As is fitting for the last weeks of summer, many of August’s finest sets went slow, languid, and stretched-out, prizing haze over anything too sharp. Melbourne selector DJ Sure went deep on sun-baked rock-and-roll and slow-rolling electronics for their Space’d entry, and Voidal went wider still, reaching for all manner of funk, pop, and jangled-up who-knows-whats. New York selector Enayet turned in a masterful sort-of-opening session that ran a million gamuts, and Nick Boyd turned in a peak-time set that was nevertheless downright delirious. Parisian DJ Duane explored the lines between dub and dubstep in a lights-out special, and Carl Luis turned in a far blearier session of dub and reggae tools for Good Morning Tapes. Vladimir Ivkovic and Chez de Milo imagined high-energy club tools as something far woozier, and Marylou turned in a straight-up horrible trip of ambient music and UK club idioms. SnPLO, DJ Frog & roadkill’s b5b presents tech-house at its trippiest, and batida power-trio O Ghettão took the rough-and-tumble drum music to a space that felt outright incantatory.
It’s not all so sludgy, though. Yu Su’s Gop Tun Festival offering is a masterclass in head-spinning techno and breaks, and DJ Land Reform went full-bore on a Rolodex of trance records, to winning effect. A minivan’s worth of DJs flooded the Pacific Northwest with all manner of club (and non-club!) sounds from this year’s Lodge festival, making for some of the most essential (and ungoogleable) listening you’ll find this year. Drum scientist upsammy pushed her craft ever further at Parameter Festival, and DJ Plead and Baby Leo turned in one of this year’s most madcap back-to-back sessions yet at the same event. Angus Mills’ Drip mix shows off the everything-goes energy that makes the mix series essential, while Hank Jackson’s naffcast is electrifying, white-hot, and a bit maddening. boxofbox turned in their once-a-year marathoner of a session, whipping between old-school R&B, Euro house, and new jack swing; elsewhere still, DJ Possum nodded towards the new season with a mix of starry-eyed dance music.
Here are some of the best DJ sets August had to offer.
Angus Mills, Drip.mix 004 // Hank Jackson, naffcast022
Though Peanut’s Drip series is relatively new—at time of writing, it’s four deep after six months—it’s left a marked impression. If you’re keen to cast one, the series’ first three offerings suggest a mold: here, the Sydney DJ has curated a killer selection of strung-out tech-house and breaks, all shades-on club music with unknowable IDs. 004, courtesy of fellow Australian Angus Mills, is a bit different, but just a bit. Scan through the set and you’ll catch on quickly: it’s appealingly loose-limbed and playful, never losing track of the dance floor but always willing to toss a curveball. That feels like the idea when Mills slides into full-throttle trance midway through; it’s there when everything cuts out except for a reverb-soaked spoken-word sample; it’s downright unmissable when he slides into some straight-up nu-jazz early on. For all the left turns, though, this one’s obviously aimed at the floor, and it’s the better for it: This is top-notch dance-music mixing where the detours feel like the point.
In case you’re keen for a bit more yes-and mixing, it’s worth taking a trip to Montreal for your next night out. On naffcast022, NYC mainstay Hank Jackson goes deep on that attitude, making something that’s at once delirious and hyper-focused, pitch-black and wild-eyed. If the Angus Mills set is the warm-up, consider this peak-time. It’s neither stronger or weaker than the other, but calibrated for a sweat-drenched dance floor rather than one that’s filling up. Not coincidentally, the best bits of this set are when Jackson gets speedy or off-kilter, like the breakbeat belter he pulls out halfway through, the freaked-out acid-techno run he goes on not long after, or the eleventh-hour dive into trance-slash-two-step. (Or something like that.) As the set runs on, Jackson locks in harder and gets more audacious, backflipping between styles without losing the floor along the way. Call it a one-two punch.
boxofbox, Mountainous Migrations of Lovelonging Hermits // DJ Possum, Butterfly Wings (Libra Mix)
A few years ago, boxofbox, a.k.a. Durham selector Johnathan Lyon, summarized their yearly long-form mix series as such: “fun-focused, long, car-ride-optimized, tracky, improvised.” No kidding. boxofbox has a habit of going long, and Mountainous Migrations of Lovelonging Hermits, clocking in at just over five hours, is no exception to the rule (if anything, it’s a little short), but it’s the rest of that sentence—the joy, the looseness, the play—that makes their sets worth sticking around for. Here, Lyon goes deep on vintage-flavored dance tracks, leaning hard on vocal cuts of all stripes: horn-slammed hip-hop, no-shit new-jack swing, lovelorn R&B, head-spinning breakbeats, piano-house stompers, and a million other styles besides. At its best, it’s up there with Lyon’s finest work, a hi-def ode to the kind of jubilee that dance floors have promised for generations. The whole thing feels like a best-case scenario for a dust-covered CD you’d find in the attic: yesteryear’s dance music pushed into the present thanks to canny mixing and unmistakable joy.
