Slam on the CDJ: The Best DJ Sets of 2024

Michael McKinney delivers the last Slam on the CDJ column of 2024, rounding out the best the year had to offer in DJ sets – from Nono Gigsta to The Deep End, Club-Night Fuel and more.

By Michael McKinney December 25, 2024

Image via Michael McKinney

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After spending a good chunk of the year digging through Soundcloud, Boomkat, Bandcamp, NTS, and all sorts of cobwebbed corners of the internet, assembling a survey of the year in mixes still feels like an impossible task. Looking back at 2024, there wasn’t an obvious center to DJing. There were, of course, throughlines—a seemingly endless barrage of sweltering hardcore, the international rise of listening bars, and the supposed resurgence of dub techno, to name just a few. None of these ideas felt central, but that’s just part of the fun. A great DJ mix can be just about anything: a miles-deep dive down a rabbit hole or a cursory glance over a decade of vinyl; a messy rip from a club night or something assembled, measure by measure, on a DAW; something confrontational and outré, straight-ahead and and serene, wild-eyed and chaotic.

The column below breaks a few handfuls of the year’s standout sets into rough categories, sorted more by methodology than anything else. As with last year, it’s everything-goes, a bit chaotic, and deliberately loose; with one exception, it’s wholly unranked (although you’ll find that (far-too-short and roughly assembled) list here, too, if that’s your speed).

If last year’s round-up was about geographies, then this is something more elemental still: about shared energies and approaches, about the ways that long-form club sessions work as compared to in-studio mixes, at-home radio shows, or barely-there cassette collagery. This is a year’s worth of recordings from another staggering year for the DJ set, each offering stretching towards something slightly different: there’s music for stargazers and headphone purists, rave-music lifers and sonic archeologists, yarn-spinners and head-trippers and amp-fiddlers. Hopefully, the blends land, but the clashes are part of the fun, too. Consider this is an effort to put a format in conversation with itself, to pinpoint the moments when musicians conjured their own universes.

Here are a few—truly, just a few—of the best DJ sets 2024 had to offer.

Wormholes and Head-Trips: Marathoners & Listening Bars

Might as well start things out by hurling a gauntlet. Some of this year’s finest sets were defined by their sheer audacity: if an audience is good for one hour, they ask, why not a dozen? There’s a kind of beauty that emerges when a DJ goes long. A wider window affords selectors space to play tunes out longer, blending in looser and stranger ways, stretching into parts of their crates that they might not reach for in a two-hour session.

This sort of set, at least here, is split between two very different camps. First, there’s the dancefloor material. Regal86, one of the finest techno-ish selectors the world over, went deep at YuYu in Mexico city, pulling a mountain of hardgroove, Memphis rap, jungle, and a million other sounds; over in New York, SPRKLBB rocketed between sassed-up house, techno and pop records. Mike Servito & Jeffrey Sfire, two legends of sun-kissed four-fours, brought their bottomless crates to Detroit, and boxofbox cooked up a more-or-less perfect road-trip mix. (Jeffrey Sfire’s six-hour disco-house stunner and boxofbox’s back-to-back with Sorry Records co-founder Nick Boyd aren’t to be missed, either.)

Over in Japan, CYK turned in seven-plus hours of firestarting kicks, hip-hop, and new wave; DJ Healthy’s offering to the same mix series is a masterclass in ebullient and hefty house music. DJ Swisha, a modern legend of east-coast club music, set the year off right with an all-nighter at Nowadays; in London, Avalon Emerson—who, for all her production credits, still ought to be known as one of the planet’s slickest DJs—turned in a critical session from The Cause. Then you’ve got the real marathons: in one of the year’s finest club sets, the folks behind Ute dug into their trance collection for a gobsmacking fifteen hours that never lets up; Funk Assault turned in a hair-raising ten hours of techno; Objekt took over the Nowadays decks for a wild-eyed and truly exploratory session; and Vladimir Ivković, a DJ who trades in the slow, disorienting, and out-there, turned in one of 2023’s finest mixes days before the calendars caught up.

