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

From a two-hour soundbath of jazz and curdled downtempo to 12-hours clashes, we break down the most memorable sets of the last month.

Art by DJ Short

Many of June’s best DJ sets have remarkably little in common. That’s a great thing. At their best, mixes contain universes: Sometimes they’re deep dives down a highly particular rabbit hole; sometimes they’re maddeningly wide; sometimes they’re archivist’s dreams; sometimes they propose a future that doesn’t yet fully exist. Last month, the finest material did all that and more.

First, we’ve got a set from 悪魔の沼 Akuma No Numa, where the Japanese trio went all in on—what else?—sludged-up club-night idioms, drenching the dancefloor in mud in a two-hour brain-bender. If you’re looking for a reprieve from that, Benedek’s session from Bar Part Time is a can’t-miss session purpose-built for dropped tops, and DJ Sundae turned in a two-hour soundbath of jazz and curdled downtempo. Elsewhere, miss behave turned in a sprightly session of minimal-techno idioms for Drip, and Ciel and Loidis spent twelve hours going head-to-head in one of this year’s strongest sessions: a glacier-sized blast of techno and house records, mixed to a tee.

In her turn behind the Tabi Tapes decks, Kaity Fox cooked up a truly delirious hour-or-so that pushes against convention and form, collaging together radio fragments, found sound, and left-field electronics. Big Gulp worked in a slightly Dadaist lens, too, but focused on archival rips of pirate-radio grime recordings. The Carry Nation’s Full Tilt Carry Vol. 3 is yet another blast of no-holds-barred New-York house mania, and DJ Scott’s HANGAR 13 v Uprising 24th May 2004 is madhouse makina played at eleven. Lastly, Yibing offered up a jubilant and gentle vision of dancefloor utopianism, and Lukas Wigflex & Ivan Smagghe said goodbye to a critical London club-night institution.

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

悪魔の沼 Akuma No Numa, PURE Guest.107

It’s almost a bit too on the nose. “Akuma No Numa,” as PURE Guest.107’s liner notes spells out, translates to “devil’s swamp.” It’s tricky to think of a more appropriate subtitle for the mix put together by the Japanese trio, which is turgid, oddball, and plenty sinister. Throughout the session, Compuma, Dr.Nishimura, and Awano lean towards screwed-down BPMs, stomach-churning industrial textures, and incantatory dance music idioms; the result feels less angled for a dancefloor than it is for a séance of some kind. It’s a remarkable approach with a huge range of highlights: a shot of reverb-blasted tech-trance that lands an hour in, a horror-flick jazz-slash-dub-techno roller they queue up half an hour later, the occasional blasts of sunlight via vintage Moog workouts. It’s a real scorcher of a session, in large part thanks to Akuma No Numa’s restraint. Here, the trio takes a pit of tar to a simmer and invites any curious ravers to dive in.

Benedek, Live @B.P.T.

It’s hard to think of a better time for Live @ B.P.T. to have released. Regular readers know what to expect from this mix series at this point: Sunny house, oddball disco, screwed-up downtempo, and plenty of curveballs. But Benedek’s entry is distinguished by its sheer humidity. This is sun-blasted dance music aimed squarely at the beach-towel crowd, full of waterlogged percussion tracks and high-NRG suited for dropped tops. Scan around and you’ll find a million flavors of the stuff: piles of lovelorn freestyle, old-school synth-rock slammers, turntablist house tracks, daytime disco pumpers, no-shit new-wave, and plenty more: Benedek keeps things moving throughout thanks to canny mixing and a wide lens. (If you’re not keen on where it’s at, in other words, just wait five minutes.) But set aside any particulars; here, the appeal is much more elemental. If it would sound good next to the ocean, it’s good to go.

The Carry Nation, Full Tilt Carry Vol. 3

In 2023, New York house-music stalwarts The Carry Nation released Full Tilt Carry, a lights-out tape of club-night fuel that showed off part of what makes the city’s scene great: hedonistic peak-time bombs, chest-rattling kicks, and undeniable vocal cuts. Three years later, they’re back for a third lap, and blessedly little has changed. Full Tilt Carry Vol. 3 is an hour of skull-cracking house music, all pumping four-fours and critical new-school names. Anyone familiar with the city’s rave flyers will find a familiar name or three here: JIALING’s “After All Kat” is a delightful triangulation of ‘90s UK acid, hardcore, and Baltimore dancefloor idioms; Jubilee’s “Move It” feels destined to move floors thanks to its delightfully tripped-out sort-of vocal chops; and MarceauxMarceaux’s “Plans Change” is the kind of garage-house stomper most producers would kill for. This one’s not complicated—it’s no-bones house music through and through—but entire careers have been forged on less. Call it a hat trick.