If Lovelonging Hermits is about finding ecstasy in a time capsule, then Butterfly Wings is about a particular set of items in that collection: breakbeats and house records. Over the course of about two hours, DJ Possum stretches out and slows down, finding a million flavors of unrushed joy along the way. The throughline, here, comes in the Melbourne selector’s tendency towards headsy club tunes, all kicks and dancing synthesizers, but there’s so much to do with that template: jazz-inflected deep-house rollers, techno cuts where the basslines eat everything else on site, breakbeats as heard through a payphone, tracky acid, piano-slammed trance tunes that wouldn’t sound out of place on her home turf’s contemporary club circuit. As the set runs on, it becomes clear that DJ Possum is using sunshine as a springboard, building a veritable kaleidoscope of blissed-out club tracks along the way.
Carl Luis, In Session // Duane, Live at Slow Roast
Maybe it’s trite to say, but it’s true: It all comes back to dub. It’s worth knowing about the style’s contours if you’re into any corner of contemporary dance music, as it’s likely touched just about any genre you can think of. But it’s also worth digging into for a much simpler reason—it’s also fantastic served straight. Carl Luis shows as much on In Session, a can’t-miss limited-edition mix (sorry!) released via Good Morning Tapes. Luis spends the A-side focused on dub and reggae records that feel a bit out-of-time—no, really, listen hard and you can hear about three tempi at once here—and, on the flip, cranks the smoke machines up and ratchets down the BPM, making something that’s both heavier and a bit zanier. It’s a laser-tight session, one that takes dub’s million histories seriously, making the implicit argument for the sound as one of dance music’s finest exports along the way.
Elsewhere, Parisian selector Duane went deep on the same kind of material, using it as a springboard towards all manner of other styles in the process. (“Perfect for inner travels, sunny afternoons or cloudy days alike,” they write, showing the sheer range already encapsulated in the best dub records.) For about the first hour, it feels like a nice extension of In Session, but, over time, Live at Slow Roast moves towards something else: the drums turn digital, the synths a bit more prominent, the basslines a touch eerier. It never turns to a full-on DMZ set, but it’s undeniably dubstep, with all the skitter and wobble implied. It helps that Duane is a preeminently clean mixer; throughout the set, they move patiently and carefully, blending without so much as a scuffed bar, prizing gradual motion over anything even slightly abrupt. The result is a neat historiography of sorts, a celebration of dub’s past and future rolled into one.
Diego, Diego’s Lounge Lizard Lodge Afters 2026 // Market Failure & Pyramid Scheme, Lodge 2026 // ‘nohup’, Lodge 2026 // Riki Healing & Diego, ᘖꝊᘖᑳ “ᏝᎧᎴᎶᏋ” 𝕃𝕠𝕦𝕟𝕘𝕖 𝕭𝖑𝖎𝖟𝖟𝖆𝖗𝖉 ͓̽T͓͓̽̽i͓̽ë͓̽s͓͓̽̽t͓͓̽̽o͓̽ B₂B ΔŘΜƗŇ VΔŇ βỮỮŘ€Ň (҉A҉҉v҉҉B҉’҉s҉ ҉S҉҉a҉҉l҉҉t҉҉y҉ ҉R҉҉u҉҉n҉҉b҉҉a҉҉c҉҉k҉ ҉W҉҉o҉҉r҉҉l҉҉d҉ ҉C҉҉u҉҉p҉ ҉C҉҉o҉҉m҉҉e҉҉d҉҉o҉҉w҉҉n҉ ҉M҉҉i҉҉x҉) // Tabitha, Lodge 2026 // Xminus1, Lodge 2026
The best parties are the ones nobody tells you about. They’re the ones for the people who already know, the ones passed around by word-of-mouth and little else, the ones that turn into hyperlocal traditions. That seems to be the case with Lodge, an annual get-together that seems to take the Pacific Northwest by storm every year. (‘nohup’, one of the area’s finest DJs, called it their “favorite party in the world.” ) Here, we’ve got a selection of some of this year’s dispatches, at least four of which were actually recorded at the event.