If you flip the coin over, though, there’s plenty more to love. The rise of listening bars across the globe, as alluded to earlier, has resulted in a flood of slo-mo and long-form mixing, a style suited equally well for head-tripping and house-cleaning; at its best, it’s as joyous and playful as anything else you could put on. The folks at murmur continued adding to their billion-hour playlist of slow, wiggly, and bleary-eyed sessions; on the other side of the world, Bar Part Time did the same. (Two particular highlights here are the mixes offered up by So Wet’s Water Kingdom at murmur and Bored Lord’s house-and-disco session from B.P.T., but everything from each establishment is well worth your time.) Over in Melbourne, misctapes’s MEZZANINE series gave DJs a few chances to dive into trip-hop, resulting in some of the strangest grooves you’ll hear all year. (Relatedly, Ciel, Hannah D & DJ Luv You’s Live at LUNA Blessings, recorded at Berlin’s Kwia, is not to be missed.) DJ Antepop’s downtempo-ish set from a restaurant in Peckham is a killer four hours of dance-not-dance music, and Good Block offered diners a joyous and quietly anything-goes set of dancehall, synthpop, and R&B.

BAR TON—”not a bar, not a listening bar, not a day club and definitely not a nightclub”—turned in plenty of killer sessions, too. (Three favorites from here: two curveballs from Rominimal don Petre Inspirescu and one from local mainstay 4142.) But the dark horse, here, is likely inis:eto, a quiet and slow-rolling mix series dedicated to all manner of out-there electronics. (Key picks include Deathbed Convert’s blur of post-minimalism and scraggly house records, Jaye Ward’s fog-covered ambient techno, Rick Shiver left-field electronics and dream-logic folk records, and Memotone’s slow-motion drone and ambient music, but you can’t go wrong with any of them.) Paris’s Malkö entered the contemporary canon of rainy-day Ibiza mixes with Balearic Waves, and the folks behind Melbourne’s Sweet Nuthin’ provided something for sunny afternoons with dropped tops. Lastly, The Arkitekt emerged out of nowhere to deliver a delirious time capsule of a set, moving deftly and carefully between IDM and ambient-techno classics for a mix that promises eternities.

Blink and You’ll Miss It: Tape Decks Covered in Smog

Frustratingly enough, a lot of this year’s finest mixes aren’t available online. Limited-edition runs of tapes are hardly a new thing, but in 2024, two series stood above the rest. Nearly everything released by Berceuse Heroique and Tabi Tapes was critical and frequently disorienting; receiving one of these tapes in the mail was akin to receiving a bit of messaging beamed in from another planet. On Berceuse Heroique’s side, you’ve got proto-and-post-industrial records from Concentric Circles, deeply personal sound-collagery from Toumba, Significant Other’s ambient-music brain-bender, who-knows pop edits from Ghost Phone, 2-a.m. disorientation courtesy of Bruce, Samson A.K’s queasy set of rusty ambience, and a staggering collection of unpinnable prog-et-cetera from Pretty Sneaky.

Over at All Night Flight, things went on an even stranger bent: to pick just a few, Christian Schoppik turned in a kaleidoscope of folk music, Cantus Orbis offered up a jaw-dropping selection of ancient choral recordings, DJ Trystero showed off a million strains of techno, techno dusty and bleary and shimmering at once, Fellowship Records reached into their Rolodex and pulled out a truly globe-trotting vision of traditional musics and field recordings, and A Happy Return explored into roughly spun balladry and no-fi lullabies. Next time you’re in a record store, keep your eyes peeled for a copy of Finn & thehouseofacidhouse’s Dismal House, an eye-watering collection of “house music to feel bad to”; Time Is Away’s Speak Low, which feels ripped from both the 22nd century and the 18th at once; and Lil Mofo & OG Militant B’s Driver, one of the deepest (and strangest) dancehall mixes to ever cross these pages.

