Slam on the CDJ: The Best DJ Sets of April 2026

From the ambient fringes to fusions of American folk with dance music traditions, these are the most memorable sets that the last month had to offer.

Art by DJ Short

It’s a long one, so let’s get right into it. In April, plenty of battle-tested DJs earned their stripes yet again, pushing the form into new territories along the way. Los Angeles beat scientist Agraybé decamped to Joshua Tree for a real brain-scrambler ambient-not-ambient set, and the folks behind Sydney’s Patina Radio offered up a tender-hearted session purpose-built for slow mornings. Chuquimamani-Condori blurred together American folk and dance-music traditions in their latest tape; elsewhere, Shhhhh went wide on floor-fillers. Amelia Holt, a.k.a. one of the States’s finest selectors, full stop, dug into sleazy dance music the world over, and Bella Sarris & Lucky Lube offered a neon-blasted counterpoint.

DJ Screendoor, a quiet mainstay of the Portland scene, crashed through a million flavors of rave tools over in Seattle, and livwutang, a reliably fantastic New York-via-Seattle selector, put on a clinic in a very specific strain of dubstep. RHR cooked up a session of minimalistic-and-white-hot club tools for RA, and Kilbourne slammed on the gas in a set of East-coast gabber and techno. Long-time club-night duo Dresden shut down dancefloor institution Corsica for the final time in a can’t-miss all-nighter, and, lastly, many, many DJs dug into the sounds that excited them most for NTS: bluegrass, exotica, dancehall, psychedelic folk, and so much more.

Here are some of the best DJ sets April had to offer.

Amelia Holt, HD Series 007

About a dozen minutes into HD Series 007, Amelia Holt pulls out a skeleton key. “Ride,” a 1996 cut from The Golden Palominos’s Dead Inside, is about as bleary as the album name suggests: a spoken-word illbient-techno gut-puncher for sleepless nights and bad trips, every word dipped in acid and the beat sounding like it’s about to slink away at any moment. It’s sexy, greasy, and queasy at once—in other words, it’s the sound of an archetypal Amelia Holt set.

For the rest of HD Series 007, Holt goes deep on that sound, pushing an imagined club night into all sorts of thrilling territories along the way. Not long after “Ride” fades out, she’s found her way towards tracky electro cuts, zero-gravity minimalism, and techno purpose-built for heads-down dancing. Scan ahead and you’ll find all manner of bleary-eyed dance musics, all reverb-soaked synth cuts, new beat dunked in molasses, extraplanar jazz fusion, or otherworldly coldwave. The only rule, here, seems to be what she establishes early on with that Palominos cut: Keep it slow, low, and a bit sleazy.

Bella Sarris & Lucky Lube, 086

With 086, Bella Sarris & Lucky Lube keep it simple: How about eighty minutes of neon? On one level, a quick scan around the set reveals all kinds of styles—tech-trance, piano-stomp house, bitcrushed hardcore, slippery acid and old-school electro—but, on another level, it’s delightfully simple: this is a set focused almost exclusively on the power of a great four-four, on sweat-soaked joy, and on hard left turns. Sarris and Lucky Lube bind the whole thing together by looking towards high-energy (or NRG) cuts throughout, finding space for equal measures of club-night come-ons and peak-time ragers along the way. It’s a remarkable example of one highly particular thing done extremely well: Bust out the confetti cannons.

Chuquimamani-Condori, Leave

It’s easy to look at mashups like a cheap trick—hey, remember this song?—but, like any compositional tool, it’s always possible to wrest beauty out of them. (And what’s wrong with a cheap trick, anyways?) As Girl Talk, Greg Gillis recorded a handful of genuinely fantastic mashup records; it’s hard not to hear a bit of his avant-pop lineage in artists like Bobby Beethoven and Ben Bondy.

Given Chuquimamani-Condori’s recent run of mixes, it’s high time to add them to that list. Leave follows a banner 2025 for the artist: Los Thuthanaka is as mind-bending as you’ve heard, and their ILY Travisthree-peat is a vital envisioning of Americana as something that stretches across hemispheres. With Leave, they follow the same script, but it’s hard to complain when it’s so singular: Andean and Bolivian folk musics car-crashed into DatPiff-brained DJ drops, contemporary country records and drum programming derived from dance-music histories. It’s a remarkable session, every selection and blend bound by sheer psychedelia rather than mood, BPM, era, style, or energy. Chuquimamani-Condori spends the bulk of the session whiplashing so much that it starts to bleed a kind of livewire joy, every track laced with a mixture of heartbreak and jubilee. Eventually, Leave starts to sound like an alternative history of American musics: Eventually, anything is possible.