First, and perhaps most unusually, there’s Diego’s solo offering. Lounge Lizard Lodge Afters is aptly named: the Seattle selector stretches out here, cooking up a loose-and-playful three-or-so hours where truly anything goes, ranging from humid dub to turn-of-the-century pop belters and—surprise!—Bill Evans. It feels like a platonic ideal of the cool-down set; in case you’ve got three hours to kill between the rave and getting home, this is more or less perfect. By contrast, you’ve got Diego’s team-up with Riki Healing, where the two claim to be Tiesto & Armin van Buuren before going all in on the slow build, moving from lighter-than-air downtempo to trance and electro pumpers.
Then, you’ve got the four that seem to have been actually recorded at the festival, rather than after it in some capacity. Seattle mainstay Xminus1’s “dinner set” gives any tired-out ravers plenty of time to kick back, with piles of funk and soul eventually giving way to more tripped-out fare. Tabitha, by contrast, went straight for the jugular, spending ninety minutes piling acid and breaks and pumping techno into something that feels unforgettable. Market Failure’s offering is heavier still, a pitch-black screamer that leans hard on EBM, industrial, and head-scrambling drum tools. Lastly, there’s the aforementioned ‘nohup’, who sprinted through histories on their set, whipping up electro, million-rhythm percussion tracks, freaked-out freestyle, a pair of remarkable Rockwell flips, and piles more besides.
DJ Land Reform, 8.24.2026
Given their association with the seemingly defunct (but still dearly beloved) 140+, it should come as little surprise that DJ Land Reform’s latest JEROME FM special is quick on its feet. Here, the Washington, D.C. disc jockey looks towards the gritted-teeth end of trance, blending vintage goa, acid, and psytrance with an obvious delight. The most striking thing, here, is perhaps the simplest: Even with the nearly thirty-year spread they’re working with, it sounds strikingly modern, all strobe-blasted synths and piledriving kicks you might expect to hear at a proper peak time set. (Not all of them, mind, but enough.) As the set runs on, DJ Land Reform puts a brick on the gas pedal; eventually, it’s an out-and-out torrent of arpeggi and four-four slammers, with every new track daring any would-be dancers to move just a bit faster. It’s an exhilarating ride through one of dance music’s wildest corners, mixed with a veteran’s grace and a young buck’s panache.
DJ Sure, Space’d Guest 052 // Voidal, inis:eto
Often, the finest mix series exist on the fringes: The podcasts aimed at the footwork freaks, the curdled-ambient aficionados, the left-of-left-field UK dance-music lifers. These present the DJ mix as a specialist’s session, letting the selector go deep into a highly particular field rather than aiming to cast a wider net. That’s the case with Space’d, too: It’s one of the finest home-listening series out there right now, and DJ Sure’s entry makes as good a case as any. On Space’d Guest 052, Bryn Dickson goes all in on low-slung chill-out tools, blending soft-rock noodlers, Balearic head-nodders, zero-grav R&B, and plenty more styles besides, making a point of never breaking a sweat. In truth, it’s easy to overlook the sheer breadth on display if you’re listening to this straight through—Dickson mixes unobtrusively, letting tracks play out, prizing melody and rhythm over anything too showy. By the end, though, he’s gone through an entire universe of low-slung listening-bar fare, grabbing armfuls of dust-covered records and making something quietly beautiful. No wonder he caps it all off with a guitar solo—he’s earned it.
Speaking of out-there mix series: inis:eto is one of the finest currently running. Since 2018, the series, whose SoundCloud page describes it as a “deep listening party,” has been approaching that mantle deadly seriously, paying host to all manner of DJs and giving them space to tunnel into highly particular modes. (Kaity Fox’s entry, from June of this year, is a critical entry in the canon in large part because of just how far afield it ventures.) inis:eto is a space for sound collagery, for house music, for dub, for techno, for drone—though rarely all at once. Given that pedigree and curatorial approach, Voidal’s entry into these halls is as out-three as you might expect: by and large, they lean into jumbled-up guitar records, reaching into their bag and pulling out billion-limbed new wave, frenetic post-punk, and surf-rock screamers. But even that feels limited: This is a set about the blind alleys, about sudden swerves into starry-eyed pop records, about the way disco and ‘90s R&B talk to each other, about the joys of friction-forward blends. If this is, as the liner notes claims, music for the afters, it must have been one hell of a party.