Ciel & Loidis, Flip 8

Can you truly have too much of a good thing? If Flip 8, a recording from Loidis and Ciel, two dance-music mainstays with careers spent exploring a million styles, is anything to go by, the answer might just be no. This set sees the pair blasting Montréal’s Parquette for nearly twelve hours, stretching remarkably few idioms out far past their breaking point. The proposition—how about twelve hours of tech-house?—is audacious enough to make the set notable, but more important is just how well it works. There are fewer scuffed blends here than you’d hear in a typical hour-long session, and there are enough killer grooves to fill a set twice its length. With something this titanic, pointing out highlights feels almost besides the point: Just know that there’s a million of them, with zippy synths, pointillistic kick drums, and just-so vocals rearranged in a seemingly endless game of Jenga, with plenty of left turns along the way—until the pair ease the floor into somewhere else entirely, with a well-earned come-down built on trip-hop and hazy pop records. It’s a perfect pairing; Flip 8 is functional, dreamy, and joyous at once. Put another way: It’s a jaw-dropping collection of a highly particular form of dance music. In a year crowded with killer sessions, Flip 8 is one of the finest out.

DJ Scott, HANGAR 13 v Uprising 24th May 2004 (feat. Mc Stompin, Mc Jet & Mc Nat) / Big Gulp, Around the Dial: Grime on Pirate Radio 2003-2008

Sometimes, all a DJ needs to do is to smash open a time capsule. It’s rarely quite that simple, of course, but there’s a real value in sets that zones in on specific traditions and histories, going miles down an inch-wide hole. Here, we’ve got a madcap double-feature: Two MC-driven tapes from the U.K. that couldn’t be any more dissimilar.

HANGAR 13 follows in the great tradition of hardcore MCing, with a DJ slamming the floor as the room’s masters of ceremonies fight to keep up. At its best, this format is a veritable arms race, with DJ, MC, and raver pushing each other into increasingly manic territories. That’s the case here: HANGAR 13 is an hour-long escalation, a steamroller of makina, euro-trance, and techno, just about every bar laced with mic work. It’s unabashedly playful and riotous, a single-minded approach to partying taken to some kind of logical conclusion. (Just take a look at the sleeve around the tape: “MAKINA MAKINA MAKINA.”) In other words, it’s a real love-it-or-hate-it proposition, but if you’re in the market for sweat-soaked party-starters, this one’s tough to beat.

It’s not all that common that a grime tape is the lower-energy tape in a pairing, but here we are. Around the Dial sees Big Gulp taking an archivist’s lens to some of the most frigid dance music you’ll hear this century, unearthing pirate radio broadcasts and scrambling them together, dredging up an ocean of static along the way. The joy of this one lies in the patina: It’s a proudly messy tape, full of spinbacks, shit-talk, and zero-bit drum machines heard through a million busted speakers. At just about any moment, it feels like the frequency might give out; the MCs might dip; the beats might turn inside out. And that happens, often enough, but this isn’t sound collagery; Big Gulp gives the ice-cold synthesizers, tooth-busting beats, and white-hot MCs their time in the sun, too. It’s that alchemy—an anything-goes energy combined with an unashamedly vintage texture—that keeps this thing vital. At a time when grime has long since gone global, it’s nice to have a reminder of just how prickly, and invigorating, this stuff can be.

DJ Sundae, Live at Dream Archive

About eleven minutes into Live at Dream Archive, DJ Sundae queues up “Song for Emahoy (Slowed),” a demo-tape deep-cut from New York singer-songwriter Eliana Glass. It’s telling for its sound—tender, acoustic, serene—and for its refractions: It is an homage re-recorded and warped, an unmistakable sound turned in on itself three times over. The same could be said about much of the rest of the recording, which sees DJ Sundae going deep on his typical M.O.: sad-sack indie rock, oddball guitar tracks, and electronic numbers that sound like they’ve been left out in the rain. Critically, though, many of Sundae’s selections feel half-remembered, whether they’re evocative of early-aughts guitar-music traditions, drenched in reverb, or simply barely present at all. This feeling ultimately colors the entire work, which feels less like a straight-ahead mix than it does a sepia-toned scrapbook. As it runs on, the set turns to a tender, gentle, and quietly exploratory session purpose-built for the stargazers.

