Image via Carl Lawrence
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
Dimly lit dancefloors have a storied history of fostering communities, offering a safe space for joy, reverie, and self-expression in a way that might not be possible elsewhere. This is common enough knowledge that any reiteration borders on trite, but it bears repeating regardless, because dance music is a fundamentally social thing. Kristin Malossi, a.k.a. Club-music alchemist DJ Voices, is intimately familiar with this. After graduating from college and moving to New York, she got involved in the city’s club circuit, dancing with her friends even as she realized that she wanted to be on the other side of the decks.
After practicing with a roommate’s turntables, she formed Working Women alongside a few of her friends. The idea was simple: the collective would offer each member space to learn and grow, with each person acting as support and ballast in a crowded nightlife scene. In retrospect, the collective offers a neat framework for where Malossi’s work has gone since. Her craft is one of communal joy; in her work, she challenges ravers to move, and think, in new and unfamiliar ways.
As a DJ, Malossi started working with deep and jazzy house records, but she has since spiraled into all sorts of infinities. Tune into any given DJ Voices set and you’re bound to find spindly dubstep, dollar-bin progressive-house gems, brain-bending techno, and umpteen other styles dedicated to turning the dancefloor upside down. Her style is both wide-ranging and deeply intuitive; she chases chest-rattling grooves even as she twists them into unrecognizable forms, one eye trained on the mixers and another angled towards the stars.
She is a neat fit with much of New York’s contemporary dance-music scene, which is as playful as it is sonically disparate. Spend enough time with her style, and you’ll start to hear all sorts of parallels: Ayesha’s polyrhythmic breakbeats, DJ Healthy’s deep-space bass rhythms, AceMo’s jacking new-school techno, Nick Boyd’s everything-goes jubilee. But, as that range of references might indicate, she is one-of-one: her work synthesizes umpteen influences and histories into something that feels surprising each time.
Critically, Malossi’s work extends beyond her DJing. She is part of the booking team at Nowadays and she runs a monthly book club that meets outside its doors. In each endeavor, she pushes conversations about what “club music” can be into new territories. At her day job, she books up-and-coming DJs and aesthetically singular veterans alike; at the book club, she fosters open-ended conversations around the Gordian knot of philosophies, histories, and ideologies that make up contemporary club music.
Ahead of a gig in Minneapolis, we had a chance to chat with Malossi, exploring her style and approach in the process. The conversation opens with a discussion of that month’s book club selection: The Underground Is Massive, which charts the global rise of “EDM” over the past few decades. From there, we dove into all sorts of nooks and crannies: her roots in gymnastics, philosophy, and skateboarding; her approaches to DJing, crate-digging, and community building; and her relationship to challenging artistry.
(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
Why The Underground Is Massive? Why now?
DJ Voices: I know Michaelangelo [Matos], and I’m familiar with his work. I knew about the book for a while; I just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. Mainstream, “EDM”-style music has been on my mind, particularly with this Skrillex reemergence, which crossed over into New York’s underground. I really like Skrillex’s new music. I feel like I’m afraid to wade too far into that world because I think I’ll like what I hear, to be honest. New York was kind of taken over by the Skrillex/Four Tet/Fred Again.. thing. It was everywhere—people were talking about how they were “bringing house back,” which, of course, it’s always been here. It’s this weird collision—underground DJs were talking a lot about it.
When I first heard of Skrillex, his music was very looked down upon. It was something you didn’t touch; it wasn’t cool. It was music you laughed at. Now, I think the narrative has shifted on him a bit, and I think people are appreciating him for what he did. He’s got amazing references. He’s clued into a lot of great music. He brought a renaissance to bass music, for better or worse. And I really like the music I’m hearing from him now, to be honest! Not all of it, and I can’t help but look over my shoulder every time I listen to it: like, “I know I’m not supposed to like this.”
But that narrative has shifted. I wanted to ask, “how did this all start?” I was so tuned out from EDM when it first came around, because it wasn’t something I was supposed to care about. The “mainstream” and “underground” have a lot of blurred lines, I think. And that’s the idea: right now, there’s more of a blurring of those worlds than ever before. I mean, look at the shows Skrillex, Four Tet, and Fred Again.. did—they did a party at Good Room, which is a club where I kind of got my start, and that was before the Madison Square Garden thing. It’s something we can’t really ignore, so it felt like the moment to dig into that book.
To me, the fulcrum of the book is the intersection of technology and community. Early on, you have some gatekeeping built in, but that slowly changes as the sound grows. At this point, do you see value in distinctions between the mainstream and the underground?
DJ Voices: More than ever, actually. For all my fascination with EDM and my interest in what’s happening sonically, I find myself craving authenticity. I feel like it can be very lacking in a lot of what I encounter. I don’t know if that’s me being hypocritical, where I’m like, “Facebook! Stage! Lights! Theatrics!,” but also saying, “don’t try too hard on Instagram because it’s not a good look.” Maybe it’s just about owning it. If you’re gonna go full-on commercial, do it big, and be honest about your intentions. Something that really bothers me is people who have so-called “underground credibility,” but seem to have no authenticity at all: they’re playing a really obvious social media game, putting out meaningless content; the presentation doesn’t work for me.
So, yes, I do feel there’s still a need for those distinctions. It would be better for there to be a clearer understanding of where those two worlds begin and end. Maybe it’s the fact that commercial dance music is a totally separate thing. Knowing that I exist outside of that, and have no aspirations to be in the world, allows me to appreciate it as a phenomenon. Sometimes, I feel anxiety around it creeping into our world, and I find myself wishing for more distinct lines.
One definition I’d like to clear up, because everyone seems to have a different idea: what do you mean by “EDM”? Is it dance music that’s reached a certain scale, or something else? Does it have a sound, or is it more of a question of presentation?
