Bobby Beethoven, real name Ashland Mines, is a DJ who has been also spending time on other modes of self-expression. For example, he crafted an installation piece for the New Museum 2015 Triennial in New York that he calls The Hook. It's about the violence of loud sound, what the physical presence of that system represents and how it interacts with a crowd. The project is a good clue about how Mines thinks about DJing and clubbing.

Mines is an extraordinary DJ. An original member of Fade To Mind (a crew that includes Kingdom, Prince William, Nguzunguzu and Fatima Al-Qadiri), his adventurous, cross-genre style sits well with his peers, though you won't find anyone who mixes quite like he does. His sets are hyperactive, deconstructive and informed by a love for horror. They are heavy on regional club sounds, exclusive tracks from his friends and his own weird edits and remixes, where Mines takes pop culture icons and places them in macabre new settings. On his Soundcloud page, you can find plenty of DJ mixes, varying from ethereal and ambient to a typical Total Freedom club set, where it seems like the goal is to pound the listener into submission.

Mines grew up in Seattle listening to punk. This no doubt shaped his belligerent and often sarcastic attitude towards dance music, which he got into after moving to Chicago. He attended and played at parties, and became excited at the idea of a gay scene that could move beyond the mainstream clubs of Boys Town. After moving to LA, Mines became involved in an event called Wildness, at The Silver Platter, a venue known as a haven for queer immigrants (particularly trans people). The other side of Total Freedom came out with Grown, a party he started where dancing was expressly prohibited. These kinds of spaces and performances became invaluable to his development as an atypical DJ who challenges and disrupts as much as he uplifts.

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ninafterdark is a creative consultant, organiser, DJ and co-founder of the collective Slipmode. Her genre-jumping sets explore nostalgic edits and global club sounds, approaching music with a non-committal attitude towards the dancefloor.

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aircode is a Swedish producer based in London whose music is typified by dubwise dynamics, sonic capaciousness, and permutable elements of percussion, voice and piano. They have performed across Europe, and put out records on the labels TT (formerly Tobago Tracks), Takuroko, Alien Jams, Gin&Platonic and NHS along with a number of self-released Bandcamp drops.

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salt_server explores sound as story, memory, resistance, and play. His edits and DJ sets splice genres, tempos, and timelines to draw unexpected connection between rhythm, melody, and narrative.

Originally from California, his early experiments with transistor radios and folklórico dance laid the groundwork for a lifelong obsession with the collective circuitry of sonic ritual.
His work has featured on NTS (as Pelle Rock), RinseFM, The Lot Radio, and ICA London.

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DJ Pitch is, in the words of the ever-ubiquitous Resident Advisor, “a man of many hats”, but this should not be taken as a lack of direction. Through his tireless efforts as producer, label head, DJ, podcaster and events promoter, he has championed the ever-mutating strands of electronic music for over a decade. Through his labels TT and All Centre, he has scoured the outer reaches of the internet, corralling nascent sounds into a thoughtfully curated catalogue, while crucially never losing the irreverent quirks that define his findings.

As a producer, Pitch fuses a background in classical piano with the revelatory discovery of dance music in his late teens. His debut album on Edited Arts, entitled ‘It's Not What You Said It's Because You Spoke’, is his most definitive document to date, placing equal merit on compositional songwriting as it does on sub-frequencies and rhythm, sitting somewhere between the club, the sofa and the bus ride in between. The full-length sits alongside several releases on both his own labels, as well as an appearance on the ‘SHOUTS 2022’ compilation from London’s Rhythm Section International.

Label-wise, TT is run with co-conspirators Maya Vika and Madjestic Kasual, highlighting idiosyncratic electronic music of all varieties, from experimental pop to dancefloor sidequests. Since 2014, it’s been a home for singular visions, housing early releases from sonic outliers such as object blue, Iceboy Violet and Organ Tapes. All Centre retains the experimental slant of it’s sister imprint, but with a laser-guided aim for the dancefloor, allowing it’s artists to challenge the space and reject regurgitative banality. Co-run alongside Simkin and Sobolik, the labels monthly release schedule has acted as a nurturing springboard for future heavyweights such as Yushh, Alexis and Toumba. Going forward, both labels will continue to join the dots between the URL and IRL sprawls, with consistent releases and regular club nights.

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Otis is the founder of Slagwerk, a Brussels-based label notorious for their parties, bringing together the ever-surprising stretches of contemporary music – its history includes James Ferraro, Amnesia Scanner, Crystallmess, Oli XL, Varg2TM, Sky h1 and Vegyn. – and a delight in the many faces of club, never disconnected from the families it fosters. That partying is not something one should take lightly, understands Slagwerk like no other, showing that only in its experimental and dynamic embrace one can escape both nightlife’s over-intellectualizing and too- trivializing impulses. At Slagwerk, and so too in Otis’ continuous escapades as a DJ, the trivial is never just banal, the poppy never just popular, but the cutting-edge never turns pose either. In Otis’ sets, rigid conceptions of music are left aside, cul-de-sacs explored conditionally through humor, affect and instinct alike. Staying true to the thrill and shuffled spirit of online musical discovery, sound and songs connect and disconnect, flow and disrupt, genres are exploited and transgressed, melody seduced and swept.

 

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Respect each other, respect yourself.