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

The most noteworthy sets of last month sway from bass-heavy club music to explorations of goa trance and woozy ambient.

Art by DJ Short

Broadly speaking, DJ sets tend to get dropped in two buckets: There’s the club sets and there’s the home-listening material. That binary, while useful—some music is body music, plain and simple—is also, sometimes, a bit stifling. Many of May’s standout sets took a sledgehammer to that mold, offering up sets that are confounding and thrilling, jubilant and meditative, rigorous and effortless.

Amelia Holt & Seth Magoon, two critical selectors who reliably situate themselves on the fringes of dance music, surveyed new beat, electro, techno, and all manner of who-knows-whats. Kiernan Laveaux, one of the States’ finest working selectors, went all in on the kitchen sink, and Spain’s TRS went ever further, tossing bass-heavy club tracks with panache. Din Daa Daa, in a can’t-miss live rip, went long and slow with the best of them; elsewhere, Lunatic Music DJs and Vidal Benjamin turned in full-throttle deconstructions of house, techno, and goa trance. g u i offered up a bleary-eyed set from a beloved Portugal festival, and microdub mastermind K Wata went wild for his RA offering. Time Is Away, a one-of-one London DJ duo, explored woozy house and ambient in a pair of recordings.

Elsewhere, a few DJs turned it up a notch. Chida’s Mix Tape is a confetti-blasted slammer of straight-up house music, and it’s packed with a million joys; Byron Yeates & eoin dj’s team-up is similarly celebratory, but it’s just a touch cheekier. Berlin selector nugget went long on just about everything in a live rip, and DJ Chrysalis & mp rotator dove headfirst into their 2-step and UKG bins for a session best suited for dropped tops. Marylou’s Accidental Meetings tape-series entry is as wild-eyed as the best of them; Fuchsia, on the other hand, showed off the power of a well-laid tech-house track. Finally, ambient-music shapeshifter King Softy went all in on full-steam club tracks and DJ Marfox turned in two hours of polyrhythmic mania.

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

Amelia Holt & Seth Magoon, Solarplexia

About fifteen minutes into Solarplexia, a remarkable recording from a set in October 2025, a vocalist says the obvious. “There is something wrong,” an abyssal voice intones as heard through a poor dial-up connection, stuttering over every syllable even the motorik-music drums stomp away underneath. It’s a neat encapsulation of the session: a bit sly, a bit humorous, and plenty psychedelic, it’s about as straight-ahead an explanation as you could hope for here. Solarplexia is, by and large, slippery and vaguely metallic, filled with drum-machine head-trips and woozy synthesizers: vocal lines spiraling in and out of intelligibility, neon-blasted retrofuturism via new beat and electro, and dust-covered drum machines falling in an out of tempo. Holt and Magoon pull off an impressive trick with this one: prizing slow-and-low chug over anything too aggressive, they stare down the dancefloor even as they conjure black holes.

Chida, Mix Tape / Byron Yeates & eoin dj, 087

The main appeal of Mix Tape, a recording stuffed with all manner of joys, is perhaps its simplest: This is house music captured at its most luminous, playful, and effervescent. It’s rarely precisely that simple—a cut from early into the session has the shuffle-and-skip of great UK garage, and about twenty minutes in, Chida dumps a vat of acid on the whole affair—but, by and large, this is a straight-up confetti-cannon of a mix, all slamming drums and lovelorn vocalists and freewheeling energy. (In case you don’t believe it, just check the guitar solo about fifty minutes in.) Mix Tape, which was recorded just over three decades ago, is a remarkable session in large part because of how much of it still lands in a dance-music landscape that’s shed its skin a hundred times over. Four-four kicks and glittering synths, it turns out, never go out of style.