DJ Voices: For me, it’s a bit of both. I definitely think it’s a bit of a scale thing: if you’re playing massive stages and massive crowds, or if you’ve got a huge social media following. But there is a sound, and that’s why I say that—particularly the bass music side of EDM—is almost obnoxious, but in a way that I’m kind of drawn to; it’s very bombastic. I’ll sometimes play “bass music,” for lack of a better term, where I wonder if my peers find it deeply uncool. But I’m really drawn towards crazy sounds; I really appreciate the unfamiliar. “Obnoxious” sounds like a bad thing, but I mean things that have a lot of character. It’s maximalist; it’s the opposite of subtle, and I’m definitely a maximalist.
One more thing on The Underground Is Massive. The book documents a tension between scenes as they started versus what they turn into as they evolve. At this point, everyone can gatekeep or go really deep on a sound. Given that, what makes, say, New York’s scene distinct?
DJ Voices: I think about this a lot. The question is: what makes a DJ stand out? Anyone can learn how to beatmatch, and great music is easily accessible; it’s quite easy to be a decent DJ. But the thing that really stands out to me when I listen—and this is something that I don’t think you can fake or teach—is a personality behind the decks. And that’s something—sorry to say—that not everybody has. Those are the DJs who really stand out to me, the ones who have a personality. If I feel that my confidence has shrunk, or like I’m not as good as everybody else, I at least know that I have a personality behind the decks. I know that I just have to stay true to myself; that’s what keeps me going and keeps things fun.
In terms of regions, I feel like the New York scene just has so much going on. I think that’s why it’s particularly interesting: there’s so many different pockets, so many different worlds. I feel like there’s always new clubs opening, so there’s lots of opportunities for DJs to make a career pretty quickly. And that keeps you energized; it’s inspiring to be surrounded by people who are working on something similar to you. It’s not perfect, but there’s a decent amount of cooperation and support.
When you were growing up in Florida, was any art particularly formative to you?
DJ Voices: From age six to 14, I was a competitive gymnast, and that was my world. Not much else could fit into that. When I was 12 or 13, I had been thinking about quitting for a while, because it was such a huge commitment. This was right at the peak of downloading music—Limewire, Kazaa, Napster. As gymnastics was making its exit in my life, music was coming in, and it consumed my entire world; it’s what my life became about from then on.
Was it club music?
DJ Voices: I didn’t even know what the hell “club music” was until I moved to New York. It was emo. Lots of terrible music, with terrible lyrics that I would pore over every night. I was an angsty teen; I was kind of a loner. I had such a community with gymnastics that it kind of rocked my world to no longer have that. So, it was a pretty swift transition to being a depressed kid in my bedroom, listening to emo and screamo.
I look back on it with fondness, though, because it formed the deep connection that I have with music now—it’s the only thing in the world that matters. I didn’t know anyone at the time who was into the music that I was into. I’d go to Warped Tour with my dad as my chaperone, because I wasn’t old enough to go alone. In high school, I met people who were into the music I was into: slightly cooler stuff—Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill. A lot of Florida skateboard soundtracks; definitely all guitars.
Did you skate?
DJ Voices: No, but all the guys did, and the girls hung out in the parking lot with them, and music was a huge part of that. But I knew nothing about the cool Miami scene—electro, Miami bass. I knew of Ultra Festival, which was mentioned in The Underground Is Massive, and I heard commercial house on the radio. But I had no connections to dance music.
My understanding is that you studied philosophy in college. Do you carry either of those practices—gymnastics or philosophy—into your work now?
DJ Voices: Definitely. Movement has always been really important to me. I feel pretty connected with my body, and this idea of pushing things to the limit is very familiar to me, for better or worse. A sense of community comes from my time in gymnastics, too. I was used to doing things together, with people cheering each other on.
Taking philosophy at 18 in a really open-minded environment completely rewired my brain, so there’s no way that hasn’t had an impact on me today. I feel sort of predisposed to question everything; I always try to peel back the layers and dig a bit deeper. I definitely find myself doing that with nightlife. Also with the book club: we read a lot of theory there, and some of it gets very heady. I still love philosophy and theory, and the book club is a way for me to talk about ideas with people in a way that I really enjoy.
The throughline I see in a lot of what you do is an effort towards community: in terms of your book club, your job at Nowadays, your practice behind the decks. Is that a fair read?
DJ Voices: For sure.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
When I first heard of Skrillex, his music was very looked down upon. It was something you didn’t touch; it wasn’t cool. It was music you laughed at. Now, I think the narrative has shifted on him a bit, and I think people are appreciating him for what he did. He’s got amazing references. He’s clued into a lot of great music. He brought a renaissance to bass music, for better or worse. And I really like the music I’m hearing from him now, to be honest! Not all of it, and I can’t help but look over my shoulder every time I listen to it: like, “I know I’m not supposed to like this.”
But that narrative has shifted. I wanted to ask, “how did this all start?” I was so tuned out from EDM when it first came around, because it wasn’t something I was supposed to care about. The “mainstream” and “underground” have a lot of blurred lines, I think. And that’s the idea: right now, there’s more of a blurring of those worlds than ever before. I mean, look at the shows Skrillex, Four Tet, and Fred Again.. did—they did a party at Good Room, which is a club where I kind of got my start, and that was before the Madison Square Garden thing. It’s something we can’t really ignore, so it felt like the moment to dig into that book.
To me, the fulcrum of the book is the intersection of technology and community. Early on, you have some gatekeeping built in, but that slowly changes as the sound grows. At this point, do you see value in distinctions between the mainstream and the underground?
DJ Voices: More than ever, actually. For all my fascination with EDM and my interest in what’s happening sonically, I find myself craving authenticity. I feel like it can be very lacking in a lot of what I encounter. I don’t know if that’s me being hypocritical, where I’m like, “Facebook! Stage! Lights! Theatrics!,” but also saying, “don’t try too hard on Instagram because it’s not a good look.” Maybe it’s just about owning it. If you’re gonna go full-on commercial, do it big, and be honest about your intentions. Something that really bothers me is people who have so-called “underground credibility,” but seem to have no authenticity at all: they’re playing a really obvious social media game, putting out meaningless content; the presentation doesn’t work for me.