The Archives: Honcho Campout, De School, DJ Randall, and Lentekabinet

It’s like clockwork at this point. Every August, for the past ten years, all sorts of ravers and DJs gather in the woods on the east coast for a weekend-or-so of dance music; a few weeks before Christmas, Honcho’s archives start piling up, turning into an out-and-out cornucopia of unadulterated joy; and, every year, it’s one of the finest dance-music events of the year. The sets from 2024’s Honcho are so consistently joyous and playful and downright ebullient that picking a favorite feels completely beside the point: just pick a stage and start digging. (Okay, fine: start with NAP’s finger-gun cumbia session, ‘nohup’’s wild-eyed rave-up, boxofbox’s everything-goes two hours, or CarrieOnDisco’s confetti cannon stuffed with disco and house records.)

If you think that’s a lot, though, just wait until you crack open Het Archief. This massive collection of material—five-hundred-plus DJ sets, who-knows-how-many hours—is a love letter to a critical (and bygone) club, stuffed with four-fours and memories and comments left by teary-eyed ravers. If picking highlights from Honcho was tough, then it’s downright impossible—and pointless—here. Just jump in, hit play, and start exploring. Dancefloors disappear, after all, but the memories left on them never quite vanish.

If you’ve got countless hours of material, what’s another one hundred fifty-eight? Lentekabinet, a festival hosted by the folks behind Dekmantel, had another roaring edition in 2024, and there’s nearly two days of the stuff in their archive; elsewhere, forty-seven Dekmantel Selectors sessions fill out the rest. In the Lentekabinet offerings alone, you have a staggering range of material: Jennifer Loveless cooly pulling off the kind of club-tool set any DJ would be lucky to do once; Black Rave Culture blasting between techno and breaks with the best of them; DJ Godfather cooking up a masterclass of ghettotech mixing; and Abdelwahed & DJ Plead offering whirlwinding hard-drum workouts and dubstep.

Lastly, it’s worth going deep for a moment. In late July, DJ Randall, a critical figure in drum-and-bass and jungle, passed away. His career stretched from pirate radio to club nights, from club nights to record shops, from record shops to legendary parties. Randall’s legacy is too massive to neatly distill into a short blurb, but, not long after Randall passed, @DorkSirjur started assembling a massive archive of his work. At the time of writing, it stands over 500 sets strong. If hardcore music—or dance music in general—is about sheer inertia, about histories snowballing into barely recognizable futures, then a dig into the archives is both informative and exhilarating. It helps that many of these sets capture Randall at peak form; he was a walking encyclopedia for drum-and-bass and jungle, eager to share its histories and possibilities with anyone willing to lend an ear, and that sheer optimism bursts through with every drum break. Hardcore, as the saying goes, will never die, and people like Randall are why.

Club-Night Fuel: High-Octane Material the World Over

One of the biggest joys of following DJing in 2024 was simple: just about anything, it seemed, could go off at peak time. CCL’s recording from Freerotation 2024 (more on that festival later) shows them in top form, vaulting between snarling dubstep, head-trip techno, and gut-twisting electronics of all stripes. (That said, their mix from January, A Night in the Skull Discotheque, is their strongest offering of the year: dubstep stripped for parts and reassembled in a beguiling game of exquisite corpse.) Simo Cell, a similarly everything-goes selector, turned in a wild-eyed and hyper-precise set for Resident Advisor’s mix series, sprinting from breaks to electro to acid to bérite club for an unrelenting hundred minutes. Hugo Passaquin, a.k.a. French DJ King Doudou, offered up a million permutations of contemporary dembow on Sin Limites, and Cezchia’s phil in a maze wrapped drum-and-bass and dancehall around each other until they felt one and the same.