DJ Screendoor, live-at-research-seattle

DJ Screendoor, at this point, is no stranger to these pages, and with good reason. The Portland selector posts an amount of music that’s frankly staggering—in between his work at club nights and wine bars, he clearly keeps plenty busy. More impressive, though, is the consistent quality; whether he’s working with dub, trip-hop, garage, techno, house, or any number of ‘90s-flavored acid cuts, Screendoor’s mixes are reliably searching, playful, and a bit wigged-out. That’s the case with live-at-research-seattle, a set recorded from the excellent west-coast party source Research. Here, as ever, he goes deep and wide in equal measure, spending four hours grabbing all sorts of old-school bombs for the heads: what starts as a set of relatively placid IDM and ambient slowly turns to a full-on boiler, with sun-drenched garage and freaked-out rock-and-roll crashing into lo-bit synth workouts and tears-in-the-club trance records.

Dresden, Last Dresden Recording at Corsica

About twenty minutes into Last Dresden Recording at Corsica, a mammoth recording from a party with an equally mammoth reputation, Dresden—a.k.a. club-music wizarding duo Ivan Smagghe and Manfredas—pull up a simple question: “What is behind that curtain?”

The quote comes from “Born, Never Asked,” a remarkable cut from Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. But that’s not really the point. Here, that idea—of mystery, of collective searching, of disorientation—is as good a North Star as Dresden provide for the next six hours, in a set that runs the gamut between a million different styles of club-night fuel. Thanks to Corsica’s outsize reputation, it’s a difficult set to hear in a vacuum, but it’s remarkable no matter how you slice it: new beat and techno and acid (and, and, and) tossed into a cauldron and rendered something entirely new, entire histories collapsed on themselves in a way that’s both instantly familiar and plenty delirious. Thanks to the sheer size of this thing, any highlighting feels a bit besides the point; instead this is about locking in, zoning out, and ending up somewhere entirely new. It’s hard to think of a better send-off.

Kilbourne, Tel0genesis

Ashe Kilbourne is a hardcore lifer at this point, but there’s another side to her craft that’s just as critical as hundred-ton kick drums: East-coast club music. (Some of her earliest DJ sets were filled with the stuff, for what it’s worth.) This is hardly unprecedented, to be clear, but East-coast hardcore is nevertheless invigorating when it’s pulled off well: It’s both heavyweight and dynamic, full of rhythmic bobbing and weaving even if every measure hits like a truck. On Tel0genesis, she pulls that trick off to a tee. The real star of the show, of course, is the low-end—galloping kick drums and basslines that hit like a screwdriver to the gut—but there’s plenty more to marvel at, too: the Jersey-meets-Rotterdam mania throughout; the way she, somehow, ratchets the intensity up for the entire session without it getting exhausting; the sheer mileage she wrings out of skull-cracking sub-bass. This is the sound of a hardcore veteran offering a critical reminder: No matter how fast or heavy it gets, there’s always room for a bit of play.

livwutang, femme vocal dubstep

livwutang—one of the finest examples of Seattle’s status as an undersung DJ incubator—understands the value of specificity. Previous Slam picks have generally learned towards bleary-eyed techno and zonked-out dub, two styles that reward deep dives over track-by-track explorations. (Not to say she can’t do kitchen-sink with the best of them.) She continues that trend of deep-over-wide mixing on femme vocal dubstep, a remarkable survey-slash-celebration that does exactly what it says on the tin: This is a wide-ranging and wild-eyed survey of bassbin rattlers; it’s a rolodex of MCs and a warehouse of busted synthesizers; it’s a long-form exploration of ice-cold dance music that’s not afraid of a bit of play. The set’s structural constraints allow livwutang plenty of wiggle room, though, keeping things bound together even as she shuttles between textures and moods—this session is mournful and jubilant, riotous and sludgy, hi-tech and gritty, and often in the space of just a few minutes. The result is a hurled gauntlet for dance-music historiography.

Patina, 0.15. / Agraybé - Palm Reader 17

Spend enough time around DJs and you’re bound to hear it: “Listening music.” It’s a funny term on its face—isn’t all music for that?—but, in club spaces, it makes a kind of sense; there’s music for subwoofers and music for headphones. In practice, “listening” sets are often wildly exciting, purely because they can be just about anything. Patina’s 0.15 feels like an archetypical example of the stuff: clangy sort-of-techno and zero-gravity kosmiche and head-spinning dream-pop and so much more, all collaged together in a way that feels both intuitive and a bit outré. Critically, it’s mixed carefully and with plenty of grace; even if it’s made of all manner of sounds and styles, Patina hold everything together thanks to an unerring focus on low-key brain-benders.