So, yes, I do feel there’s still a need for those distinctions. It would be better for there to be a clearer understanding of where those two worlds begin and end. Maybe it’s the fact that commercial dance music is a totally separate thing. Knowing that I exist outside of that, and have no aspirations to be in the world, allows me to appreciate it as a phenomenon. Sometimes, I feel anxiety around it creeping into our world, and I find myself wishing for more distinct lines.
One definition I’d like to clear up, because everyone seems to have a different idea: what do you mean by “EDM”? Is it dance music that’s reached a certain scale, or something else? Does it have a sound, or is it more of a question of presentation?
DJ Voices: For me, it’s a bit of both. I definitely think it’s a bit of a scale thing: if you’re playing massive stages and massive crowds, or if you’ve got a huge social media following. But there is a sound, and that’s why I say that—particularly the bass music side of EDM—is almost obnoxious, but in a way that I’m kind of drawn to; it’s very bombastic. I’ll sometimes play “bass music,” for lack of a better term, where I wonder if my peers find it deeply uncool. But I’m really drawn towards crazy sounds; I really appreciate the unfamiliar. “Obnoxious” sounds like a bad thing, but I mean things that have a lot of character. It’s maximalist; it’s the opposite of subtle, and I’m definitely a maximalist.
One more thing on The Underground Is Massive. The book documents a tension between scenes as they started versus what they turn into as they evolve. At this point, everyone can gatekeep or go really deep on a sound. Given that, what makes, say, New York’s scene distinct?
DJ Voices: I think about this a lot. The question is: what makes a DJ stand out? Anyone can learn how to beatmatch, and great music is easily accessible; it’s quite easy to be a decent DJ. But the thing that really stands out to me when I listen—and this is something that I don’t think you can fake or teach—is a personality behind the decks. And that’s something—sorry to say—that not everybody has. Those are the DJs who really stand out to me, the ones who have a personality. If I feel that my confidence has shrunk, or like I’m not as good as everybody else, I at least know that I have a personality behind the decks. I know that I just have to stay true to myself; that’s what keeps me going and keeps things fun.
In terms of regions, I feel like the New York scene just has so much going on. I think that’s why it’s particularly interesting: there’s so many different pockets, so many different worlds. I feel like there’s always new clubs opening, so there’s lots of opportunities for DJs to make a career pretty quickly. And that keeps you energized; it’s inspiring to be surrounded by people who are working on something similar to you. It’s not perfect, but there’s a decent amount of cooperation and support.
When you were growing up in Florida, was any art particularly formative to you?
DJ Voices: From age six to 14, I was a competitive gymnast, and that was my world. Not much else could fit into that. When I was 12 or 13, I had been thinking about quitting for a while, because it was such a huge commitment. This was right at the peak of downloading music—Limewire, Kazaa, Napster. As gymnastics was making its exit in my life, music was coming in, and it consumed my entire world; it’s what my life became about from then on.
Was it club music?
DJ Voices: I didn’t even know what the hell “club music” was until I moved to New York. It was emo. Lots of terrible music, with terrible lyrics that I would pore over every night. I was an angsty teen; I was kind of a loner. I had such a community with gymnastics that it kind of rocked my world to no longer have that. So, it was a pretty swift transition to being a depressed kid in my bedroom, listening to emo and screamo.
I look back on it with fondness, though, because it formed the deep connection that I have with music now—it’s the only thing in the world that matters. I didn’t know anyone at the time who was into the music that I was into. I’d go to Warped Tour with my dad as my chaperone, because I wasn’t old enough to go alone. In high school, I met people who were into the music I was into: slightly cooler stuff—Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill. A lot of Florida skateboard soundtracks; definitely all guitars.
Did you skate?
DJ Voices: No, but all the guys did, and the girls hung out in the parking lot with them, and music was a huge part of that. But I knew nothing about the cool Miami scene—electro, Miami bass. I knew of Ultra Festival, which was mentioned in The Underground Is Massive, and I heard commercial house on the radio. But I had no connections to dance music.
My understanding is that you studied philosophy in college. Do you carry either of those practices—gymnastics or philosophy—into your work now?
DJ Voices: Definitely. Movement has always been really important to me. I feel pretty connected with my body, and this idea of pushing things to the limit is very familiar to me, for better or worse. A sense of community comes from my time in gymnastics, too. I was used to doing things together, with people cheering each other on.
Taking philosophy at 18 in a really open-minded environment completely rewired my brain, so there’s no way that hasn’t had an impact on me today. I feel sort of predisposed to question everything; I always try to peel back the layers and dig a bit deeper. I definitely find myself doing that with nightlife. Also with the book club: we read a lot of theory there, and some of it gets very heady. I still love philosophy and theory, and the book club is a way for me to talk about ideas with people in a way that I really enjoy.
The throughline I see in a lot of what you do is an effort towards community: in terms of your book club, your job at Nowadays, your practice behind the decks. Is that a fair read?
DJ Voices: For sure.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
So, yes, I do feel there’s still a need for those distinctions. It would be better for there to be a clearer understanding of where those two worlds begin and end. Maybe it’s the fact that commercial dance music is a totally separate thing. Knowing that I exist outside of that, and have no aspirations to be in the world, allows me to appreciate it as a phenomenon. Sometimes, I feel anxiety around it creeping into our world, and I find myself wishing for more distinct lines.
One definition I’d like to clear up, because everyone seems to have a different idea: what do you mean by “EDM”? Is it dance music that’s reached a certain scale, or something else? Does it have a sound, or is it more of a question of presentation?
DJ Voices: For me, it’s a bit of both. I definitely think it’s a bit of a scale thing: if you’re playing massive stages and massive crowds, or if you’ve got a huge social media following. But there is a sound, and that’s why I say that—particularly the bass music side of EDM—is almost obnoxious, but in a way that I’m kind of drawn to; it’s very bombastic. I’ll sometimes play “bass music,” for lack of a better term, where I wonder if my peers find it deeply uncool. But I’m really drawn towards crazy sounds; I really appreciate the unfamiliar. “Obnoxious” sounds like a bad thing, but I mean things that have a lot of character. It’s maximalist; it’s the opposite of subtle, and I’m definitely a maximalist.
