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In June, plenty of the world’s finest selectors offered material to beat the heat, whether via high-energy stompers or material aimed straight at the lawn-chair crowd. Peshay, a critical figure in the world of drum-and-bass, turned in a barnburner for Resident Advisor, and Faited & Octo Octa similarly dug up the Amen breaks for a hair-raising hardcore session. Beau Beaumont, a sound artist with a history in techno production, looked towards the dancefloor in an industrial-tinged NTS show, and Timedance label boss sprinted between all sorts of UK dance-music psychedelia. Hank Jackson & Yumi, two essential new(er)-school DJs, pushed each other into ever wilder club-night territories, and Jonny From Space leaned into the million intersections between Miami bass, electro, techno, and dubstep.
Elsewhere, Nono Gigsta turned in a brain-bending session at The Lot Radio, somehow finding her way from IDM to jazzed-up riddim and back again. In their time behind the Truancy decks, Facta and K-Lone offered up a freewheeling survey of transatlantic dance musics, and NAP used “vocal-forward dance music” as a springboard towards delirium, vaulting between all sorts of low-key club sounds in the process. Innerworld showed off their vision of techno—hallucinogenic, playful, left-field, and plenty patient—in their offering for rural; lastly, Universal Cave continued a one-of-one mix series centered around sunburned yacht-rock.
Here are some of the best DJ sets June had to offer.
In his work—whether he’s behind the decks, behind the boards, or overseeing Timedance—Batu, a.k.a. Bristol-based DJ-producer-et-cetera Omar McCutcheon, makes a habit of bridging universes. This is hardly a new idea to dance music, of course; club music is a Gordian knot of histories and timelines, a maddeningly deep-and-wide pile-up of drum machines and vocal samples and synth blasts, each sound pointing back to a different decade, methodology, or tradition. But it’s nevertheless an idea that Batu’s finest work makes abundantly clear. Part of the thrill of Nowadays Nonstop lies in what he almost plays, in the dark alleys he glances towards but never fully ventures down. There are points where the set promises to be full-on corrugated-metal gqom, all pitch-black drum machines and vertiginous ambience; elsewhere, Batu suggests an all-nighter composed entirely of rough-and-tumble hand-drums and R&B acapellas; elsewhere still, he feints in the direction of bone-crunching techno tools. Nowadays Nonstop is none of these things in its entirety, but it’s never not them, either. By taking a revolving-door approach to percussion tools and dancefloor burners, Batu makes his own kind of homage: this is a kitchen-sink UK club-night set of the highest order, with universes and drum tracks and vocal chops fitting neatly in each other like an unending Matryoshka doll.
A few years ago, Beau Beaumont shed her former alias and recast her gaze. As Breakwave, she tended towards a particularly rough-and-tumble vision of techno, all glistening metals and pitch-black emptiness; under her own name, the Liverpool artist has been responsible for all sorts of arresting field recordings and deep-left-field experimentalisms, tangling up drone and noise and contact microphones along the way. These may seem like disparate practices, but maybe not: in each, she takes mechanical idioms and stretches them to the point of disorientation. Whether or not it’s angled towards the dancefloor may be entirely beside the point.
That said, it’s certainly front-and-center on 21st June 2025, a remarkable return to no-shit techno slotted alongside her other NTS spots. Critically, it sounds like she never left at all. The hour whips by thanks to a focus on heads-down drum programming and lockstep grooves. The real joy, here, lies in the textures at play: acidic and zippy and bleary-eyed synthesizers, waterlogged kicks and snares doused in just the right amount of reverb, and all manner of who-knows-whats reminiscent of Beaumont’s contemporary work in sound design. The result is a lights-out techno session—scrub the metadata and there’s a reasonable case for this being an early-’90s Birmingham cassette, all corrugated-metal synth loops and chest-caving kicks and air-raid sirens and open air.
Whether they’re operating as the twin heads behind Wisdom Teeth or chasing their own personal dragons, Facta & K-Lone move unlike most anyone else in the contemporary UK dance-music circuit. Their material—in DJ sets, in productions, in various-artist compilations—is deadly serious about lighting up dancefloors; it’s labored over, aware of its histories, and carefully constructed, but there’s nevertheless tongues firmly planted in cheeks. By walking that tightrope for so long, the two firestarters have earned a formidable selector’s-selector kind of reputation. On Truancy Volume 350, they go deep on that particular aesthetic approach yet again, sprinting between all sorts of UK dance-music histories, keeping an eye on any would-be ravers throughout: this is a session of tracky techno, stomp-and-clatter 2-step, and joyful-noise house records, of car alarms and slammed pots and pans and busted kick drums and hyper-precise grooves. Throughout the session, they mix with unerring precision, matching up rhythms to the point where the seams wholly disappear; it’s a sign of their years behind the decks that it never comes off as peacocking, no matter how ramshackle the rhythms get.
