Art via Michael McKinney
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
In October, plenty of the world’s finest DJs lit up the decks, offering material for sweat-soaked ravers and headphone lifers in equal measure. ADAB, a critical Philadelphia selector, turned in a livewire session from the east coast woods; Succubass, at the same festival, mixed up something aimed straight at the steely-eyed crowd. Nosedrip turned in a one-of-one new beat set for this year’s Making Time festival, and K Wata slammed the decks with a mixture of downtempo, IDM, and who-knows-what rave tools. Elsewhere still, Brian Leeds, working as Loidis, turned in three critical live sessions stuffed with deep-cut microhouse, breakbeat, and techno selections.
Elsewhere still, Compliments turned in a killer session of polyrhythmic drum tracks, and XDB & PLO Man went deep on heads-down club sounds. Another tape of screwed-up cumbia courtesy of Sonido Dueñez gave exploratory diggers plenty to love, and Lyra Pramuk spent an hour on NTS whipping up loopy and out-there electronic-music compositions. Objekt, a critical selector on even on off days, went on a tear at Parameter, turning in a set of wigged-out rollers, and Time Is Away offered up a disorienting meditation on the stars: IDM, spoken word, and downtempo laced around each other until any distinctions fall away.
Here are some of the best DJ sets October had to offer.
At first, Dripping 2025 sounds like it could be a miles-long dive down a hole the size of a nickel. ADAB opens the session with a killer twenty-odd minutes of gqom, kwaito, and amapiano, offering something of a primer of the South African styles — something that they’re certainly good for, given the amount of time they’ve spent mixing the stuff. That version of Dripping 2025 could have been one of the year’s strongest sets. But what fun is that? After about a half hour, ADAB pulls off a bit of a feint, swerving hard from DJ Lag’s “Hade Boss” into Missy Elliott’s “Pass That Dutch” with a twist of the knob. From there, it’s anything goes, with the caveat that everything’s got to have the rhythmic intensity of the opening salvo. But that’s still an awful lot. Bitcrushed sort-of-electro, chopped-up Baltimore club stompers, sludged-up dancehall, fidgety reggaeton-techno slammers, busted-sub rap tracks? Sure, why not? It’s in this everything-at-once approach that Dripping 2025 ultimately finds its identity; it plays like a carefully curated selectors’ tape as much as a great DJ set.
Sometimes, all you need is a great low-end. On subglow/Live 7 — a re-recording of a live set from Field Maneuvers (an annual “no frills rave” in the United Kingdom) — London DJ Compliments goes deep on this idea, turning in two hours of sub-melting halftime, techno, drum-and-bass, and just about anything else liable to turn the dancefloor inside out. Throughout the session, Compliments pulls off a seriously impressive trick, sliding between tempi without throttling the energy, mixing all sorts of polyrhythmic drum-machine musics into each other, grabbing onto different threads each time — a hi-hat here, a kick there, a sub snarl elsewhere. The result is a set that’s both slippery and propulsive, full of left turns and surprises: a session full of showstopping moments and head-spinning blends that’s defined not by any particular sound but instead by Compliments’ gradual move from a stroll to a sprint down a universe of blind alleys, from downtempo R&B to steamrolling drumfunk with all sorts of sidebars in between.
Elsewhere, at a festival on the other side of the Atlantic, Succubass, a one-of-one American selector, pulled off something similar — but if Compliments’ set is polished metal, Succubass’ is a bit more roughly hewn, full of fiery-eyed drum breaks and percussion tracks that double as dares. This one takes a bit of time to get up to a sprint (a funny thing to say about a session with white-hot drum-and-bass in the first ten minutes, but here we are), but once it does, Succubass steps on the necks and doesn’t let up, reaching into their crates and pulling out a million different flavors of soundsystem pressure: lickety-split techno and million-ton halftime, tooth-cracking dubstep and who-knows-what exercises for hand-drum and subwoofer, skin-crawling dub-siren tools and brain-bending breakcore. For all its genre acrobatics, the set is grounded in its sheer dynamism; these are percussion tracks imagined firmly as body music.