One more thing on The Underground Is Massive. The book documents a tension between scenes as they started versus what they turn into as they evolve. At this point, everyone can gatekeep or go really deep on a sound. Given that, what makes, say, New York’s scene distinct?
DJ Voices: I think about this a lot. The question is: what makes a DJ stand out? Anyone can learn how to beatmatch, and great music is easily accessible; it’s quite easy to be a decent DJ. But the thing that really stands out to me when I listen—and this is something that I don’t think you can fake or teach—is a personality behind the decks. And that’s something—sorry to say—that not everybody has. Those are the DJs who really stand out to me, the ones who have a personality. If I feel that my confidence has shrunk, or like I’m not as good as everybody else, I at least know that I have a personality behind the decks. I know that I just have to stay true to myself; that’s what keeps me going and keeps things fun.
In terms of regions, I feel like the New York scene just has so much going on. I think that’s why it’s particularly interesting: there’s so many different pockets, so many different worlds. I feel like there’s always new clubs opening, so there’s lots of opportunities for DJs to make a career pretty quickly. And that keeps you energized; it’s inspiring to be surrounded by people who are working on something similar to you. It’s not perfect, but there’s a decent amount of cooperation and support.
When you were growing up in Florida, was any art particularly formative to you?
DJ Voices: From age six to 14, I was a competitive gymnast, and that was my world. Not much else could fit into that. When I was 12 or 13, I had been thinking about quitting for a while, because it was such a huge commitment. This was right at the peak of downloading music—Limewire, Kazaa, Napster. As gymnastics was making its exit in my life, music was coming in, and it consumed my entire world; it’s what my life became about from then on.
Was it club music?
DJ Voices: I didn’t even know what the hell “club music” was until I moved to New York. It was emo. Lots of terrible music, with terrible lyrics that I would pore over every night. I was an angsty teen; I was kind of a loner. I had such a community with gymnastics that it kind of rocked my world to no longer have that. So, it was a pretty swift transition to being a depressed kid in my bedroom, listening to emo and screamo.
I look back on it with fondness, though, because it formed the deep connection that I have with music now—it’s the only thing in the world that matters. I didn’t know anyone at the time who was into the music that I was into. I’d go to Warped Tour with my dad as my chaperone, because I wasn’t old enough to go alone. In high school, I met people who were into the music I was into: slightly cooler stuff—Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill. A lot of Florida skateboard soundtracks; definitely all guitars.
Did you skate?
DJ Voices: No, but all the guys did, and the girls hung out in the parking lot with them, and music was a huge part of that. But I knew nothing about the cool Miami scene—electro, Miami bass. I knew of Ultra Festival, which was mentioned in The Underground Is Massive, and I heard commercial house on the radio. But I had no connections to dance music.
My understanding is that you studied philosophy in college. Do you carry either of those practices—gymnastics or philosophy—into your work now?
DJ Voices: Definitely. Movement has always been really important to me. I feel pretty connected with my body, and this idea of pushing things to the limit is very familiar to me, for better or worse. A sense of community comes from my time in gymnastics, too. I was used to doing things together, with people cheering each other on.
Taking philosophy at 18 in a really open-minded environment completely rewired my brain, so there’s no way that hasn’t had an impact on me today. I feel sort of predisposed to question everything; I always try to peel back the layers and dig a bit deeper. I definitely find myself doing that with nightlife. Also with the book club: we read a lot of theory there, and some of it gets very heady. I still love philosophy and theory, and the book club is a way for me to talk about ideas with people in a way that I really enjoy.
The throughline I see in a lot of what you do is an effort towards community: in terms of your book club, your job at Nowadays, your practice behind the decks. Is that a fair read?
DJ Voices: For sure.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
One more thing on The Underground Is Massive. The book documents a tension between scenes as they started versus what they turn into as they evolve. At this point, everyone can gatekeep or go really deep on a sound. Given that, what makes, say, New York’s scene distinct?
DJ Voices: I think about this a lot. The question is: what makes a DJ stand out? Anyone can learn how to beatmatch, and great music is easily accessible; it’s quite easy to be a decent DJ. But the thing that really stands out to me when I listen—and this is something that I don’t think you can fake or teach—is a personality behind the decks. And that’s something—sorry to say—that not everybody has. Those are the DJs who really stand out to me, the ones who have a personality. If I feel that my confidence has shrunk, or like I’m not as good as everybody else, I at least know that I have a personality behind the decks. I know that I just have to stay true to myself; that’s what keeps me going and keeps things fun.
In terms of regions, I feel like the New York scene just has so much going on. I think that’s why it’s particularly interesting: there’s so many different pockets, so many different worlds. I feel like there’s always new clubs opening, so there’s lots of opportunities for DJs to make a career pretty quickly. And that keeps you energized; it’s inspiring to be surrounded by people who are working on something similar to you. It’s not perfect, but there’s a decent amount of cooperation and support.
When you were growing up in Florida, was any art particularly formative to you?
DJ Voices: From age six to 14, I was a competitive gymnast, and that was my world. Not much else could fit into that. When I was 12 or 13, I had been thinking about quitting for a while, because it was such a huge commitment. This was right at the peak of downloading music—Limewire, Kazaa, Napster. As gymnastics was making its exit in my life, music was coming in, and it consumed my entire world; it’s what my life became about from then on.
Was it club music?
DJ Voices: I didn’t even know what the hell “club music” was until I moved to New York. It was emo. Lots of terrible music, with terrible lyrics that I would pore over every night. I was an angsty teen; I was kind of a loner. I had such a community with gymnastics that it kind of rocked my world to no longer have that. So, it was a pretty swift transition to being a depressed kid in my bedroom, listening to emo and screamo.
I look back on it with fondness, though, because it formed the deep connection that I have with music now—it’s the only thing in the world that matters. I didn’t know anyone at the time who was into the music that I was into. I’d go to Warped Tour with my dad as my chaperone, because I wasn’t old enough to go alone. In high school, I met people who were into the music I was into: slightly cooler stuff—Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill. A lot of Florida skateboard soundtracks; definitely all guitars.
Did you skate?