Over in New York, plenty of critical selectors kept things hot. The Carry Nation, a mainstay of the city’s house-music culture, offered up one of the year’s finest mix CDs in Full Tilt Carry – Vol 2, a set of rowdy house-et-cetera guaranteed to set any dancefloor ablaze; elsewhere, DJ Voices, a selector with a keen ear and clear principles, blended contemporary dancefloor fuel and contemporary headlines in some of this year’s most arresting mixing. In a pair of sessions, Physical Therapy—a.k.a. Daniel Fisher, a.k.a. Car Culture, a.k.a. DJ Overnite, a.k.a. Kirk the Flirt—pitched garage records up to maddening tempi and soundtracked a sunrise with three hours of donk, hip-house, trance, hi-NRG, and all manner of dancefloor scorchers. Boo Lean, in her own one-two, tunneled into rough-and-tumble drum music and turned in one of this year’s finest garage sets. (That latter offering comes from Sorry Records’s mix series—if you’re looking for a document of the sound of modern New York, you could do a lot worse than putting that on shuffle.)

It’s not like New York gets all the fun, though. Danny Daze donned his D33 alias for three hours of knotty and playful techno, IBM, and EBM, and Steeze turned in a set of rollicking bassline for Sheffield mainstay Off Me Nut. Beaming in from France, Nídia looked towards the minimalistic and disorienting sounds of kuduro and batida; and Príncipe’s NTS residency allowed the Lisbon label another platform from which to push those very styles. DJ Flight offered up a who’s-who of drum-and-bass, storming and icy and riotous in equal measure; Vrika split the difference between heart-in-throat drum-and-bass and chilly ambience; and Serious Cut explored pitch-black drum breaks and steely-eyed dance music in a frigid set from Madrid. Crown Ruler Mix #28 saw Lil Mofo—a chronically undersung selector—reach for countless why-not dancefloor burners, and Amsterdam’s upsammy showed off her fast-and-precise-and-sweltering style in a pair of zippy show-stealers.

Elsewhere, some of funk brasileiro’s finest names kept melting amplifiers: DJ Anderson do Paraíso, a critical name behind the ultra-minimal sound of funk mineiro, explored the style in a creeped-out and Gothic club session, DJ K set a Boiler Room dancefloor ablaze with a more maximalist vision of funk, and Living Gatlato & d.silvestre took over NTS for an hour of skull-crackers. Melbourne’s LOIF continued to stake his claim as a mastermind of new-school dancefloor wigglers, and Zürich’s Atrice pushed just as hard for the same title; on a heavier tip, Assyouti tossed umpteen soundsystem cuts into a wood-chipper and Kilbourne turned in a set of tooth-gnashing hardcore bound to leave your headphones soaked.

Slipmatt, a hardcore lifer, offered up something of a personal history of the stuff in a brain-blasting RA set; elsewhere, Job Jobse looked towards old-school trance and lighters-up techno. Gqom heavyweights DJ Lag and Omagoqa outlined the power behind their preferred takes on the sound, while MUSCLECARS made no bones about their lane: deep, souled-out, and hefty. Introspekt continued to be one of contemporary (dub-)2-step’s leading lights, and Jonny From Space cooked up a propulsive and psychedelic set of drum music that suggests infinities. (Relatedly: El Gusano, a Miami producer who goes by a million handles and, alongside Jonny, co-produced Beats, a.k.a. one of this year’s finest electronic-music LPs, set a Boiler Room stage alight back in May: brain-bending dembow, wall-of-noise beatmaking, and an intoxicatingly everything-goes approach to the form.)

