Soufiane Zemrani

There’s a moment in every DJ’s development — usually happens around the third or fourth year, sometimes earlier if you’re paying close attention — where you realize that the technical quality of your sound matters more than you initially wanted it to. In the beginning, it’s all about track selection and energy and reading the

I remember the specific quality of the disorientation the first time I watched a DJ I respected play a genuinely great set from what was clearly a spare bedroom. There was something cognitively unresolvable about it — the music was right, the energy was there, the mix was tight — but the backdrop was someone’s

Ask any DJ who’s been doing this for more than a decade how their best collaborations started, and you’ll get some variation of the same answer. A chance encounter at a gig. A friend who knew a friend who knew a producer. Overhearing someone else’s set through a wall and chasing down whoever was playing.

Okay so I need to tell you about the night everything changed for me, production-wise. And I know that sounds dramatic — “the night everything changed” — but bear with me because it genuinely was, and it happened in the most anticlimactic setting imaginable: 1:30am, cold tea, a DAW session that had been open for

There’s a particular kind of DJ mythology that gets passed around — the idea of the selector with the gift, the one who just *knows*. Who plays the record that nobody’s heard yet and watches a room transform in real time, who seems to operate on some frequency slightly ahead of everyone else’s present tense.

Let me tell you something that took me longer to accept than it should have. You can be genuinely, demonstrably good at this — years of craft, an ear that took real time to develop, a sound that people specifically request — and still be completely invisible to the person sitting at their desk right

Here’s a thing nobody tells you when you’re starting out as a professional DJ — and I mean this with the specific bitterness of someone who learned it the hard way, at 11pm on a Tuesday, reading an email from a venue that had, according to a clause I apparently agreed to but definitely did

Picture the scene. Lights strobing, bass frequency you feel in your sternum before you consciously register it as sound, a floor packed with bodies moving in that collective, almost biological rhythm that only happens when everything — the room, the music, the moment — aligns just right. Now ask yourself: whose creativity made that happen?

Nobody warned you about this part. When you decided to take DJing seriously — really seriously, not just “I have a controller and some opinions about music” seriously — the implicit contract you thought you were signing was about music. About craft. About the specific, private joy of finding two tracks that fit together in

There’s a moment — and every DJ who’s played a proper room knows exactly the moment I mean — where you stop *performing* and start *listening*. Not to the music, you’re always listening to the music. To the room. To the specific frequency of four hundred people collectively deciding whether they’re in or out. You