DJ Voices: No, but all the guys did, and the girls hung out in the parking lot with them, and music was a huge part of that. But I knew nothing about the cool Miami scene—electro, Miami bass. I knew of Ultra Festival, which was mentioned in The Underground Is Massive, and I heard commercial house on the radio. But I had no connections to dance music.
My understanding is that you studied philosophy in college. Do you carry either of those practices—gymnastics or philosophy—into your work now?
DJ Voices: Definitely. Movement has always been really important to me. I feel pretty connected with my body, and this idea of pushing things to the limit is very familiar to me, for better or worse. A sense of community comes from my time in gymnastics, too. I was used to doing things together, with people cheering each other on.
Taking philosophy at 18 in a really open-minded environment completely rewired my brain, so there’s no way that hasn’t had an impact on me today. I feel sort of predisposed to question everything; I always try to peel back the layers and dig a bit deeper. I definitely find myself doing that with nightlife. Also with the book club: we read a lot of theory there, and some of it gets very heady. I still love philosophy and theory, and the book club is a way for me to talk about ideas with people in a way that I really enjoy.
The throughline I see in a lot of what you do is an effort towards community: in terms of your book club, your job at Nowadays, your practice behind the decks. Is that a fair read?
DJ Voices: For sure.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
In terms of regions, I feel like the New York scene just has so much going on. I think that’s why it’s particularly interesting: there’s so many different pockets, so many different worlds. I feel like there’s always new clubs opening, so there’s lots of opportunities for DJs to make a career pretty quickly. And that keeps you energized; it’s inspiring to be surrounded by people who are working on something similar to you. It’s not perfect, but there’s a decent amount of cooperation and support.
When you were growing up in Florida, was any art particularly formative to you?
DJ Voices: From age six to 14, I was a competitive gymnast, and that was my world. Not much else could fit into that. When I was 12 or 13, I had been thinking about quitting for a while, because it was such a huge commitment. This was right at the peak of downloading music—Limewire, Kazaa, Napster. As gymnastics was making its exit in my life, music was coming in, and it consumed my entire world; it’s what my life became about from then on.
Was it club music?
DJ Voices: I didn’t even know what the hell “club music” was until I moved to New York. It was emo. Lots of terrible music, with terrible lyrics that I would pore over every night. I was an angsty teen; I was kind of a loner. I had such a community with gymnastics that it kind of rocked my world to no longer have that. So, it was a pretty swift transition to being a depressed kid in my bedroom, listening to emo and screamo.
I look back on it with fondness, though, because it formed the deep connection that I have with music now—it’s the only thing in the world that matters. I didn’t know anyone at the time who was into the music that I was into. I’d go to Warped Tour with my dad as my chaperone, because I wasn’t old enough to go alone. In high school, I met people who were into the music I was into: slightly cooler stuff—Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill. A lot of Florida skateboard soundtracks; definitely all guitars.
Did you skate?
DJ Voices: No, but all the guys did, and the girls hung out in the parking lot with them, and music was a huge part of that. But I knew nothing about the cool Miami scene—electro, Miami bass. I knew of Ultra Festival, which was mentioned in The Underground Is Massive, and I heard commercial house on the radio. But I had no connections to dance music.
My understanding is that you studied philosophy in college. Do you carry either of those practices—gymnastics or philosophy—into your work now?
DJ Voices: Definitely. Movement has always been really important to me. I feel pretty connected with my body, and this idea of pushing things to the limit is very familiar to me, for better or worse. A sense of community comes from my time in gymnastics, too. I was used to doing things together, with people cheering each other on.
Taking philosophy at 18 in a really open-minded environment completely rewired my brain, so there’s no way that hasn’t had an impact on me today. I feel sort of predisposed to question everything; I always try to peel back the layers and dig a bit deeper. I definitely find myself doing that with nightlife. Also with the book club: we read a lot of theory there, and some of it gets very heady. I still love philosophy and theory, and the book club is a way for me to talk about ideas with people in a way that I really enjoy.
The throughline I see in a lot of what you do is an effort towards community: in terms of your book club, your job at Nowadays, your practice behind the decks. Is that a fair read?
DJ Voices: For sure.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
Was it club music?
DJ Voices: I didn’t even know what the hell “club music” was until I moved to New York. It was emo. Lots of terrible music, with terrible lyrics that I would pore over every night. I was an angsty teen; I was kind of a loner. I had such a community with gymnastics that it kind of rocked my world to no longer have that. So, it was a pretty swift transition to being a depressed kid in my bedroom, listening to emo and screamo.
I look back on it with fondness, though, because it formed the deep connection that I have with music now—it’s the only thing in the world that matters. I didn’t know anyone at the time who was into the music that I was into. I’d go to Warped Tour with my dad as my chaperone, because I wasn’t old enough to go alone. In high school, I met people who were into the music I was into: slightly cooler stuff—Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill. A lot of Florida skateboard soundtracks; definitely all guitars.
Did you skate?
DJ Voices: No, but all the guys did, and the girls hung out in the parking lot with them, and music was a huge part of that. But I knew nothing about the cool Miami scene—electro, Miami bass. I knew of Ultra Festival, which was mentioned in The Underground Is Massive, and I heard commercial house on the radio. But I had no connections to dance music.
My understanding is that you studied philosophy in college. Do you carry either of those practices—gymnastics or philosophy—into your work now?
DJ Voices: Definitely. Movement has always been really important to me. I feel pretty connected with my body, and this idea of pushing things to the limit is very familiar to me, for better or worse. A sense of community comes from my time in gymnastics, too. I was used to doing things together, with people cheering each other on.
Taking philosophy at 18 in a really open-minded environment completely rewired my brain, so there’s no way that hasn’t had an impact on me today. I feel sort of predisposed to question everything; I always try to peel back the layers and dig a bit deeper. I definitely find myself doing that with nightlife. Also with the book club: we read a lot of theory there, and some of it gets very heady. I still love philosophy and theory, and the book club is a way for me to talk about ideas with people in a way that I really enjoy.
The throughline I see in a lot of what you do is an effort towards community: in terms of your book club, your job at Nowadays, your practice behind the decks. Is that a fair read?