Making Time, a dance-music festival hosted in Philadelphia’s Fort Mifflin, is pretty new to the game — 2025 marked their fifth year of operation — but, even then, it has an undeniable M.O.: “A TRANSCENDENTAL futuristic sound experience,” their Instagram page reads. Here, we’ve got two wildly different manifestations of that idea. K Wata, a NYC DJ whose roots can be traced to the city’s kitchen-sink club nights, flooded the amps with a real Rosarch Test of a set: look at it one way and it’s harried downtempo, look another and it’s head-trip IDM. He spends the session splitting the difference between clicks-and-cuts minimalism, sludgy dub-techno, and all manner of who-knows drum workouts; a good number of the tracks here sound like hard-nosed rave cuts with half the tracks on mute. It’s a singular expression of contemporary dance music from one of the east coast’s finest names.
Nosedrip, on the other hand, went in an entirely different direction. For his turn behind the decks, the Belgian DJ goes deep on tripped-out new beat records, all tracky synthesizers and slammed drum sets and tossed-off vocal refrains. The set is both a bit of a history lesson and an out-and-out barnstormer, packed with scraggly dollar-bin Z-sides and bleary-eyed beats that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Vladimir Ivkovic marathoner. Most remarkably, he keeps this relatively single-minded pursuit downright thrilling for the duration, thanks in large part to deft mixing and careful textural interplay: while tempo and tone rarely shift much, it’s still one hell of a thing to hear him rocket between proto-electro synth jams, electro-boogie MIDI string sections, and all manner of robotic elegies. The best part of any new Nosedrip set is that it’s functionally impossible to predict where it might go; here, as ever, a critical selector digs an entirely new rabbit hole.
Brian Leeds has spent the past decade-plus in a near-constant state of artistic reinvention. Whether he’s working with blissed-out ambient music, scuzzy house records, nu-skool dub techno, jerk bootlegs, billion-limbed club tools, or heads-down tech-house, he’s been consistently remarkable and almost entirely unpredictable; his work, historically, has been defined less by a clear sound than by an endless series of what-ifs. Part of the joy of his work as Loidis, then, lies in hearing him tunnel deep into a highly particular sound. Under this alias, Leeds works almost exclusively with long-forgotten Beatport tech-house, all clicks and cuts and whirrs and grooves that promise to stretch into infinity.
In that case, the best way to check out Pacific Mode mix004, Dekmantel Festival 2025, and Waking Life 2025 — three sets released three weeks apart and totaling up to just a hair over eight hours — is to treat them as one steady rhythm, a long-form ebb-and-flow of hi-hats and kicks and snares and just-so synth lines. The former was recorded at DJ Healthy’s “Pacific Mode” party, and it proves a comfortable fit for that environment — Healthy’s style tends towards dark, playful, and a bit sly, all understated grooves threatening to swallow the club in smog. Leeds does the same thing here, slowly building a world out of gurgling synth workouts and aqueous kick-drum tracks. It’s minimal until it, suddenly, isn’t; go deep enough on a groove and you can find an entire universe. Dekmantel Selectors is just as deep, but a bit more bugged-out, its tracklist stuffed with winking synth tones and shuffle-skip drum kits. Waking Live 2025 is undoubtedly the most high-energy of the three, but never mind the difference in tempo: that focus on just-so grooves remains the same, even with a 20 BPM jump and a few extra breakbeats thrown on top. These sets are the sound of a new-school trailblazer forging his own path yet again.
Earlier this year, Lyra Pramuk released Hymnal, a remarkable record that tangles up choral music, Devil-may-care electronics, “modern classical” traditions. “I consider my music to also be trance music, in a way,” she told me in an interview surrounding that record. The idea tracks. Her recent work is equal parts transportive and exploratory, full of endless loops and psychedelic undertones. The October edition of her bi-monthly NTS residency sees Pramuk chasing that dragon yet again, turning in an hour of her own unreleased music. Jump around and you’ll find all sorts of ideas on display — cacophonous walls of synth and hocketing voices, roughshod sketches for drum machines, proto-post-electro-techno, Glassian minimalism and Orange-Milk maximalism, all crashed into each other for something that’s outright delirious. At points, it’s blissed-out and minimal; elsewhere, it’s almost exhaustingly layered. Pramuk’s compositional philosophy holds it all together; this is less a selection of tracks than it is of loops and textures: here, Pramuk tosses a handful of stones and invites listeners to watch the ripples.