Normally, the #storytelling tag on SoundCloud is a bit of a joke, but it makes a kind of sense with ED0045: this one really goes places. Here, Hank Jackson and Yumi—two essential New York selectors whose crates run kaleidoscopic—go deep and wiggly and weird, using low-slung sort-of-techno as a springboard towards all sorts of unexpected locals. It’s Villalobosian techno dunked in acid; it’s Ghettoville-era Actress if he made Miami bass; it’s shoulder-rolling house paired with what sounds like field recordings from a house party in ‘93 Brooklyn; it’s electro that moves in three tempi at once; it’s pop-radio flips slamming into non-language spoken-word experimentalism; it’s light-speed string sections; it’s old-school dubstep rattlers; it’s—you get the gist. Great back-to-backs can be just about anything, but, sometimes, they’re the sound of two minds pushing each other into ever more avant-et-cetera territories, testing their mutual range and finding new territories along the way. That’s the case here. You can practically see the DJs grinning as they pass headphones back and forth, egging each other on all the while.
At first, the liner notes seem like a bit of a joke. On rural Podcast 018, Goa-based dance-music producer Innerworld takes a deep excursion into head-in-the-clouds ambient music before, eventually, finding some kind of rhythm amidst the haze. That’s by no means a knock, nor an attempt to place one practice above the other, mind—the set is a masterclass in a slow build, moving from Glassian minimalism to vertiginous and elliptical techno workouts with a preternatural ease. The set’s at its strongest when Innerworld goes furthest afield, though: there’s a brain-bending bit of modern-classical-slash-drone twenty minutes in liable to make hairs stand on end, and in just a few minutes he’s launched into some sort of gamelan-techno, the sort of thing that would work perfectly fine at peak-time or 8 a.m. the following morning. No matter your preferred environment for the kind of stuff, though, rural Podcast 018 is remarkable. It’s not ambient music, exactly, nor is it the first (or second, or third) thing you might think of with a techno set, and it’s all the stronger for it: this is the sound of a DJ falling through the cracks and finding an entire universe.
Jonny From Space may be best known for his headier productions—last year’s tripped-out back then i didn’t but now I do, which was rightfully hailed all over as a best-of-’24 contender, conjured a fogged-up vision of ambient music and club-night idioms. But he’s got plenty more in the chamber, too; as one half of Crespi Drum Syndicate, he’s responsible for a seemingly bottomless array of drum sciences, and his DJ sets are just as restless, shuttling between dreamy, raucous, and hair-raising moods with ease. On Nowadays Nonstop, he focuses on the latter chunk of that equation, turning in two and a half hours of drum-machine stompers that nevertheless carry a bit of skip in their step: rollicking two-step, breakbeat-inflected trip-hop (or is it the other way around?), plenty of acid-flecked electro and Miami bass, tooth-rattling bass workouts. Jonny never goes totally left-of-center here, but that’s hardly something to complain about; this is function-forward DJing that nevertheless offers entire rabbit holes for exploratory dancers. Consider this one in line with the cover art: familiar, playful and a touch plasticine, every drum break coursing with neon colors and a bit of mechanical flair.