DJ Voices: For sure.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
I look back on it with fondness, though, because it formed the deep connection that I have with music now—it’s the only thing in the world that matters. I didn’t know anyone at the time who was into the music that I was into. I’d go to Warped Tour with my dad as my chaperone, because I wasn’t old enough to go alone. In high school, I met people who were into the music I was into: slightly cooler stuff—Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill. A lot of Florida skateboard soundtracks; definitely all guitars.
Did you skate?
DJ Voices: No, but all the guys did, and the girls hung out in the parking lot with them, and music was a huge part of that. But I knew nothing about the cool Miami scene—electro, Miami bass. I knew of Ultra Festival, which was mentioned in The Underground Is Massive, and I heard commercial house on the radio. But I had no connections to dance music.
My understanding is that you studied philosophy in college. Do you carry either of those practices—gymnastics or philosophy—into your work now?
DJ Voices: Definitely. Movement has always been really important to me. I feel pretty connected with my body, and this idea of pushing things to the limit is very familiar to me, for better or worse. A sense of community comes from my time in gymnastics, too. I was used to doing things together, with people cheering each other on.
Taking philosophy at 18 in a really open-minded environment completely rewired my brain, so there’s no way that hasn’t had an impact on me today. I feel sort of predisposed to question everything; I always try to peel back the layers and dig a bit deeper. I definitely find myself doing that with nightlife. Also with the book club: we read a lot of theory there, and some of it gets very heady. I still love philosophy and theory, and the book club is a way for me to talk about ideas with people in a way that I really enjoy.
The throughline I see in a lot of what you do is an effort towards community: in terms of your book club, your job at Nowadays, your practice behind the decks. Is that a fair read?
DJ Voices: For sure.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
My understanding is that you studied philosophy in college. Do you carry either of those practices—gymnastics or philosophy—into your work now?
DJ Voices: Definitely. Movement has always been really important to me. I feel pretty connected with my body, and this idea of pushing things to the limit is very familiar to me, for better or worse. A sense of community comes from my time in gymnastics, too. I was used to doing things together, with people cheering each other on.
Taking philosophy at 18 in a really open-minded environment completely rewired my brain, so there’s no way that hasn’t had an impact on me today. I feel sort of predisposed to question everything; I always try to peel back the layers and dig a bit deeper. I definitely find myself doing that with nightlife. Also with the book club: we read a lot of theory there, and some of it gets very heady. I still love philosophy and theory, and the book club is a way for me to talk about ideas with people in a way that I really enjoy.
The throughline I see in a lot of what you do is an effort towards community: in terms of your book club, your job at Nowadays, your practice behind the decks. Is that a fair read?
DJ Voices: For sure.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
Taking philosophy at 18 in a really open-minded environment completely rewired my brain, so there’s no way that hasn’t had an impact on me today. I feel sort of predisposed to question everything; I always try to peel back the layers and dig a bit deeper. I definitely find myself doing that with nightlife. Also with the book club: we read a lot of theory there, and some of it gets very heady. I still love philosophy and theory, and the book club is a way for me to talk about ideas with people in a way that I really enjoy.
The throughline I see in a lot of what you do is an effort towards community: in terms of your book club, your job at Nowadays, your practice behind the decks. Is that a fair read?
DJ Voices: For sure.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
Was that impulse towards community always there? How has it changed since you moved to New York?
DJ Voices: A lot. When I first moved to New York, I was on the other side of things. I was dancing, and I had a community that I would go out with. Early on in my DJing days, I started Working Women with three other women. That was really about learning together—this was about the same time that DISCWOMAN was popping; there was an increase in visibility, momentum, and excitement for women DJs. When we formed Working Women, it was a response to feeling like the only women doing this in our friend group. Certainly not in the city; DISCWOMAN preceded us by a while.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
As it evolved, we started talking about how it was a way to decenter ourselves in this individualistic DJing world, and a way for us to collaborate and embrace unpredictability, and learning together, and messing up together. But even while Working Women was happening, I got the feeling that I was in it alone. They supported me so much, but I, more than anyone, I think, wanted to pursue DJing as something that would take up more of my time. As the collective faded for us, my solo stuff took off, and I got the job at Nowadays.
Was that on the back of your DJing?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Working Women started as residents at Nowadays from the very beginning, right when it opened. For the first two years of my time at Nowadays, I was a resident through them. The owners would call us to pick our brains, to ask questions, maybe get booking ideas. It would happen more and more often , and I was very unhappy at my day job at the time. I thought, “I should have a job at Nowadays.” So I asked to be the other booker there, and they said yes.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
I don’t know if this was simultaneous with Nowadays, but over the past few years, I’ve felt that even though there’s a great community there, and there’s a lot of communities in New York, I’ve often felt on the outside of most communities and scenes. So my impulse to be more community-minded comes from that lack. I Tweeted about this the other day—I started the book club and Open Decks to fill the void I was feeling with connecting with the greater scene. I don’t know if it’s something about me, or something about the scene, but I’ve always been sort of on my own; I’ve never run with a big crew. After I became a DJ, after a while, I started to feel like I was seen as a gatekeeper with my job at Nowadays, but I was feeling a little disconnected from what was happening there! I wanted to get in touch with the people in the scene. Those have been two ways to do it, and they’ve been really, really rewarding.
They’re not DJ gigs; I’m not asking them to come see me. We’re giving back to each other mutually. I didn’t set out to be this community-minded—it’s a product of feeling like it’s something that’s lacking, and it’s really important to me. That connection is why I DJ in the first place. It’s not that satisfying to me to feel like, “I’m booked out, and I’m popular on social media.” It’s about face-to-face contact and deeper connections, on the dance floor and off. That’s what fuels me. I’m not out here to be the coolest DJ; I just want to geek out with other people over books and music.
How did you get from dancing to DJing?
