Slam on the CDJ: The Best DJ Sets of February & March 2026

Michael McKinney's column returns, diving into sets by DJ DEADNAME, Finn, thehouseofacidhouse, and more.

Art by DJ Short

There’s real joy to be found in the long set. Spend enough time with long-form DJ mixes—whether they’re live or recorded—and a two-hour session can start to feel downright restrictive: why not go longer, dig deeper, get more playful, a bit wilder? In February, most of the best stuff took this to heart, with DJs lugging armfuls of USBs to the decks and offering dancers long-form jubilee in the process.

Traxx, a critical Chicago selector, went the furthest, turning in nearly ten hours of truly out-there selections, tracing an entire history of Black dance musics along the way. Benedikt Frey & Diamin, in their own all-nighter offering, went deep and wide in equal measure, soundtracking an everything-goes club night with an unmissable joie de vivre. Miscmeg, Mike Midnight, and deep creep went all in on slinky tech-house contemporary UK sounds over in Oceania, and Vladimir Ivkovic came with two back-to-backs—one with Ivan Smagghe and one with Manfredas—that are equal parts mischievous, meditative, and meticulously crafted.

It’s not all all-nighters, though. Cal-C dug into slow-and-low rollers for dropped tops and sun-blasted highways in his Pacific Spirit entry (the longest in the series yet, admittedly). DJ DEADNAME, a one-of-one New York DJ, sprinted through a million flavors of club bombs in a blistering live set, and Qoso zeroed in on corrugated-metal dembow and post-industrial mayhem. Lucia Kagramanyan’s latest offering sees the selector working with both ancient and hypermodern Armenian musics, making a Dadaist collage of folk, trap, and choral records, and Finn & thehouseofacidhouse put out the capstone on a trilogy of bleary-eyed hardcore and tear-soaked house music.

If February had plenty of material, though, March’s best stuff is a veritable cornucopia. To spare formalities and just get into the meat of it: Alfred Andres and Al Wootton both offered up heady and deep sets that kept the dancefloor at a simmer; Bristol selectors Bass Clef and Batu looked towards Japanese footwork and anything-goes bass tunes, respectively. Joe Delon and Carlos Souffront offered up masterclasses in disco-and-everything-else jubilee; elsewhere, Kamal Naeem did something similar while keeping their eye firmly trained on the ‘80s.

In a remarkable live recording, Nicolás Jaar dunked international dance-music idioms in a vat of smog. Dj wiggles and Albin leaned into the disorientation with two killer sets that twist ambient and dub idioms into new forms. Parisian selector DJ Sundae showed a chunk of his miles-deep crates via two mixes of his own: One for the yearners, one for the ravers. The who-knows-who selector DJ Gangy loaded a semi truck with contemporary Latin American hip-hop, and perennial prankster DJ George Costanza offered up a gut-busting bootleg tape in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. DJ’s-DJ Dr Banana looked towards funky garage and house records, and Julien Dechery completed a must-hear trilogy of tapes focused on Indian folk musics. Lastly, Time Is Away filled a monastery with suitably ancient sounds: World-weary classical records, outré choral works, and minimalism the world over.

Here are some of the best DJ sets February and March had to offer.

Bass Clef, Juke, Footwork & 160 from Japan

At its best, footwork, a fast-and-tight and wild-eyed style of dance music that stands as one of the Midwest’s finest exports, is both manic and hyper-specific: A whirlwind of drums and just-so sample chops, every mechanistic snare echoing against negative space. It brings to mind what Kode9 (who, perhaps not coincidentally, has played a fair amount of the stuff out) once said about gqom: It’s “like being suspended over the gravitational field of a black hole, and lovin' it.” The joy of Juke, Footwork & 160 from Japan lies not in any surprises—international footwork scenes are well-documented at this point, and drum alchemy is hardly constrained by borders—but instead in the set’s articulation of what footwork can be. There’s all sorts of thrilling selections, sure—About forty minutes in, he pulls up a car-crash of eight-bit synths and vocal chops in what feels like an RP Boo Z-side; not long after, it’s dubwise footwork-jungle slammed with ice-cold drum programming. But it’s not about the specifics, not really. Here, Bass Clef strips a pointed style down to an even more bare-bones level, selecting cuts built around the space between.

