Broadly speaking, DJ sets tend to get dropped in two buckets: there are the club sets and there is the home-listening material. That binary, while useful—some music is body music, plain and simple—is also, sometimes, a bit stifling. Many of May’s standout sets took a sledgehammer to that mold, offering up sessions that are confounding and thrilling, jubilant and meditative, rigorous and effortless.
Amelia Holt and Seth Magoon, two critical selectors who reliably situate themselves on the fringes of dance music, surveyed new beat, electro, techno, and all manner of who-knows-whats. Kiernan Laveaux, one of the States’ finest working selectors, went all in on the kitchen sink, and Spain’s TRS went ever further, tossing bass-heavy club tracks with panache. Din Daa Daa, in a can’t-miss live rip, went long and slow with the best of them; elsewhere, Lunatic Music DJs and Vidal Benjamin turned in full-throttle deconstructions of house, techno, and goa trance. g u i offered up a bleary-eyed set from a beloved Portugal festival, and microdub mastermind K Wata went wild for his RA offering. Time Is Away, a one-of-one London DJ duo, explored woozy house and ambient in a pair of recordings.
Elsewhere, a few DJs turned it up a notch. Chida’s Mix Tape is a confetti-blasted slammer of straight-up house music, and it’s packed with a million joys; Byron Yeates and eoin dj’s team-up is similarly celebratory, but it’s just a touch cheekier. Berlin selector nugget went long on just about everything in a live rip, and DJ Chrysalis and mp rotator dove headfirst into their 2-step and UKG bins for a session best suited for dropped tops. Marylou’s Accidental Meetings tape-series entry is as wild-eyed as the best of them; Fuchsia, on the other hand, showed off the power of a well-laid tech-house track. Finally, ambient-music shapeshifter King Softy went all in on full-steam club tracks and DJ Marfox turned in two hours of polyrhythmic mania.
Here are some of the best DJ sets May had to offer.
Amelia Holt & Seth Magoon, Solarplexia
About fifteen minutes into Solarplexia, a remarkable recording from a set in October 2025, a vocalist says the obvious. “There is something wrong,” an abyssal voice intones as heard through a poor dial-up connection, stuttering over every syllable even the motorik-music drums stomp away underneath. It’s a neat encapsulation of the session: a bit sly, a bit humorous, and plenty psychedelic. Solarplexia is, by and large, slippery and vaguely metallic, filled with drum-machine head-trips and woozy synthesizers. Holt and Magoon pull off an impressive trick with this one: prizing slow-and-low chug over anything too aggressive, they stare down the dancefloor even as they conjure black holes.
Chida, Mix Tape / Byron Yeates & eoin dj, 087
The main appeal of Mix Tape is perhaps its simplest: This is house music captured at its most luminous, playful, and effervescent. It’s rarely precisely that simple—a cut from early into the session has the shuffle-and-skip of great UK garage, and about twenty minutes in, Chida dumps a vat of acid on the whole affair. Mix Tape is a remarkable session in large part because of how much of it still lands in a dance-music landscape that’s shed its skin a hundred times over.
In case that’s not enough, flip the tape over. 087, a live recording ripped from the 2022 Drop Everything festival in Ireland, carries over the unbridled jubilee in spades. Here, Byron Yeates and eoin dj, two critical names pushing trance, house, and progressive idioms deep into space, go long on their specialty, spending two hours shelling the dancefloor with all manner of club-night bombs. If dance music is a bit of a Möbius strip, you might as well coat the whole thing in glitter.
Din Daa Daa, Live From Orbita
Live From Orbita, a remarkable recording from German DJ Din Daa Daa, opens a portal to low-BPM dance music. Here, Denise Ross goes long on slow-and-low dance music, flooding the dancefloor with smog, kicks, and a sly sense of psychedelia. In theory, it’s a hugely variant session—a brief scan around reveals some zero-gravity nu-disco, dub-drenched house records, and electro-tinged drum-machine science—but, in practice, it all works like a charm. Ross finds a universe inside a highly particular rabbit hole.