DJ Voices: When I started going out in New York, I worked in a restaurant. One of the people who worked there was very close with the Bunker crew. So I immediately went straight to the best parties—I still revere them; in a lot of ways, I see them as the pinnacle of dance music in New York. I’ve always loved music—I entertained ideas about making music one day, or maybe being in a band. When I saw DJing live for the first time, I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is so cool—this is where I can channel my love for music.” I’d make mix CDs, mixtapes, and playlists. I’d be the friend who was sharing YouTube links that nobody responded to, begging for people to listen. And I said, “I can do that as a DJ.”
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
It just so happened that I was living with an incredible record collector at the time. We had walls of records in our apartment, just bursting from the seams—records of every genre. And he had a turntable. So I started out, using his records at first—he had a great collection of dance music. There was also A-1 [Records], in Manhattan. That store specialized, especially then, in New York house and deep house. So that’s what I played for my first few years of DJing, all on vinyl. I started out on very housey and jazzy records; I even went through an acid jazz phase, because that’s what this store had. I was really lucky that I lived with turntables; it was a lot of practicing in the living room.
Can you trace the arc of how you moved from house to where you are now?
DJ Voices: In the last few years of Working Women, we moved from vinyl to digital. Eventually, everybody made their way to CDJs, and I was the last one—I was very resistant. I don’t do well with new technology, and I thought it was a lot harder than mixing records. I was like, “I just finally got the hang of this other thing! Why are you making me go digital?” I also had very little music digitally, so, as we started playing on CDJs, I started digging for music online, and that’s when the world opened up. Previously, I was going on Discogs occasionally, but I was trying to fit in with the sound that I had discovered, which was house music. That opened up my world to so many new things.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
What is your relationship to technology now? Does your CDJ inform your sound?
DJ Voices: Yeah. I was very resistant to Rekordbox for a long time. But, over the years, I’ve gotten really into Rekordbox, and it completely changed my DJing. Now, I use a lot of cue points, and I’m constantly jumping around between tracks, repeating things, skipping things, making sure I jump in at the right place. Precision is really important to me now.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
I ask because there are such firm camps on this: folks who put three-deck vinyl mixing as a be-all-end-all, and folks like Objekt who do deeply technical work on digital setups.
DJ Voices: There’s so many ways to do this. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m finally starting to unlearn a lot of the unspoken, or sometimes very loudly spoken, rules of DJing. Like: you should be able to mix vinyl, or you’re not a real DJ. I recently saw a Tweet from a friend that said “playing for a basic crowd is literally a DJ skill check.” I used to feel the same way—if you’re a real DJ, you should be able to rock any crowd. Within the last year, though, I’ve come to accept that I have no desire to be able to do that. I’m okay with the fact that I might not be able to please that audience.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
That sounds like I’m patting myself on the back. But I like to be challenged on the dance floor, and so I like to challenge people on the dance floor. You don’t have to be able to rock every room to be a good DJ; it’s okay to be good at one style. Nobody expects DJ Nobu to play to a basic crowd. We love him for what he does, because he’s really good at this one thing. This is a pretty recent change; up until very recently, I used to feel like I should be able to work any room.
There’s also this idea of “reading a room.” I’ve been hanging out with DJ Marcelle a bit too much. Although I want people to have a good time, I think people are overly precious about the concept of reading a room. I’m presenting a vision, and I want to present it in a certain way. Of course, I’m going to change direction if it’s flopping—I’m not soulless. But there are DJs who want to make any crowd dance, and there are people who have a vision they’re setting out to present, and I feel like I’m a little bit more in that camp.
Talk to me about DJ Marcelle.
DJ Voices: I played with her before, with the Working Women residency; I’ve always loved her DJing. I’ve had her on my Lot Radio show, and I interviewed her for Love Injection, which is a small zine in New York. There was a festival two weeks ago called Dripping: they invited me to moderate a discussion between DJ Marcelle and RP Boo. Honestly, it was one of the biggest honors of my life. It was really out of my comfort zone; I appreciate that the organizers saw the potential in me to do that, because I certainly didn’t at first. I was very intimidated. I got to hang out with Marcelle, because we came from Nowadays at 6 a.m. to the festival, and we hung out the entire day after that conversation.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
She’s one of my biggest inspirations. She’s very badass. She played two nights in a row: one at Nowadays, and the next at Dripping. Nowadays was on Aurora Halal‘s night, which was a Friday. Saturdays are more for the heads; Fridays have more people coming through and not knowing what they’re getting into. So to have DJ Marcelle that night—the crowd was great, and people were really into it. But there were a lot of people who were quite challenged by what she was doing. On Saturday, at Dripping, everyone knew her, so they were primed for it, especially after the conversation we’d had before. After the second night, I asked her how those shows compared. She told me that she preferred Friday’s show, because she loves the challenge of winning people over. She definitely had an incredible time on Saturday; I could tell. But everybody was down for whatever she was gonna give them.
She’s very fierce as a DJ. She loves to challenge people, but not for its own sake. There’s virtue in opening your mind up to new kinds of music and new styles of mixing. She’s not beatmatching in a conventional way; she’s layering something on a third turntable—samples of chickens from the Soviet Union, or something like that. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before, and I love watching people encounter her for the first time. It’s: “wow, I didn’t know DJing could be this way.”
That’s such a smart bit of curation on that panel.
DJ Voices: Isn’t it brilliant?
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
Yeah—you’ve got two names who take one particular thing as far as it can go. In one case, it’s an approach; in the other, it’s a genre and history.
DJ Voices: When they first asked me to do it, that was what was interesting to me. I thought, “We’re gonna get so much out of this, because they’re so different.” But the more I dug into what they do—the phrase I kept using is that they’re kindred spirits. They’re just being their most authentic selves. They’re taking an untaught approach: they’ve both said that they don’t read the manuals for their machines. They don’t want to sound like anybody else; they want to channel whatever they’re feeling. As I peeled back the layers and researched more, I was like, “they’re saying the same thing.” But the outcome is so different: you’ve got a genre specialist and someone who’s saying “f*ck genre.”
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
To loop this back to Nowadays: let’s take this idea of following an aesthetic. Do you see your work at Nowadays and DJing as connected practices?