In a Q&A that accompanies MDC.312, NAP—a.k.a. Daniel Rincón, a critical figure in the contemporary dance-music underground who was interviewed in these pages roughly two years ago—put his approach fairly simply. “I wanted to make a driving mix,” he said, “that featured a lot of vocals but in mutated and affected ways… Perfect for a night drive or an afters with some BFFs.” Based on those metrics, the mix is a wild success: a three-hour celebration of out-there dancefloor idioms paired with a bottomless rolodex of vocalists: MCs and mutterers alike filling the air with spells and come-ons, and incantations and incitations, seventh-world utterances and robodials. The music underneath is similarly varied—generally, Rincón tends towards heads-down club tools here, but he finds all sorts of shades in even that, whether he’s pulling up lighters-up UK garage, fog-blasted trip-hop, big-beat slammers, or straight-up techno tools. Throughout the set, Rincón takes a relatively straightforward idea and complicates it in a million ways, tossing vocal-forward dancefloor music into a kaleidoscope.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Nono Gigsta’s Lot Radio set is that it happened at all. The Berlin DJ avoids flight for climate-justice purposes, preferring to find her way to clubs by foot, bus or train. Or, it turns out, sailboat: on April 15 of this year, she boarded a “largely wind-powered boat” in France and set sail; two months later, there she was, DJing from a shipping container in Brooklyn. But maybe none of this should be all that surprising. Nono Gigsta is a one-of-one DJ, a selector whose tastes generally treat dance-music idioms as a diving board towards black holes; to be shocked and awed and tossed about is par for the course. (Case in point: last year’s The House of Crocodiles Part 2, which is simultaneously one of last year’s strangest, heaviest, and most delirious DJ mixes.) For her turn at The Lot Radio, she pulls no punches, starting with rickety electro-experimentalism before rocketing into parts unknown yet again: sort-of-trance-dembow, no-nonsense house pumpers, click-and-rattle IDM, grime-inflected shoulder-rollers, free-jazz riddim (or something along those lines), drum workouts heard from miles away, and so, so much more.
It’s easy to get locked into preconceptions with drum-and-bass: snares stuffed with gritted teeth, kick drums covered in chrome, quick-and-precise-and-ice-cold rhythms. Not to knock that, of course—that side of the stuff has featured in this column plenty of times over the years. But there’s so much more to the genre, too. RA.993, the latest studio session from a critical genre figure, presents the other side of that coin: hardcore imagined as a sun-blasted thing, each new drum break serving as an invitation to roll down the windows. Here, Peshay opens up his R&B rolodex and leans hard on jazz-inflected electronic music, pairing the drums with full-throated a capellas, amp-busting horn sections, and plenty of acoustic percussion. At its best, it takes on the free-wheeling energy of a great jazz solo: everything working in concert to egg the featured players on, grooves promising to stretch into eternity—just four more bars, again and again and again. RA.993 is undoubtedly a history of hardcore musics, but it’s a highly particular one, and it’s all the stronger for it.
If you’re looking for something a bit more rough-and-tumble, though, it’s worth tuning into Faited and Octo Octa’s recent back-to-back session, ripped live from the decks in Oakland. Keen observers may be a bit surprised to see these names listed next to a drum-and-bass session—roughly two years ago, when Faited was last in this column, it was for a session that sits somewhere between trance, techno, and prog; Octo Octa, for her part, has spent her career scaling mountains of ‘90s house records. That’s all perfectly fine rave music, of course, but it’s rarely exactly hardcore, even if it does, on occasion, glance in that direction. With Eostre 2024, the two DJs crank things up and pile on the Amens, offering up two rip-roaring hours of drum-and-bass that could make you think they’ve spent their careers living in it: stomach-churning basslines and mile-a-minute snare loops, basslines that suggest riddim cuts even as the drums atop point towards something a fair bit older, light-speed dub and UK garage flips, and all manner of white-hot club bombs. (A bit over halfway in, there’s even a straight-up gutbuster, a track that takes a well-worn vocal-house sample and slams it on top of scorched-earth drum breaks, tangling up histories with a wink.) As with Peshay’s offering, this is a riotous set that’s over all too quickly: a survey of hardcore delivered at a sprint.
In retrospect, it only makes sense that Soft Rock for Hard Times turned into an institution of sorts: good name, great pitch, better DJs. With the series, Universal Cave—a Philadelphia-based DJ quartet whose Bandcamp page is a veritable treasure trove of old-school funk, house, and soul records—go deep on sand-blasted soft rock, putting together a dream-scendario take on twentieth-century AM radio. Volume 9, blissfully enough, is no different. They open things up with a bit of just-so yacht-rock in the form of Night Plane’s “Don’t Be Fooled,” all focus-grouped sax solos and carefully laid vocal harmonies, and it just gets smoother—and sadder, and more sensual—from there: scan through and you’ll find singer-songwriter cuts with just a tinge of Southern soul, rapturous boogie records, heart-on-sleeve duets for voice and bass guitar, steel-drum shufflers, and all manner of sand-encrusted rockers. Through it all, Universal Cave prioritize selections over blends, making it ultimately feel a bit more like a hand-crafted mixtape than a DJ mix, but that’s hardly a problem: this is about emotions turning larger than life, not the moment-to-moment alchemy.
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