In case that’s not enough, though, flip the tape over. 087, a live recording ripped from the 2022 Drop Everything festival in Ireland, may not have a ton in common with Mix Tape, but the important stuff—namely, the unbridled jubilee—carries over in spades. (In case you want someone else vouching for that, just listen for the crowd noise.) Here, Byron Yeates and eoin dj, two critical names pushing trance, house, and progressive-whatever idioms deep into space, go long on their specialty, spending two hours shelling the dancefloor with all manner of club-night bombs. Just-cheesy-enough synths abound, as do steamrolling kicks and breakbeats; it’s tough to go a few minutes here without spotting some sort of cheeky percussion flip. So much dance-music history is locked in conversation with itself, in a way that’s alternatingly stultifying and exhilarating—why recreate the past when you can just revisit it, after all? On 087, Byron Yeates & eoin dj answer that question with a pair of million-dollar grins: If dance music is a bit of a Möbius strip, you might as well coat the whole thing in glitter.

Din Daa Daa, Live From Orbita

Last year, Vladimir Ivkovic—a Düsseldorf-based DJ who tends towards the slow and sludgy end of the spectrum—put the appeal of low-BPM dance music simply. For him, it’s about the “Absence of hysteria,” he said, before going on to refer to magical traps in Indiana Jones films. “It’s this trial and error: sometimes the portal opens.”

Live From Orbita, a remarkable recording from fellow German DJ Din Daa Daa, opens that portal. Here, Denise Ross goes long on slow-and-low dance music, flooding the dancefloor with smog, kicks, and a sly sense of psychedelia. In theory, it’s a hugely variant session—a brief scan around reveals some zero-gravity nu-disco, dub-drenched house records, freaked-out post-punk, electro-tinged drum-machine science, high-NRG disco screamers, beatless ambiance, and so much more—but, in practice, it all works like a charm. That’s in large part thanks to Ross’ unwavering focus on some kind of bleary-eyed ecstasy; just about every track here feels like the kind of thing you might hear at a particularly adventurous closing session or on the cab ride home. (Funnily enough, this was an opener, making one wonder what the rest of the evening sounded like.) “Dance music,” excitingly enough can be a million things and then some; on Live From Orbita, Ross finds a universe inside a highly particular rabbit hole.

DJ Chrysalis & mp rotator, KANNMIX 67 / nugget, at renate

The liner notes for KANNMIX 67 do a solid job of setting expectations: It’s not every set that comes with an introduction to the DJs’ pets, but it’s not every set that’s this goofy, either. The set, a rip from a recent party, is packed with vim and vigor; it’s the kind of back-to-back where you can practically see the million-dollar grins and hear the hum of the crowd. Throughout the set, the selectors push each other into ever giddier territories, finding all manner of dollar-bin gems along the way: finger-gun 2-step, sleazed-up tech-house, haunted-house breakbeats. That first part’s definitely the throughline, though; while this has four-fours with the best of them, KANNMIX 67 is really about the shuffle-and-skip transatlanticisms, about the million ways snares and hi-hats can wrap around each other and keep a room moving. In other words, it’s a white-hot party.

That said, if you’re keen to keep the energy rolling, it’s worth turning towards nugget’s at renate, a different live rip from a different party at different club that nevertheless has a similar spirit. This one’s more Detroit than it is Bristol, if you will, but it’s still got plenty of verve, and it’s got an undeniably pan-genre spirit about it. Here, it’s grime-techno stompers; there, it’s creeped-out hall-of-mirrors dubstep; elsewhere, it’s nu-school low-end psychedelia; elsewhere still, it’s a jazz trio locked in a synthesizer warehouse. Regardless of the specifics, though, at renate is reliably trippy, playful, and high-energy, full of left hooks and overflowing with attitude. Consider this one KANNMIX 67’s spunky cousin—setting aside the specifics, they’re both great hangs.