“I decided to leave the dubstep to the professionals,” TJ Hertz, a.k.a. Objekt, writes in the liner notes for Parameter 10, a live recording from a storied San Francisco weekender. That’s a good sign. It’s not that he’s particularly weak when he’s working at 140 — he can hang with the best of them there — but, instead, that Hertz’s strongest sets come out of opposition: rather than pushing a hyper-specific vision of dance music, what if he did everything else, instead? (See also: his nine-hour opus from Nowadays a few years ago, which may still be his strongest release, period.) Parameter 10 is undoubtedly floor-focused stuff, but, more than that, it’s just truly all over the place: mechanistic body-music, it turns out, can take all sorts of forms: brain-bending techno, pointillistic hand-drum workouts, dial-up electro, bass-gurgle ambience. (As he put it: “wriggly, psychedelic, gurgly, engrossing, a little weird but also sometimes fun.”) Hertz is at his best when he’s constructing universes out of left turns and rug-pulls; on Parameter 10, he does little else, resulting in ninety minutes of sweat-soaked and eye-popping dance music.
As with last month’s edition, we’re back to cumbia rebajada, a folk-music style where every beat’s stuffed with sludge. The genre, which takes cumbia records and slows them down to stomach-churning tempos, contains the same revelations that anyone familiar with screwtapes or Paulstretches will regale you with: beats between beats between beats, quivers in voices turned to their own kinds of instruments with the benefit of a bit more time spent between the cracks. This tape works best as a companion to the first one — good luck on Discogs with these — because it’s functionally a continuation of the approach, with accordions and keys and voices melted into a psychedelia that feels both ancient and brand-new. Folk music has long presented infinities; the Rebajadas tapes just make that invitation explicit, turning well-worn tracks inside out and revealing an entirely new world in the process.
In a conversation that ultimately wound up in POW’s pages, Elaine Tierney, one half of Time Is Away, bottled lightning: “In many aspects of contemporary culture, you’re meant to have your quick-fire, shoot-from-the-hip, fully resolved opinions about things,” she said. “And I just don’t trust that.”
Time Is Away, a column mainstay at this point, make music about uncertainty: about lingering between meanings, about the way sentences can shift based on the slightest of inflections, about the ways memories linger and mutate long after events have faded from view. Moon Book, the October entry in their long-running NTS residency, takes their typical M.O. and curdles it just a bit further, tangling up beauty and disquietude until their silhouettes have all but overlapped. The mix is anchored by recitations pulled from the texts in the back of a recently-published book about the shifting meanings of the moon — the language is both specific and archaic, recognisably of a different time to our own but difficult to pin down beyond that. The music mirrors that dislocated feel, with individual selections flitting between static-laced modern classical, barely-there piano elegies, trance-state violin soli, and IDM suited for sunrise. It’s a quietly remarkable thing: words and notes alike bound together less by a shared aesthetic than by a shared sense of searching; this is music for staring at the stars and wondering what might be looking back.
There’s a certain magic to minimal techno. Braid the right set of rhythms around each other, it argues, and you’ve got a groove that can bear the weight of an entire dancefloor. Waking Life 2025 isn’t minimal, exactly — these tracks often have a bit more going on than you might find in, say, a Sei Es Drum release — but that same faith in rhythmic interplay courses throughout the set, which sees two contemporary titans of heads-down four-fours going head-to-head for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it three hours. XDB, a.k.a. Kosta Athanassiadis, has been slinging this stuff for decades at this point, and PLO Man is a critical figure of the style’s new(ish) school. Here, they go deep on just-so techno tools, whipping between all sorts of styles — sludgy, jazzy, breaks-inflected, dubbed-up, blissed-out — without so much as a scuffed beat. By the end, they’ve traversed an entire universe of kick drums without leaving the decks, and it feels like the already-extended session could run for another three days.
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