Batu, All Night

Whether he’s behind the decks or manning the ship at Timedance, Omar McCutcheon, a.k.a. Bristol-based DJ and producer Batu, has well past earned his reputation as a steady-handed curator. So why not go long? All Night, a recent six-hour recording from a November 2025 Los Angeles show, features the selector neck-deep in USBs, mixing with a veteran’s grace and a young buck’s glee. It’s a remarkable set for all sorts of reasons—the way it seesaws, ever so slowly, between dub and gqom, finding an equally vertiginous energy in both; for its middle hour, which is both minimal and delirious, like Detroit or Birmingham techno boiled down to something even more sinister; for the way he draws lines from vintage electro to contemporary dubstep tools with the flick of a knob. But it’s more than that: It’s just the sheer joy and steadfastness of it all. McCutcheon, over the past decade, has revealed himself to be a critical architect of modern dancefloor sounds. On All Night, he unrolls his plans on the CDJs, revealing a veritable labyrinth in the process.

Benedikt Frey & Diamin, All Night Long

All-nighter sets, by their very nature, carry an implicit and familiar promise: That old yarn about DJs acting as sherpas, about selectors building bridges to unseen worlds out of vinyl and USB sticks. But clichés are, more often than not, borne out of a semblance of truth. On All Night Long, Benedikt Frey & Diamin make those whispers real, taking a staggeringly wide-ranging approach to what qualifies as “dance music.” Skip around and you’ll find a million sounds: Nu-age jazz fusion, lighters-up tech-trance, melted-vinyl disco retoolings, cheeky UK hardcore classics, brain-scrambling drum-and-bass, pumping house records—you get the gist. That range isn’t obvious when you listen to it front-to-back; Frey & Diamin blend with a contagious joy and unerring precision here, flipping between untold styles and histories without so much as a scuffed blend. All Night Long is the sound of everything-goes DJing aimed straight at the floor’s most dedicated crowd—the kind of stuff dance-music legends are made of.

Cal-C, Pacific Spirit No. 99

It might be barely above zero in the midwest right now, but who says you can’t drag out your beach towel anyways? Brampton DJ Cal-C is a one-of-one selector in the world of left-field rollers; his mixes are reliably sunny, playful, and stuffed with unidentifiable records, the kinds of tracks you might hunt for years without any luck. Pacific Spirit No. 99, blessedly, is (much) more of the same: here, he builds a sandcastle out of vinyl, grabbing all manner of blissed-out head-nodders along the way. Here, it’s heartrending dub records; there, it’s steel-drum boom-bap; elsewhere still, it’s synth-funk R&B. At times, it feels more like a selector’s session than a recording focused upon DJing, but that roughshod quality is perfectly fine here: This is four hours of a dollar-bin dance-music head going deep on dropped-top downtempo and sun-blasted shufflers, with nary a missable track in sight.

DJ DEADNAME, Osmosis in the Trees 2025

New York-via-North-Carolina DJ DEADNAME has been on an astronomical ascent in the past few years, but Osmosis in the Trees 2025 might mark a new kind of level-up for the selector. The appeal of this one is simple. DEADNAME, who once told PAPER that they cut their teeth DJing for a “freeform college radio station” in years past, goes deep on everything-goes mixing here, upturning a veritable cornucopia on the decks. The unifying thread is quick-and-precise club sounds, but that, of course, can be just about anything: post-post-dubstep screamers, XXX-era Danny Brown bootlegging, white-knuckled drum-and-bass, lickety-split trance tools, Amen-blasted R&B, and so, so much more. It’s a truly riotous session, one that takes the yes-and promises of contemporary pan-genre mixing and makes them deliriously real. This is pan-stylistic, wide-eyed, and thoroughly daring mixing pulled off at the highest level.