DJ Marfox, Live at Expert Death

In 2014, DJ Marfox described his craft simply: “It’s 100% dancing and vibrant music,” he told RA. “It is natural and hot.” Twelve years later, almost everything surrounding Marfox’s music—a white-hot fusion of kuduro, batida, and house, an everything-goes car-crash of drum samples and whistles and million-limbed percussion tracks—has changed. For one, Príncipe, a Lisbon label dedicated to roiling and unpredictable club sounds that Marfox has released with a few times, seems locked in a continuous ascension, and dancefloors the world over have embraced dance music from all corners of the world. Blessedly, though, Marfox’s music hasn’t changed a note, as Live at Expert Death shows. This is the sound of a polyrhythmic polymath going deep on the stuff he knows best, backflipping between all sorts of tracks defined less by their steady groove than by their sheer insistence: There’s always a rhythm (or seven) to latch onto, but Marfox seems to delight in the possibility that it could all turn inside out at any minute. It’s jittery, high-strung, and, critically, an unbridled delight. By the time the set draws to a close, it feels like it could go on for another two hours, thanks in large part thanks to Marfox’s class behind the decks. Príncipe’s sounds may have infiltrated clubs across the globe, but it never hurts to go back to the source.

Fuchsia, ??????????

Never mind the title. This one’s pretty straight-ahead. On ??????????—named to indicate the secret location the mix was recorded at—Fuchsia, a one-of-one Sydney selector, goes deep on techno, trance, and tech-house, turning in two hours of sci-fi-flavored body music, lacing every kick drum and acid lick with a bit of stardust. That aesthetic specificity gives Fuchsia plenty of room to maneuver, though. Across the mix, they mix all sorts of alien textures and sounds, blending them so smoothly that you’d think nothing was amiss in the first place: bleary-eyed almost-ambient that you might find on a Spekki Webu set, eye-popping acid techno, brain-bending IDM and distant-future electro, stomach-churning trance tools, and so much more. This tightrope act—utter tonal control on one end, why-not genre-bending on the other—is, ultimately, just part of what makes the set most impressive. The other critical part is much simpler: This is ice-cold dancefloor minimalism executed to a tee.

g u i, Waking Life

“Waking Life,” here, almost certainly refers to the festival of the same name in Portugal, but it’s an oddly fitting title even stripped of that context. Here, weaves together something that teeters on the edge of lucidity, using dream logic to blend together all manner of sort-of-club tracks. Jumping around the set, you’ll find a million idioms—zero-BPM trip-hop, spine-tingling IDM, fog-blasted breakbeats, fifth-world percussion-track experimentalism, ASMR-flavored techno. But those individual ideas aren’t the point—not really. Instead, the magic of Waking Life comes in the blends: the way g u i cranks the tempo down on a breakbeat until they’re able to safely land it on top of some ambient R&B, the way bad-dream ambient and stormy nu-jazz make sense next to each other. Waking Life is just rowdy and disorienting enough to stir on some unusual dreams, but, critically, it is tender enough to let you keep sleeping.

K Wata, RA.1039

K Wata, a.k.a. Brooklyn selector Kenzo Perron, has more or less always been a fascinating DJ. (To wit: This is his third time appearing solo in this column—and that’s setting aside his group appearances.) For years, his material was bound together by a shared focus on soundsystem pressure and club-night growlers, all low-end experimentalism blasting out of speaker stacks, and that’s all well and good. That said, he’s started tilting in a different direction. The title of his Lot Radio show, “Micro Dubs,” acts as a skeleton key: Nowadays, Perron is interested in some kind of dancefloor-bound minimalism, all clicks and cuts and gurgles and rattles and drums that patter like raindrops.

RA.1039 isn’t quite that, mind—eventually, the clouds burst open and rain some straight-up breakbeats onto the listener—but it’s not not that, either. Here, Perron goes deep on soundsystem simmerers, pushing the sounds of dub, dubstep, and techno ever further afield throughout. Critically, Perron balances creeped-out ambiance and headphone fuel, never fully prizing one over the other; as a result, it’s both pulse-quickening and a bit sludgy. On paper, the mix shouldn’t work. Anything with this many left turns and rug-pulls ought to fall apart on principle. But Perron mixes with a veteran’s grace here, stuffing the decks with smog and turning rhythms inside out.