Kaity Fox, Untitled

One of the joys of DJ mixing is that it truly can be anything. This isn’t always the case, of course—plenty of selectors have built their name on specific sounds and tunnel-visioned stylistic approaches. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But there’s a unique thrill to a set that feels like it could go just about anywhere, that blows the doors open on the format’s collagery and turns it outright Dadaist. Kaity Fox’s Untitled, the twenty-third entry in All Night Flight’s consistently remarkable “guerrilla mixtape series,” does just that. If forced to find a throughline here, one could posit that the tape focuses on ramshackle and threadbare musics, but that’s less a sound than an approach, and such a description dodges any real specifics. That’s for a reason: the tape plays like a bit of a wormhole, shuttling between sounds and decades and ideas at a staggering clip, settling into a barely-lucid dream-state in the process. Untitled is elegiac modern classical; it’s chopped-and-scattered radio-drama fragments; it’s trap that’ll cave in your chest; it’s folk music divorced from postal codes but deeply rooted in the soil; it’s reverb-drenched balladry; it’s hellish techno; and it’s so, so much more. With Untitled, Fox takes a kaleidoscope to the decks and presents DJing as an infinite thing.

Lukas Wigflex & Ivan Smagghe, Corsica Studios Closing Party 2026

Call it déjà vu. In April, Dresden, a.k.a. Ivan Smagghe and Manfredas, put out a six-hour mammoth recorded live at Corsica Studios’ closing party. It’s one of the year’s finest sets thanks, in large part, to the DJs’ industrial-tinged palettes and their quiet mastery of prolonged blends. Now, we’re back: Another series of dancefloor bombs, another live Corsica recording, another Ivan Smagghe appearance, and another can’t-miss recording. Given it’s from the same night as Last Dresden Recording at Corsica, it should come as little surprise that this plays in similar spaces; given that, it should come as little surprise that it’s gas. Here, Lukas Wigflex and Smagghe spend four hours pushing each other into ever-more delirious territories, pulling up sprightly Chicago house, outré electro, head-trip techno, wall-of-sound 2-step, and so, so, so much more. An early highlight comes in Klein Zage’s fittingly acerbic “A Lot of Limes,” a biting house-music slammer dedicated to back-of-house staff and shithead customers: “Another night in paradise,” the narrator murmurs. She’s sarcastic, but more broadly speaking, she’s not exactly wrong.

miss behave, Drip.mix 002

Great DJ sets can, of course, be a million things at once. But they certainly don’t have to be. On Drip.mix 002, Sydney-based DJ miss behave goes deep on a simple question: How long can a four-four kick keep the floor moving? Here, the answer to that feels like a resounding “forever.” The set is a masterclass of minimal mixing, with every hi-hat and snare layered just so; take just one element out and the whole thing would fall apart. That emphasis on floor-focused constructions holds throughout the set, offering a strong foundation from which the selector can build in all manner of directions. There’s plenty of Villalobosian minimalism, to be sure, but there’s so much more here, too: body-rocking electro, squelching acid cuts, 3-a.m. UK garage, turn-of-the-century microhouse. No matter the specifics, though, this is a set about one thing: long, drawn-out grooves that promise eternities.

Yibing, naffcast020

Over the years, New York-based Yibing—a DJ in a city with a seemingly endless rolodex of party-starters—has carved out an enviable reputation. Her material is rarely any one thing; she’s not a genre DJ, but she’s not going to lock into a particular mood or flavor, either. Her best material is a bit all over the map, bound less by sound or style than it is by sheer alchemy; it’s wistful one moment and rollicking the next, and on and on. naffcast020, then, is a bit of an odd bird. By her own admission, it’s something of a two-parter: For the first hour-or-so, she floods the Sustain-Release decks with bleary-eyed dance music—extraterrestrial breakbeats, guttural electro, nu-age CD-comp wizardry; in the back half, she moves a bit more delicately, turning the dancefloor’s energy down until the whole thing lands like a sonic bath. It’s still “dance music,” mind—she’s hardly giving up the breakbeats here—but it’s tears-in-the-club kind of stuff alternating with sun-drenched house tunes. The result is a remarkable A/B from an artist who normally tears up the whole dictionary; as ever, it’s thrilling, playful, and characteristically joyous.