DJ Voices: Yeah. Both involve music, and they both involve me, and I’m very influenced by my surroundings; I pull from all directions in everything I do. Being in a space where I watch other DJs all the time is really inspiring, too. Other DJs are the most inspiring thing to me. Especially when you’re working at a nightclub, you’re going to be there on nights where you otherwise might not have gone. You’ll end up encountering a DJ that you haven’t seen before, and it’ll blow your mind, or it’ll make you think about stuff differently. I’ve been talking a lot about bass music, but it’s really important to me that I cast as wide a net as possible, sonically. The more DJs I hear, the more inspired I am to play different sounds.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
How does that approach apply to your booking work?
DJ Voices: In some ways, I’m presenting a vision. But it’s got to be bigger than me, too. It can’t be just what I’m into. I’m paying attention to people who are getting other people excited. Then there are the DJs who really stand out that you really want to take a chance on. More and more, I want to welcome DJs who have singular voices and are playing more challenging music. The beauty of it is that I’m not the only booker there; there’s also Jada [Lorraine] and Gareth [Solan, the director of Nowadays]. There’s a nice balance: I check with them all the time to see how they feel about people I’m into, and I find out about people from them. I’m very lucky.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
How has your approach to digging changed over the years?
DJ Voices: After I started out with A-1, I branched out into other record stores in the city. By the time I started building my digital library, we were well within Bandcamp times. In terms of digging online, it’s mostly YouTube and Discogs; I probably buy most of my stuff on Bandcamp. There’s a bit of Soulseek, but it’s really unrewarding. Beatport, too—there’s a ton of stuff on there that’s not on Bandcamp. I try to diversify my sources. This is something that my friends talked about, especially in the pandemic’s end—this idea of a “Bandcamp sound.” All the DJs were at home digging all day, and it felt harder to have hidden gems. For a while, I felt like there was a Bandcamp sound, which I think I was definitely f*cking with.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
What was that sound?
DJ Voices: In New York, at least, it felt like it was a lot of UK club music that was coming out then. That sound is hugely inspiring to me, and I know I’m definitely guilty of playing it. But so was everyone else. For that reason and more, it’s been important to me to diversify my sources. You don’t want to be pulling from the same thing over and over again. I look at promos, but I feel if it’s made its way all the way to me, then everyone else has it too. Friends send me their stuff, too, but that’s different. Often, in gig preparation, I’ll get stuck in the digging phase; it’s my favorite thing. I live for the thrill of the chase with new sounds—I’m inspired by novelty. I like hearing things that I’ve never heard before.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
So much of club music is built upon iterations—take dubstep and its offshoots. What does novelty mean in that context?
DJ Voices: It’s always shifting. Early on, I played house music, and I did a radio show in the morning, which got me into playing slower stuff. Then I started playing digitally, which is how I found bass music, or UK club music, for lack of a better term. After getting deep into a world that prioritized sound design, I started to get a little bored. Now, in my last phase, I got really deep into old progressive house, because I wanted songs again! Now, I’m really focused on this progressive tip, and I’m into new dubstep. But I’m always trying to look for everything.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
If New York has a sound, what is your relationship with it?
DJ Voices: It’s a tough one, honestly. There are so many scenes in New York. I don’t go out and see a lot of house music these days, although I still love it, and I feel like maybe the faster techno sound—which people really associate with New York—is maybe not so much for me. Something I love about New York is that there isn’t just one New York sound. I think of Copenhagen’s trance scene, for example: a city that’s really known for a specific sound. If you came to New York and said, “I want to check out the New York sound,” it would depend on which club you went to. It’s all so different. All my favorite DJs in New York are playing a little bit of everything, and the dancers are quite open-minded. This is especially true at Nowadays, to be honest; you can really do whatever you want there.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
If you go to Club Night Club you’re gonna hear a lot of UK DJs who are on the bassier spectrum, but who are still very eclectic—Ploy, Batu, Ben UFO. That’s the Club Night Club sound. Then you’ve got GROOVY GROOVY, which is another amazing party. They’ve really shifted in recent years; they were maybe on a UK club tip and now they’re leaning in a deeper, trancier direction. At Dripping, which is a New York festival even though it’s in New Jersey, I heard a lot of psytrance. I was kind of blindsided by that—it was really exciting. But it makes sense; New York has a good connection with a lot of Australian DJs. If you go to MERGE, another amazing party, you’ll hear a lot of really good techno. With Nowadays, it depends on the night; most Fridays are very classic-style techno and house, and Saturdays, which I tend to program, tend to be all over the place. I really appreciate that about New York—I feel like there’s no dominant genre in its sound.
Who do you look to right now for inspiration?
DJ Voices: There’s GROOVY GROOVY, which is helmed by Andrew Akanbi, who I play with a lot. He’s one of my biggest inspirations as a DJ. He’s on a DJ Marcelle kick, too, in a different way: “you’re going to get what I’m prepared to give you, and we’re going to go on a journey together, so let’s approach this with an open mind.” His partner in GROOVY GROOVY, DJ Temporary, I think is quite underrated in the scene. They’re always several steps ahead of everybody else. I definitely look to the GROOVY GROOVY folks because those parties have a huge following, but they haven’t lost any intimacy. I find they tend to be the best parties in New York, just in terms of comfort, vibe, and overall enjoyment. They’re often putting me onto DJs I’ve never heard of, which is really amazing.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.
There’s a small club in Queens called Mansions, too; it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s a really fun place. They have a wine bar and an outdoor patio, and it’s kind of tavern-like. You feel like you’re in the woods somewhere. I’m really inspired by smaller things like that. If we’re talking about inspiration, I’ve also got to shout out Andrew Devlin and The Level Party, Leo and Daniel of Dripping, everyone involved with Kindergarten Records, Nick Boyd and Sorry Records, and Beta Librae. There’s tons of DJs who inspire me.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
DJ Voices: Tonight, I’m playing Minneapolis, which I’m really excited about. Tomorrow, I have my residency at Nowadays with Diskonnected, from Taipei—talk about a trancey, psychedelic sound. There’s a few more gigs this month, and then I’m back in Europe for a lot of August and September, and then Australia in October.