King Softy, FR108

Given his involvement with INDEX:Records and Appendix.files, two critically undersung labels at the forefront of new-school weird electronics, it should come as little surprise that a mix from Amos Turner is yet another left hook, but here we are. The Berlin DJ a.k.a. King Softy has been behind all sorts of great sessions over the years, often at the intersection of IDM, techno, and breaks—though he’s not against a foray into trip hop, mind. But FR108, recorded for the can’t-miss Santiago “mix series, digital art catalogue and music collective” Fake Rolex, shows him going wider still, finding another way to confound: Who knew straight-up techno and breaks could feel this unexpected? FR108 isn’t exactly a Detroit lifer’s mix, of course; it’s a bit more complicated than that. Here, what starts as a relatively heady trip through dub-techno tools turns positively raucous, dipping into nerve-frying dubstep, brain-tickling sort-of plugg, and roiling rave-ups of all stripes. Turns out a heads-down club session can still find plenty of ways to surprise.

Kiernan Laveaux, naffcast019

Dance music is rife with mythology, handed-down half-truths, and warped histories. (Just ask anyone with a worn-down sampler—ripping up sacred texts is its own form of remembrance.) In that case, consider Kiernan Laveaux one of contemporary club music’s preeminent mystics. At its best, her music is raucous, celebratory, and Dadaist, a truly everything-goes blur where the collagery is the point. It’s both straight-ahead—it’s music to dance to, mostly—and profoundly disorienting. Such is the case with naffcast019, a remarkable live recording ripped from the decks in Detroit a few years back. Here, she cooks up a wild-eyed two hours that nevertheless stays trained on the dancefloor the whole time, offering up plenty of fodder for adventurous ravers: joyful-noise techno and wall-of-noise choral-breakbeat-collagery, dub-soaked drum workouts and why-not turntablism, no-shit house-music stompers and elliptical vocal-trance tunes. Laveaux likes to describe herself as an “rhythmic energy conduit & ecstatic beat conductor”—with naffcast019, she proves it.

Lunatic Music DJs, H.A.N.D. Mix 088 / Vidal Benjamin - H.A.N.D. Mix 089

You might not think a name like that would be tied to a mix like this, but dance music has a long history of oddball aliases, so who are we to judge? On H.A.N.D. Mix 088, Australian duo Lunatic Music DJs cook up four-plus hours of—what else?—left-field disco, lighters-up house, and stomach-churning breakbeats, with plenty of acoustic guitars tossed in for good measure. It’s a remarkable session, in no small part thanks to their focus on a wide-ranging vision of psychedelia—it’s unerringly danceable, sure, but it’s also playful and wigged-out and a bit slower than you might expect, every blend sounding a bit like a dare. As with most any set this long, highlights abound, but the highlights aren’t really the point, either. Instead, H.A.N.D. Mix 088 really shines in its sheer generosity. Even during its most avant moments, the set sees Lunatic Music DJs keeping their eyes trained on the people in the back of the crowd, making sure everyone’s getting a bit of what they came here for in the first place.

H.A.N.D. Mix 089, on the other hand, leaves no doubt about what you’ll get. It’s all in the hashtag: “#GOA.” This, of course, refers to goa trance, a psytrance forerunner that’s better than the skeptics would have you believe and more delirious than the converts say. Here, though, Vidal Benjamin isn’t that interested in delivering a genre primer: Instead, he takes the genre’s psychedelia-over-everything attitude and stretches it like a fistful of taffy, looking towards a bargain bin’s worth of vintage club sounds. H.A.N.D. Mix 089 is static-encrusted new beat; it’s haunted-house acid techno; it’s low-BPM hi-NRG; it’s wild-eyed synth soli played like a man possessed. More than anything, though, it takes seriously goa trance’s notions of using dance music to push towards some sort of sublime, an idea mirrored here in the slow boil Benjamin cooks up on the decks: By the time you realize it’s turned sweat-soaked, it’s likely too late to back out.