DJ Gangy, todo rap / todo trap

Over the years, Shotta Tapes, the label run by Manchester’s Tom Boogizm, has nurtured a one-of-one reputation: The label tends to operate on the murkier end of UK electronics, but they prize disorientation above all else. The same can go for their every-now-and-then mix series: “dance floor” oriented salsa, “H A R D C O R E,” zero-bit drill, and drip-fed all-nighters are all fair game. This is all to say that DJ Gangy’s todo rap / todo trap—a survey of Puerto Rican, Columbian, and Brazilian rap records assembled by the heretofore unknown DJ Gangy—makes for a perfect fit. What’s another left hook in a catalogue of zig-zaggers?

It helps, though, that todo rap / todo trap is out-and-out fantastic. The mix is all function and all flex, mixed quick-and-carefully, like so many hip-hop tapes before it. There’s common motifs, to be sure—snarling MCs, air horns, drum patterns that wouldn’t sound out of place on a modern DMV record or a circa-’22 UK drill project, and a focus on chilly synth leads—but the focus, here, rests squarely on Gangy’s chops as a selector rather than any particular track. Over time, the mix turns to a veritable revolving door of rap idioms, emcees, and production tricks, with so many ideas circling in and out that it turns a bit delirious—an affect helped by the frequently hazy production and prodigious use of AutoTuned trickery. On todo tap / todo trap, DJ Gangy takes a critical mix series built upon out-there choices and doubles down on specificity, finding something striking along the way.

DJ George Costanza, Green Beer and Celtic Cross Tattoos

Say what you will about DJ George Costanza, but he doesn’t waste your time. His mixes—which, candidly, are a real love-them-or-hate-them proposition—rarely exceed the 15-minute mark, but his music is so dense that it would be exhausting if it were much longer. (Not that that’s a bad thing; his Country Rap Mix, which asks its listeners for half an hour, stands as one of the century’s most impressive DJ sets, full stop.)

In the first two minutes of Green Beer and Celtic Cross Tattoos, DJ George Costanza slams “Shipping Up to Boston” with clattering trap drums, a wall of air horns, and Metal Gear sound effects before putting chopping up early-’90s West-Coast rap on top of stomach-churning bass. That’s without getting to the near-constant barrage DJ drops, too, which he slams refixes with like a DatPiff lifer. Another parallel to the rest of this work: Tattoos is a car crash of east-coast club idioms, mid-aughts pop-rock, and carefully placed mania. It’s the sound of heart-on-sleeve balladry played at an illicit club night, and it’s all entirely absurd.

But is that such a bad thing? It’s certainly a fine line to walk. His material is novel and everything-at-once and probably ironic but maybe not, but when DJ George Costanza pulls it off, it’s a one-of-one feat. (Imagine a SoundClown devotee learning their way around Ableton and you’re starting to get the idea.) Here, a singular DJ executes a ridiculous trick once again, turning in a 15-minute screamer that reimagines a million contemporary idioms as something more wild-eyed and raucous.

DJ Sundae, 2401 / Sound Metaphors Mix Series 48

Trying to guess what a set from DJ Sundae, a.k.a. Parisian selector Laurent Richard, will sound like is a bit trying to pin down a ghost. In one mix, he’s working with lovelorn folk records; in another, it’s slo-mo house music; grab another tape and you’ll find battle-tested electro and hip-hop. So, rather than just one mix, here’s two.

First, we’ve got Sound Metaphors Mix Series 48. Here, Richard goes deep on tough-as-nails electro and high-NRG house music, staring down the dancefloor while picking out left-field scorchers. It’s colorful and just strange enough, a celebration of the power to be found in a four-four kick drum. Scan around and you’ll find just about anything within that mode, though: Haunted-house Miami bass, machine-funk minimalism, and MIDI-piano stompers. Next, we’ve got 2401, which is an entirely different beast. Where Metaphors is riotous and party-starting, 2401 is zoned-out and bleary-eyed—the drive home rather than peak time, if you will. That lower-key mode fits Richard, though, and he goes wide here, turning the dials between low-key synth-jazz, zero-BPM yacht-rock, dub and spoken word, and, eventually, fog-blasted house music. 2401 is a truly everything-goes session—just give it a few minutes first.