If that’s too straight-ahead for your tastes, though, Palm Reader 17 is more or less purpose-built for the head-trippers. Recorded live from Joshua Tree National Park in October of last year, the session sees Agraybé— a one-of-one who-knows DJ—goes all in on deep-space sound design, constructing a set out of gurgles and clicks and whistles and screeches, making for something that’s immersive and mystifying at once. The set is both diverse and pleasantly disorienting, full of shots from deep left field. To grab just a few, there’s the pitch-black synth-drone piece three-quarters of the way in; the early-session pile of birdcalls and machinery; the sudden dip into a smoke-filled jazz club; and the blast of broken-down drum-and-bass that rockets through the middle. All told, Palm Reader 17 is a remarkable achievement, full of slow-and-low mixing that makes even the most alien sounds familiar, eventually.

RHR, RA.1035

In RA.1035, Roniere Santos, a.k.a. RHR, puts on a clinic in the art of high-impact selections. It’s not like it has “drops,” exactly—that would imply some temporary lags in energy—but, again and again in the set, Santos pulls out all manner of screw-facers and rug pulls, upturning the energy whenever things threaten to get even a bit rote. This should come as little surprise for anyone familiar with Santos’s work, which frequently sees the São Paulo selector veering between energies, BPMs, and moods without so much as a missed measure. With RA.1035, Santos zooms in on galloping techno and wild-eyed baile funk, collapsing any distance between Birmingham and Brazil along the way. The result is a truly riotous session packed with devil-may-care energy and clever blends, all gut-punch drums and motormouthed emcees and black-hole sub-basses stretched within an inch of their life. By the end, he’s sprinted between all manner of geographies, energies, and styles, all while keeping the would-be floor moving. This one’s for the exploratory ravers.

Shhhhh, Live @ B.P.T.

There’s no obvious throughline on Live @ B.P.T., but, if we’re being honest, that’s half the fun. Here, Leeds selector Shhhhh goes long on just about everything, bobbing and weaving between all sorts of dance-music idioms without ever feeling like they’re peacocking. The set is shuffle-and-skip UK garage; it’s dub techno played from a nearby abyss; it’s firestarting gqom and 3-step; it’s million-limbed percussion workouts; it’s Geigling and Ed Banger in a trenchcoat; it’s lighters-up hip-hop. (It helps, of course, that it’s all mixed to a tee, making just about every transition work, no matter how audacious.) The sheer variety on display feels like the point; this is the sound of a DJ with obviously miles-deep club crates exploring just about every corner of them, offering a million flavors of dancefloor jubilee in the process.

Various Artists, Supporter Radio: Your Specialist Subject II

Every now and again, NTS Radio—an online radio station whose archives are a veritable cornucopia—hosts a series of mixes submitted by their supporters. The latest batch encouraged listeners to make hour-long mixes based on the prompt: “What do you know more about than anyone else?”

There were, frankly, a staggering number of submissions—so many that, despite a valiant effort, it simply didn’t make sense to listen through all of them. That said, some highlights stand out. To go through them briefly due to the sheer quantity: Emerald’s Lost Psychedelia is a remarkable survey of blissed-out folk records and dreamy pop records; Daydream’s C’era una volta does something similar, but with old-school Italian film scores. Piper’s Lament, by 3am3ali, finds the sweet spot between deep-space drone and Northumbrian folk-music traditions, while Frouge’s Scanzonatissima is a lights-out session of Italo-disco oddballs. Héctr’s Bugalú is a riotous and jubilant celebration of a bygone New York; Ben Adams looked further south with From Hill and Holler, a killer hour of bluegrass and Appalachian folk-music selections; and Degsbody went even further afield on Elsewhere, a fever dream of exotica and shuttered lounges.

Elsewhere still, Pirouette’s Momentary Sanctuary takes the transportative promises of trance music and turns the volume down a few notches; Mykissera’s A Tour Through Twerknation is more or less the polar opposite, a veritable windstorm of sample chops and sweat-soaked drum programming. With Yumemiru kikai (Dream Machine), Finn den Hertog makes good on their promise to build “a sonic dream machine” out of folk and indie-rock deep cuts, and Sinziana Velicescu’s Torch Songs and Aftermath Ballads, a selection of heartbroken ballads and gut-punch songwriting, strikes a balance between visceral and tender.

With Rhythm & Bloops, Henrique dug into the interception of 2-step, R&B, and all sorts of early-aughts dance music; Sonido Panzón & Panamami’s Old School Perreo, similarly, does exactly what it says on the tin. On Dancehall Versions 1997-2006, Super Fabulous (great DJ name!) cooked up a truly psychedelic hour of killer dance music, and LS’s Better Luck Tomorrow (“Asian international teenage angst”) is a great soundtrack for a rainy morning. Lastly, there’s DJ Mihajlo’s Yugoslavian Streetsoul, which offers a deep dive on a sound that’s both sun-baked and a bit delirious, and Nela’s More u meni—world-weary folk music from Bosnia, Yugoslavia, and Macedonia, all heartstrings wrapped in a double helix.