Enayet, Enayet’s Ragg ‘n’ Roll
There’s a joy to the warm-up set: in hearing the way a DJ takes a floor, as Enayet puts it here, “from laying around horizontal” to “moving around vertical.” It’s tempting to conceptualize Ragg ‘n’ Roll, a live recording in which the New York DJ does just that, as a one-two punch—one half “ambient,” the other half “club.” But the far more interesting approach is to look at it as a gradient: as the set progresses, Enayet takes what starts as a relatively serene affair and sneaks in more and more drums, inching the floor towards something more mobile by the measure. The raga exercises up top might be downright dreamy, but what about the spiritual-jazz freakouts, or the too-intimate trip-hop, or the guitar-feedback breakbeat duets, or the zero-BPM goa-trance exercises? At some point, this thing turns into dance music, and the point in question will change from dancer to dancer. But it’s that uncertainty that makes it fun: Ragg ‘n’ Roll sees a seasoned selector constructing a universe out of blind alleys, building a maze that ultimately leads to a full-bore party. It’s up to the listener to find their way through.
Marylou, The Cycles Special
In the notes for The Cycles Special, Marylou frames their set as a tone poem of sorts: “Ode to the infinite, the unpermanence,” they write. “They are the eternal driving force.” Such language suggests something mystical, left-field, and a bit out there—or, to put it another way, it suggests a Marylou set. As was the case with her previous set in these pages, this one starts out as deep-space ambience, all blissed-out synth blurs and folk-music idioms cast far afield. Slowly, though, she cranks on the BPM and tightens the snares. The first indication that she’s up to something comes roughly halfway in, when the warm synth tones of Gūsū’s “发芽 Fāyá” start bouncing off the walls—but don’t mistake that for a full-on admittance to the dance floor, as her headlong dive into devotional musics underlines just a few minutes later. Eventually, she puts a thumb on the scale and moves deeper into dance music, including a head-spinning gqom tunneler in the back third, but don’t get too comfortable: here, Marylou makes good on her writing’s promise, making something that doubles back on itself and never fully settles into a given groove. It’s all the better for it.
Nick Boyd, SORRMIX44: Live in Pittsburgh from 1 to 3am // Vladimir Ivkovic & Chez de Milo, The Love Inn // Vladimir Ivkovic, Selecters Mix 001
Brooklyn DJ and BOYDZONE boss Nick Boyd has a long history of curveballs. His tracklists frequently feature all manner of house and disco classics, sure, but you’ll find just about everything else if you look, too, ranging from screwball techno to left-field breaks, with room for TikTok rips and classic rock, too. Even among such a varied body of work, SORRYMIX44 stands out: To put it bluntly, Boyd has never been this sludgy. On this remarkable live rip, he goes slow and low for a downright delirious two hours, blasting the dance floor with rickety kick drums and smog in equal measure. Here, just about anything goes as long as it’s sufficiently zonked-out: dubbed-up Rolling Stones Z-sides, trance-inducing James Brown reimaginings, terrible-trip house records, screwface hand-drum rollers, post-post-post dubstep, and so much more. Throughout the set, Boyd works with a kind of lucid-dream logic, making something that’s both dance floor-ready and slyly confrontational, pushing slow-burn mixing into ever stranger territories all the while.
Of course, if you’re talking about low-BPM live mixing, Vladimir Ivkovic is never far behind. The Offen Music head made his name on the stuff—his sets are routinely playful, off-kilter, and flecked with mud, packed with screwed-up trance, new wave, ambient, spoken word and far beyond. He teamed up with Bristol party-starter Chez de Milo for a recent long-form excursion, and the results are typically outré while still remaining pitched towards the floor: scan around and you’ll find bleary-eyed acid, body-jacking breaks, pitched-down tri-tom workouts, abyssal two-step, and all manner of rabbit holes, every successive track sounding like a dare. It’s appealingly tough to find any gaps between Ivkovic & Milo’s styles here; with both DJs unerringly focused on tripped-out dance records. The result is a club recording aimed at the stargazers, full of rug-pulls and left hooks: a million histories tossed into a rock tumbler and polished into something that feels altogether new.
If you’re looking to make it a hat trick, Ivkovic’s got you covered. Selecters Mix 001, recorded live from BAR Inc in Osaka, sees the selector going deeper still, blasting the floor with incantatory club tools, prizing zero-BPM chuggers over all else. This one’s all about the little details that emerge from the muck: the way a snare promises to snap your neck in two, the way a talkbox-flavored vocal bounces between stereo channels, the way a properly pitched drum track can move in four tempi at once. It helps that the whole thing is mixed with Ivkovic’s trademark flair and finesse; it’s packed with careful and confident blends, moving between all manner of styles without so much as a scuffed rhythm. Eventually, he’s moved towards a kind of blissed-out jubilee, making a set that feels like the second wind during a long night out: energized, up for anything, and just a bit groggy.