Dj wiggles, An Ambient Dub Nightmare / Albin, Low Sun in Dub

From the title on down, An Ambient Dub Nightmare is a thrown gauntlet in large part because of how steadfastly Dj wiggles commits to the idea: two hours of skin-crawling ambience and dub records that might make your hair stand on end. Are you in or out?

If you’re in, you’re in for a treat. London’s Dj wiggles has been making a racket in the city’s club circuit for several years at this point. If she has a typical modus operandi, it’s at the intersection of contemporary UK soundsystem rattlers, dub, and techno. That said, this recording, which sees wiggles jettisoning any dancefloor fuel in favor of something far eerier, is likely her finest recording to date. (It’s not for nothing that it was purpose-built for similarly-omnivorous selector Jon K’s NTS show, which frequently tangles up dub, folk musics, and industrial-terror world-building.) Across the session’s two hours, wiggles reaches for migraine dub, extradimensional ambience, and bleary-eyed electronics the world over, prioritizing a digital miasma over everything else. Her focus on otherworldly architecture allows her all sorts of unusual swings, like when she tosses a recording of Apollo 11’s launch on top of 3-a.m. drones for strings and scraped metal, or when she moves from zero-BPM digital-dub to barely-there synth soli to starry-eyed Memphis rap. The set is full of moments like this: Daring blends pulled off with care, an entire universe dunked in fog, every selection glowing with scalp-tingling unease.

Peer between the shades, though: There’s a trillion-color sunrise just over the horizon. On Low Sun in Dub, Brazilian selector Albin flips over the coin that Dj wiggles initially palmed, pulling together an hour of low-slung and gentle dub rhythms. If An Ambient Dub Nightmare is the sound of dub targeted towards nights gone wrong, this is an ideal soundtrack for a morning’s walk: reverb-soaked nu-jazz, featherlight trip-hop, zero-gravity ambience, deep-space spoken word, and low-end soundsystem pressure-cookers defined by bass and thin air. Don’t mistake its mellow nature for anything undercooked, though. Throughout, Albin moves with a quiet grace, blending all sorts of styles without so much as a scuffed blend, holding everything together with a veteran’s grace. Slowly, the set does get heavier—Albin clearly knows their way around contemporary dubstep, a style that threatens to rear its head a few times late into the hour—but, even at its toughest, Low Sun in Dub is a downright welcoming affair mixed by a clear student of the stuff.

Dr Banana, DRBM08

In a late 2023 interview with Resident Advisor, Dr Banana, a.k.a. London-via-Bristol DJ, label boss, and streetwear connoisseur Sandy Hagenbach, put his taste in records simply: he likes to look for music that really “twists people’s melons.” In a different selector’s sticks, this could mean the kind of brain-bending deconstructed club records spun by folks like Bobby Beethoven and Kingdom, but if DRBM08 is any indication, he means something a bit different: shuffle-and-skip UK garage and head-turning house records, the kinds of tracks that keep a floor moving even as they throw a curveball or two on top. There’s plenty of joy to be found in a more function-forward approach, though.

The good doctor’s latest mix, ripped live from much a longer session in Berlin, shows him in top form, whipping between barely-there R&B retoolings, old-school shoulder-rollers, speed-garage pumpers, and souled-out deep house, prizing an effortless flow over anything particularly showy. (Not that there aren’t great selections here, mind: It’s just not about that.) Here, the wildest bits come from the acapellas he Hagenbach selects, whether it’s call-and-response self-help mantras or Ms Monique Renee’s tough-and-tender “Like Any Other Bitch.” Often, though, he’s happy to sit back and let the drums do the talking, twisting up the dancefloor all the while.

Finn & thehouseofacidhouse, Dismal House III: Dismal Doomsday

On Dismal House III, Finn & thehouseofacidhouse knuckle down, for a third and allegedly final time, on glum and downtrodden dance music, turning in a mix that’s all clouds and no silver linings. (Just in time for Valentine’s Day.) Critically, though: It’s remarkable. Finn handles the A-side, turning in forty-odd minutes of slow-and-low house music, all lovelorn vocal samples and pitched-down drum breaks. It’s both dreamy and a bit disorienting. The same could be said of thehouseofacidhouse’s flip side, but they get there through entirely different means: turn the tape over and you’ll find sludgy electro, clang-and-rattle techno workouts, zero-bit proto-Miami bass, and straight-up dubstep screamers. It’s noticeably faster and more energized than Finn’s chunk, but the sides are bound together by a shared interest in bleary-eyed dance music. Call it a hat trick.

Joe Delon, 10.01.26 / Carlos Souffront, Live @ B.P.T.

Here, Joe Delon keeps it simple: How about two and a half hours of house, disco, and jubilee? On 10.01.26, the Lisbon-based DJ flexes his miles-deep understanding of the stuff, flipping between all sorts of sounds without breaking a sweat. Throughout, he keeps his eye on jacking grooves, whether that’s almost-ghetto-house stompers, retrofuturistic electro, or synth-blasted new wave. But there’s more going on, of course: Delon knows his way around a killer vocal cut, he’s got armloads of Roland TB-03 workouts, and he’s not afraid of a wild-eyed sax solo, either. (Dancing is supposed to be fun, remember?) It helps that Delon, a great writer in his own right, knows his way around narrative, that old idea that DJs sometimes trot out to make selecting seem a touch more mythological. But maybe there’s something to it. This is joyous dance music pitched towards the rave-music lifers, a pile of records pulled from a very specific tradition: Dancing as both the end and the means, the club imagined as a utopia. At its best, 10.01.26 makes those old stories ring true.

In case that wasn’t enough for you, though, it’s worth pulling up the latest offering from Carlos Souffront—a San Francisco DJ who is surely one of the strongest house-music historiographers out there, full stop. Live @ B.P.T. shows him in top form, mixing wry, playful, and wild-eyed house, disco, and art-rock rollers with a Devil-may-care glee, prizing why-not selections over any particular aesthetic mode. Souffront makes sure to pack the session with all sorts of audacious blends, vaulting between all sorts of styles without so much as a missed beat, but any peacocking is never the point. Instead, Live @ B.P.T. is about the joy of a great drum break, the way a well-placed piano roll can send a discotheque into overdrive, the power of a carefully deployed cowbell, the countless flavors of joy to be found in a four-four kick. This is “house” viewed as expansively as possible, with a palpable generosity and love bleeding between each selection, and it’s a veritable masterclass.

Julien Dechery, SOORAVALI

“Dance music,” far too often, gets reduced to “club music,” or, perhaps, “electronic.” But—to underline a broader point this column tries to make about DJ mixing—dance music can be anything. It’s about the way bodies move in response to the music, about the interaction between the crowd and the selector—not, necessarily about the sounds themselves. That’s all to say that SOORAVALI, the latest tape from one-of-one selector and curator Julien Dechery, is flat-out incredible, even if it’s all wildly (defiantly?) analogue. Here, in a follow-up to two other Indian-diasporic-music explorations last year, Dechery goes buck-wild on a million flavors of folk music, whipping up a whirlwind of hand drums and group vocals and strings and flutes, making for something whose energy rivals that of any contemporary tools you’d find beaming out of club soundsystems the world over. Taken on its own merits, though, SOORAVALI is flat-out incredible: A survey of folk music traditions with a brick on the gas pedal.