Marylou, AMX008

In retrospect, of course, it makes sense. Since its inception, Accidental Meetings has been firmly dedicated to the fringes. The label’s catalogue is dedicated entirely to the outré: Purgatorial ambient music, muck-slathered club tracks, and experimental who-knows-whats of all stripes. AMX008, the latest in their consistently remarkable and frequently alarming tape series, then, may be the most archetypically unusual release they’ve put out yet. (The Discogs tags, which include “Electronic,” “Folk, World, & Country,” and “Breakcore,” should serve as a strong signpost.) Here, Marylou goes all in on just about everything, not so much blending as blurring, heaping armfuls of mist on top of the decks. It’s entirely possible to try to break down the styles on display here—footwork, free jazz, proto-techno, noise, dub, post-industrial, spoken word, field recordings, motorik new beat, synth-blasted trap, soukous—but the sheer range on display underlines how pointless that effort is. The most thrilling thing about AMX008 isn’t any particular sound or moment, though there are plenty of each; instead, it’s the lucid-dream headspace Marylou conjures throughout, making a DJ set that feels, in both spirit and sound, like one of the wildest drum solos put to tape. This one’s for the hair-raisers.

Time Is Away, DoE 003 (Jonathan Dee Untitled Cassette) / Illuminance

Maybe it’s true; maybe it’s not. Who cares? The notes with DoE 003 describe a cassette purchased nearly three decades ago, an idea that may be wholly immaterial to the hour of music it goes alongside. That trick, though—finding meaning in the past, in rummaging through misremembered histories and sifting for gems—is clearly of some sort of import to Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, who, as Time Is Away, have built a reputation for just that. Here, the pair have unearthed a pair of time capsules, each with a very different patina. On DoE 003, they look towards ambient-house wizardry and no-mo electronics, conjuring something that feels like a sibling to Music Has the Right to Children even if it’s not got a lick of Boards of Canada: Muggy, hazy, baggy-eyed, quiet, beautiful.

Illuminance, by contrast, is downright liturgical. (Funnily enough, this one plays with transience in its own way: Unless you meet up with the folks from IC Visual Lab, this one’s likely to slip through the cracks.) Here, the duo tapes into a distinctly low-key mode, leaning towards “folk music” in the broadest definition of the term—music rooted in a place and people—and blasting the smoke machines. The A-side is a tumble of world-weary classical music, tumbling drum-kit experiments, and meditative almost-drone pieces for bells and celli. Flip the tape over and you’ll find them deepening the trance, albeit in delightfully strange ways: ten minutes in, they find their way towards elegiac and robotic balladry, only to, three minutes later, drag out field-recording-laced post-post-minimalism, making the transition, and the idea of such a blend, sound like the most natural thing in the world.

TRS, subglow/Live 12

To open this one slightly rhetorically: Is there a new-school digital mix series with a higher batting average than sub/glow? (No, seriously—is there?) With subglow/Live 12, TRS overfills yet another cup for CCL’s fledgling label, which has already seen killer sessions from pranksters, alchemists and beat scientists the world over. Not to be outdone, Spanish selector TRS goes wide and wiggly, turning in one of the strongest mixes the series has seen yet. The name of the game, this time, is bass weight delivered with a grin: the mix is deadly serious about working out your subwoofer, but just about everything else is fair game. Here, it’s craggy and steely-eyed dub techno; there, it’s the kinds of sample chops and brain-scrambling synths you might have heard on a Brainfeeder record a decade ago; elsewhere still, it’s rib-tickling dubstep tools, all blurted-out beats and negative space. It’s not all that common for DJs to pull off half this many acrobatics in a set this cleanly, let alone the sheer range TRS does here—at times, it recalls All Basses Covered, a legendarily pugilistic DJ set in its own right. The main difference, ultimately, is pretty simple: For all the swings this one takes, it goes down awfully easy.