O Ghettão, RA.1050
About 50 minutes into RA.1050, O Ghettão accomplish something remarkable. By this point, the Lisbon trio have long since established their mode: this is a set of whirlwinding batida, all carefully laid drums racing laps around each other until it’s downright Ouroborosian. In other words, disorientation is par for the course. But about halfway through the set, they take just a few elements—handclaps, hand percussion, a piano, a disarmingly mournful string line—and, at an imperceptibly slow pace, flip the script from 4/4 to 3/4, reorienting the track around the handclaps until they’re the new center of gravity, reframing everything else without missing a beat. It’s all the more impressive because this is far from the only brain-bending spot in the session. Throughout the mix, recorded live from Waking Life, the batida power trio pull off all manner of technical and theoretical flexes without ever coming off like they’re peacocking. The set is far more elemental than that, in truth: This is about chasing drums down whatever rabbit holes they offer, about leaning so hard into minimalism that it turns to its own kind of whirlwind. Batida is one of the most exciting dance-music idioms on the planet, and O Ghettão’s latest offering—a slow-motion haze that nevertheless invites constant movement—shows why.
SnPLO, DJ Frog & roadkill, Tripping Joints
Sometimes, the joy of a back-to-back lies in hearing the friction: any two selectors, no matter how similar, are likely to butt heads productively given enough time. But sometimes it’s just the opposite: a real meeting-of-the-minds type of event, with DJs’ crates and attitudes lining up so closely that it might as well be one person. Tripping Joints, a remarkable back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back session performed ahead of a boat party that added a sixth DJ, is the latter. The order of the hour, here, is no-bullshit techno and breaks, all elliptical and minimal and dubbed-out. The drum programming here is both heads-down—the set is a veritable mountain of four-fours—and spaced-out; it routinely sounds like half the channels are muted or like they’re broadcasting live from the bottom of a well. The most remarkable thing about the session, though, isn’t any particular track: It’s the sheer flow of the thing, which sees five DJs moving as one, blending a tremendous amount of zero-gravity dance music until it feels like the whole thing’s levitating.
DJ Plead & Baby Leo, Parameter Festival 2026 // upsammy, Parameter Festival 2026
Don’t let Please, DJ Plead’s remarkable album from this year, fool you: Jarred Beeler knows how to turn a rave inside out. When he’s at his best behind a pair of CDJs, he leans towards omnidirectional club sounds, making mixes that flip between techno, dubstep, breaks, and bass of all stripes. That description, happily, applies just as neatly to San Francisco selector Baby Leo, making any time the two meet up utterly electric. (No wonder Leo’s got a playlist documenting just that.) Their latest team-up is a downright pugilistic affair: you can practically see the screwed-up grins and popped eyes as they flip between tracks, whether that’s livewire drum-and-bass, drum-line screamers, minimalistic electro, or zero-gravity hyphy. Throughout the set, the two selectors get more and more wild-eyed, pushing each other ever further out-there, egging the dance floor on to winning effect. These aren’t blends; they’re gut punches.
upsammy’s set from Parameter 2026, on the other hand, is most remarkable for how narrowly it moves. The Dutch selector has earned a reputation for searching and heady IDM, but her club sets are a different beast entirely, sort of. Parameter is a good idea of where her sticks are at right now: She’s still playing dazzlingly complex electronic music, all constellations of synthesizers and spiderwebbing drum patterns, but there’s an unmissable focus on weight and speed throughout. Here, she uses that idea—lickety-split dance music pushed to some kind of logical extreme—and stuffs the decks with rocket fuel, blasting the floor with billion-ton techno, triple-time dubstep, junglisms that’ll blow your hair back. The set is, functionally, one hundred percent drums, but that’s hardly a complaint; indeed, upsammy is one of the finest DJs alive precisely due to how deliberately she drills down into a single idiom before blowing it open. Parameter Festival 2026 is one of her most explosive displays yet.
Yu Su, Gop Tun Festival 2026
When London selector Yu Su was last in these pages—in just last month’s edition of this column, in fact—it was for her live recording from Horst Festival 2026, a two-hour techno-et-cetera slammer that took an awfully intuitive approach to the dance floor. Given that context, Gop Tun Festival 2026 looks eerily familiar. Here, the bié Records head goes deep on heads-down techno, electro, and breaks, slowly tightening the ratchet as the set runs on. But that similarity’s hardly a bad thing. Taken from another angle, this is the sound of a dance floor don further tightening their craft, honing in on the intersection of floor-slamming tools and head-spinning experimentalism. There’s a telling bit about forty minutes in where she moves from steamrolling techno to turntablist house records, and then into something that feels like a breakbeat-inflected MPB edit: in Gop Tun Festival 2026, it’s all fair game.