Kamal Naeem, SORRYMIX43: Uncle Kamal’s 80s Mix

The new school is wildly overrated. That’s not to say contemporary dance music traditions and styles are in a poor state, to be clear—far from it—but instead to point out that digging and promotional emails can push selectors towards music that hasn’t even been released yet, and there’s only so many tracks you can fit into an hour. So it’s refreshing to see, with SORRYMIX43, that Ithaca’s Kamal Naeem eschews that paradigm entirely, winding the clock back four decades and cranking up the bass. Naeem writes that this mix reflects a “pre-rules” era of house music, and that why-the-hell-not energy courses through the set, which is playful and groovy in equal measure; shut your eyes and you can practically see Naeem flashing a grin from behind the decks during the blends. Even in this relatively limited window, Naeem finds all sorts of colors to play with: rickety electro and hip-house; aquatic disco; minimalistic slap-bass funk cuts; piano-slammed rollers; and so much more. The result is confetti in a can.

Lucia Kagramanyan, Never Ending Sunday

The trouble with—and the most exciting thing about—“folk music” is, at a basic level, it doesn’t mean anything. With Never Ending Sunday, Lucia Kagramanyan takes a sledgehammer to any notional ideas of what traditional musics can (or “should”) sound like, turning in something that feels truly hallucinatory in the process. The A-side is a forty-minute survey of ancient Yerevanian folk musics, all duduks and dhols and chanted vocals, every cut sounding coated in a thick layer of dust and mud. Each selection is a surprise even in that context: there’s a moment about halfway in where Kagramanyan reaches for a track fueled by high-speed hi-hats and lo-bit synthesizer noodling, and it feels downright revelatory. The B-side, by contrast, is altogether stranger: After a few minutes of folk-et-cetera mixing, Kagramanyan drops the listener straight into the 21st century with a selection of pitch-black trap records before rocketing to the ‘90s via boom-bap and radio-ballad crooners. It’s yet another left hook in a long line of them. Never Ending Sunday is the sound of Kagramanyan breaking a time capsule into a million pieces.

Miscmeg, Mike Midnight & deep creep, pi/live

How’s this for a meeting of the minds? pi/live pairs two critical dance-music institutions—pi pi pi, a critical mix-series-slash-label founded by deep creep, and Miscellania, a club night based in Melbourne—for four-odd hours of jacking dance music. The former’s mix series is decidedly wide-ranging, but there’s a general focus on wigged-out tech house and dubstep; the latter occasionally posts smog-blasted trip-hop to their SoundCloud page. pi/live leans more towards the former than the latter, but there’s still plenty of material for the head-trippers, too. The mix opens with a long-form excursion into hip-swaying tech house, like a Loidis record with a bit more swing in the drums; from there, though, just about anything goes, whether it’s oddball electro, Balearic sunblasters, flirtatious UK garage, black-hole minimalism, or veritiginous techno. It’s one hell of a swing, bound together by a shared sense of jubilee: This is three essential underground selectors pushing each other ever further into the dark, grins lighting up the floor all the while.

Nicolás Jaar, Nuvole (for Sergio)

When Nicolás Jaar released his début productions in the late 2000s, his music betrayed a range of flirtations. “Democracy, I Was Thirsty,” a sort-of-house sort-of-jazz shambler, stands unique in his discography nearly two decades later; “Don’t Break My Love” (which was re-released, years later, as part of Nymphs) is static-drenched micro-house, all clicks and rattles and rolls and open air; and “Mi Mujer” pairs hundred-limbed drumming with nu-jazz synth soli and nigh-whispered vocals.

It’s been a long 18 years since then, of course, and Jaar has lived a hundred lives in that time. His music has evolved, too; it has slowed down and sped up again; he has delved ever deeper into both abstraction and club fodder; it has turned both industrial, reflective, and maddeningly ambitious. But, for all those twists and turns, that original M.O.—take a groove, twist it up, and invite dancers down a black hole—never disappeared.

As much is clear on Nuvole (for Sergio), a remarkable transmission from 2025’s C2C Festival. The bulk of the session sees Jaar focusing on long-form dub techno, leaning into a bad trip until it turns to its own kind of joy, layering aqueous synthesizers on top of shuffle-and-patter kick drums. It’s so smooth that it’s difficult to discern any obvious transitions whatsoever; for the most part, the session reads more like a live-electronics jam session than a club-night session. But it’s the exceptions—the ways he reminds listeners that any rhythm can be pushed to the side with the push of a button—that make it truly remarkable, like the mid-point descent into contemporary-classical tearjerkers or an eleventh-hour blast of folk music, disco-inflected house, and haunted-house soul. For all the ostensible austerity Jaar’s taken on in the past several years, he’s still a bit of a trickster, after all—of course his latest masterstroke would end with a bit of a flourish.

Qoso, Two

Two’s cover art—Steamboat Willie, digitally manipulated into some kind of black-and-white Polyphemus—is, its own way, indicative. Here, Parisian selector Qoso blacks out on reggaeton, post-industrial, and bleary-eyed electronics, taking familiar forms and mutating them into something both sinister and a bit playful. On the A-side, he looks towards soundsystem stompers: dembow where the kicks hit like cinderblocks, sort-of trap instrumentals that recall Brodinski at his gnarliest, light-speed percussion workouts for voice and hi-hat and bells. The flip is comparatively light, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy listening: from the El Alfa bootleg on down, it’s downright psychedelic, defined by a cavernous low-end and syrupy BPMs. (Think haunted chopped-and-screwed and you’re on the right track.) With Two, Qoso takes one of the world’s finest dance-music idioms—the dotted rhythm—and twists it into a million forms, each a bit more outré than the last.

Time Is Away, 01.03.25

In conversation, Time Is Away, a.k.a. London’s Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, have brushed off the summary of their NTS show—“Part soundscape, part essay for the radio.” But that idea still bears significance. Not infrequently, their mixes sit between those ideas, pairing spoken-word meditations with all manner of muted folk, classical, and electronic musics. In their own way, the duo wring drama out of minutiae.

That said, they don’t always need the lyric book. 01.03.25, a remarkable recording taken from San Francesco de’ Macci, a 14th-century monastery and church in Florence, makes literal many of their fascinations: ancient arts and architecture; sculpture and reverence. They spend the bulk of the recording blending slow-motion classical-music and choral selections—the kind of things purpose-built for stone cathedrals—but find all manner of moods therein. The recording is, at points, serene, joyous, bleary-eyed, and, somehow, moribund. Most impressively, though, it is also welcoming. As it runs on, 01.03.25 slowly turns its gaze towards folk musics, moving from the divine towards the intimate. It’s a move that collapses scales and approaches at once, underlining just how similar the church and the home might be: Anything is holy if afforded enough patience.

Traxx, On Dek From Wall of Sound

Perhaps it should come as little surprise, given Traxx has a 20-hour-long mix series titled “The Definitive Articles of House Music,” but the Chicago DJ is at his best when he’s writing epics. His finest sets take dance music’s histories seriously, working as both dancefloor fuel and a hurled gauntlet, focusing on sweat and dust and blind alleys in equal measure. That’s undoubtedly the case with On Dek From Wall of Sound, a stunning marathoner recorded on DVS1’s famed traveling soundsystem in May of last year. Here, the gargantuan length is the point. As Traxx writes it in the set’s liner notes, the set is an effort to move “beyond ‘house’ or ‘techno’ as most of the society overall would define it for a FULL 10 Hour Seance.”

Mission accomplished. The set is remarkable in both its breadth and its specificity, with a nigh-bottomless bag of records and an equally unwavering commitment to rickety electronics. It’s all “dance music,” by and large, but you’ve got to be willing to jump in the deep end. On Dek From Wall of Sound is a barrage of wall-of-sound electronics; it’s proto-proto-proto-techno; it’s static-blasted EBM; it’s a love letter to Detroit and Hamburg; it’s a steamroller that would make your local hardcore DJ jealous; it’s a million flavors of rock-and-roll; it’s a hundred histories rolled into one. Here, Traxx moves with a veteran’s grace and a young buck’s glee, hurling bombs for ten hours straight.