Elsewhere still, all sorts of names went deep on their particular approaches: georg-i’s Knekelhuis entry took white-hot UK dance-music idioms to their extremes, and Ikävä Pii’s set for TOWER is all gasket-popping hardcore. DJ Problem’s HEADS KNOW tape, a wild-eyed survey of the sound of Jersey club, stands as the series’s strongest mix to date, while Tre Oh Fine’s SYSTEM offering looks towards the fast-and-loose sounds of Florida jook. (SEL.6’s SORRYMIX, on the other hand, takes a very different tack towards the Sunshine State, looking towards high-energy rollers of all stripes in a truly livewire session.) On a very different tip over at Terraforma, Donato Dozzy and Marco Shuttle spent four hours creating a gravity well with kick drums and just-so grooves. House-music mainstay Eris Drew turned in a pair of showstopping dance-music mixes, all sunbeams and slamming kicks straining towards the sky; and Joker, a don of dubstep, used the genre as a launchpad towards delirium on a head-spinning RA set. Peter Van Hoesen & Wata Igarashi went long on deep-space techno at The Observatory, suitably enough, and ojoo—a contributor to 2022’s most head-spinning DJ mix—continued to chase dancehall, techno, and folk music down wormholes.

The Deep End: Left-Field Rollers, Bleary-Eyed Electronics, and Dancefloor Dissolvers

Let’s slow things down a bit, shall we? While there was plenty to get the blood pumping in 2024, a lot of the stuff that really stuck to the ribs moved a bit differently, running counter to prevailing trends of fast-and-hefty club sounds. Physical Therapy donned his Car Culture alias for a heartrending set of souped-up pop and ambient music; elsewhere on the east coast, Tarotplane cooked up a four-hour love letter to ambient techno and trance tunes and a beguiling session of gossamer and delirious folk-jazz-ambient-et-cetera records. Myles Mac & DJ Possum, two critical selectors of downtempo and Ibizan dance musics, turned in two sun-soaked sessions of the stuff; on the other end of the planet, M August & J Castillo did something similar for Bar Part Time. Amelia Holt brought a bunch of no-shit jazz records to the Nowadays dancefloor; later in the year, she teamed up with Yumi for a sludged-up session of slo-mo techno. Baptist Goth, in one of this year’s most wild-eyed (and slowest!) mixes, stretched a thread from Steve Reich to Sinéad O’Connor. (The second subglow/Live offering, a closing set from Bambi & Beatrice M. that manages to drop tempi while raising intensities, is critical, too.) Akanbi, Yibing, and Vladimir Ivković made a triptych of sets that lived up to Weird Science’s name.

Speaking of Ivković (for the third time): MIX070, released near the top of December, shows him working in peak form, grabbing all sorts of bleary-eyed pop records and working towards a kind of slow-motion delirium. Objekt, in the best DJ-mix joke of the year, played a set at WHOLE’s “ambient” stage that was anything but; and Kiernan Laveaux, one of the States’s finest working selectors, sculpted electronic-music histories into all sorts of vertiginous, out-there, and left-field shapes. OKO DJ, a selector with a lethal coldwave collection, dug deep into those very crates for a two-hour stormer and locked horns with fellow left-fielder Nosedrip for some unmissable alchemy. London diggers 404 Eros grabbed their Memphis bags for a critical Truancy volume; over on the NTS airwaves, the In Focus series looked several centuries further back for a deep dive on ancient medieval musics. Jonathan Williger’s Smithsonian Folkways: Bluegrass Special is a heartrending (and heart-racing) selection of some truly manic folk tunes, while Jen Monroe & Allie Avital’s Getting Warmer: Soviet Choral & Folk Special is a critical survey of stained-glass choral compositions. Self and Other, broadcasting on the same airwaves, assembled a meditation upon eroding histories and dissolving borders; MI-EL blurred the lines between ‘90s hip-hop and field recordings; and Time Is Away, in a pair of radio shows, explored the borders between enjoyment and lust and folklore and lived reality.

Several other names looked towards DJing as a springboard towards the unknown, taking familiar idioms and casting them into the abyss: Aaron J imagined techno as a dimly lit machine-music, while buttechno conjured phantoms with his USB, moving between head-spinning drone records, haunted-house techno, and bone-cracking percussion workouts. Alberto Iniesta turned in a session of stomach-churning ambient music, and Hissed looked towards the sun-damaged sounds of ambient country music. Jake Muir pulled off an audacious (and queasy) mix of enmossed’s catalog; elsewhere, Pom Pom continued to excavate mountains of pitch-black ambience. Breakout dub-techno stars Purelink continued their hot streak with a killer session for Resident Advisor (check their Lot Radio appearances for a total inversion of their expected approach), and genre veteran Sa Pa soundtracked a sleep-in concert with a mesmerizing mix of drone and ambient records.