Vladimir Ivkovic & Ivan Smagghe, H.A.N.D. Mix 083 / Vladimir Ivkovic & Manfredas, Playing at Opium Club Somewhere Back in Time / Alfred Anders, Dekmantel Mix 507 / Al Wootton, Recorded at Houghton

The Cosmic Hole, a dancefloor that was part of the now-shuttered Berlin party Cocktail d’Amore, had one ironclad rule: Play low and slow. The floor had strict tempo guidelines, and sets from its soundsystem often went long (six, eight, or 24 hours). The best stuff archived from there is psychedelic in both form and function, with spiralling grooves and turgid tempos interacting to create a particularly wigged-out form of dancefloor alchemy. That all applies, thrillingly, to H.A.N.D. Mix 083, which sees long-time sparring partners Vladimir Ivkovic and Ivan Smagghe conducting affairs for nearly eight hours, coating the dancefloor in mud all the while. They spend the session trudging from synth-pop belters to left-of-left-field house records, but they go down so many blind alleys—sludged-up acid! Pitched-down breaks! Hall-of-mirrors trance!—that you’d be forgiven for getting a bit diverted.

Playing at Opium Club Somewhere Back in Time is, by comparison, awfully energetic, but it’s just as off-kilter. This broadcast, another archived recording from another since-closed dancefloor, is chock full of bait for adventurous ravers: Techno cuts that seem to move in four tempi at once, new-beat and electro records locked in a double helix, psychedelic trance records that sound nothing like psytrance, and so, so much more. About two hours in, there’s a blend that really encapsulates it all: First, they drop a series of almost-off-beat organ stabs on top of a four-four acid-house cut, making for a dancefloor-ready groove that threatens to turn the whole room on its side; then, suddenly, they’re slinging scuzzed-up rock-and-roll courtesy of The Jesus and Mary Chain. It ought to not work in the least, but, through some kind of alchemy, Ivkovic and Manfredas pull it off. Opium Club is stuffed with moments like this: Why-not absurdities pushed to the point of out-and-out deliria. The dancefloor’s all the better for it.

It’s not as though Ivkovic (or his collaborators) have a monopoly on slow-and-low dance music, of course. With Dekmantel Mix 507, Belgian selector Alfred Anders goes deep on the stuff, cooking up an hour-and-change of new beat, techno, and house records, sauntering on the floor rather than sprinting towards it. Dance music at this tempo already frequently leans towards the psychedelic, and Anders, cannily, leans into that approach, looking towards oddball selections throughout. Perhaps the most wigged-out moment features George H. W. Bush talking about Operation Desert Storm on top of four-four kicks and pan-flute riffs, but there’s plenty of other moments pulled straight from left field: Proto-proto-proto new-beat slammers, cyborgian electro-disco, space-age jam-sessions for hi-hat and a thousand synthesizers, come-ons from the abyss. It’s all got an appealingly retrofuturistic lens, which is both charming and plenty invigorating by its own accord. Dekmantel Mix 507 feels like a blind alley in dance-music histories. Fortunately, it’s always possible to run it back.

Finally, if that wasn’t enough for you, Al Wootton’s Recorded at Houghton—though, on paper, it shares little of the same DNA—might make a good chaser. Here, the veteran DJ goes deep and a bit bleary, opting for percussion tracks that balance disorientation and groove in equal measure. A few highlights: a late-session blast zoned-out jazz-funk, all buzzing snares and three-ton basslines and frenetic flute soli; the moment a mid-hour handclap and jaw-harp stomper bleeds into livewire dub; the million different flavors of drum kits Wootton hauls to the decks along the way. There’s a remarkably ‘live’ feel to this; it’s all undeniably dance music, but it feels less like an hour of heads-down techno than it feels like an open-ended jam session, each groove promising infinities along the way. It’s generous, playful, and invigorating in equal measure: The sound of a rightly venerated DJ straying from his decks and finding gold.