Elsewhere still, all sorts of DJs looked towards gauzy and dubbed-out sounds, imagining the dancefloor as a space for dreams. Brian Leeds donned his Loidis alias for a best-in-show tech-house set for Resident Advisor, and Stone amassed a stellar pile of dubby techno and low-slung ambient music. With their session for The Observatory, Makiko Iwaki reached for chilly classical music and drone selections, making for a set suited for moonless nights; and Jack Rollo, one-half of the aforementioned Time Is Away, returned to his Peace Pipe handle for a set that blurred the lines between house, techno, and ambient records. His Early Bird Show, broadcast weekly on NTS, became appointment listening this year thanks to his careful and patient ear: dub, classical music, dance-not-dance tracks, and plenty more pitched at a gentle simmer; Taylor Rowley’s “The Windmills of Your Mind” did something similar with soft rock, folk, and vintage psychedelia.

On an even more laid-back angle, it’s worth fiddling the dial until you find Tommasi’s residency on the same station. Here, the Icelandic selector turned in a bleary-eyed and sepia-toned hour each month; it’s both blissed-out and sepia-toned. His session with Molly Lewis, a top-shelf purveyor of contemporary lounge music, is a particular highlight. If you’re looking for something a bit more stomach-churning, turn towards aftherzaftherzaftherz, where Jonny From Space (again) and Detroit’s Jacob Park kicked up a cloud of starstuff and antimatter, or perhaps you’d prefer Marius Bø’s ambient-techno masterclass from Monument 2024, or maybe you’d like André Pahl’s dream-logic ambient-and-folk-and-stardust shuffler for Somewhere Press. CCL’s liquidtime #12: Mist is a dubbed-out exploration of lighter-than air sonics, and it should come as little surprise that DJ Oltermann’s Seaside 42—four hours of love songs mixed to perfection—was recorded in February.

Nono Gigsta: Freerotation 2024: The House of Crocodiles Part 2

DJing is a thing rife with mythology. Selectors are cast as purveyors of universes, seven-inch records as fast-tracks to euphoria, deep diving as something akin to a treasure hunt. The best stuff makes all that feel true. In 2024, one set encapsulated those possibilities more wholly than anything else. Freerotation 2024: The House of Crocodiles 2 is a set of a million miracles: nature documentaries crashing into Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”; dubbed-out horn sections slipping away in the face of soundsystem-melting bass drops; shoulder-rolling R&B, somehow, sitting comfortably next to vertiginous dubstep; the early-session dive into junglisms sounding, somehow, less intense than whatever comes after.

Nono Gigsta spends The House of Crocodiles Part 2 pulling off something remarkably tricky, constructing a dream logic that makes audacity seem like the standard approach and pushing even that to its breaking point, moving into wilder and wilder territories as if locked in a game of chicken with the audience. Fortunately, nobody blinks. Most DJs would blush at adding one of these blends to their repertoire, let alone all of them; this is wild-eyed DJing, the kind of musicianship where you can practically see Nono Gigsta flash grins every few minutes, full of an unmissable sense of play. (The crowd’s hoots and hollers, preserved in the recording, certainly help that.) By the end, she’s constructed an out-and-out steamroller of a set, a billion-ton amalgamation of dance-music idioms that, somehow, keeps shedding its skin, taking once-familiar idioms and catapulting them into the unknown again and again.

DJing, so the stories go, can be anything. With Freerotation: The House of Crocodiles Part 2, Nono Gigsta made all those whispers real.

The Best DJ Sets of 2024, Roughly Ranked: