Once again I’ve been struggling to write about my recent gigs. There was much I wanted to say about my trip to San Sebastian to play at Dabadaba club, but when I first sat down to get to it I found myself stalling. What I was writing started to turn into a kind of report on San Sebastian, and I never wanted this newsletter to be a travelogue. I figured I might just focus on the music I played instead, but that would miss a lot of what made the visit significant.

The most important aspect of the whole thing was actually the fact that Dabadaba, which I had never heard of before they got in touch, proactively sought me out and committed to including me in their music programme. When I asked them for more information about the venue, they said “we are bookers, not venue renters”, i.e. their focus is on meaningful cultural production rather than capitalising on their real estate. To that end they book 200 bands and 100 club nights a year, which is no mean feat for a 200+ capacity venue in a relatively small city.

It’s so rare for me to get this kind of unsolicited interest and it felt really good. They weren’t booking me because I was a big name, but because they appreciated my DJing and wanted to say something to their crowd by having me play. Indeed, when I visited the venue the night before my gig, to see Basque punk hero Kiliki do a concert to a buzzing full house, I realised that this was a venue embedded in a local community and invested in bringing something fresh to the region. That’s not to say money is no object, that business doesn’t matter. On the night of my gig, one of the bookers, Alex, confessed to some sleepless nights tracking the attendance figures, even on dates when he stays at home in Bilbao, one hour’s drive away. But with my limited view onto the club’s setup, crowd and programme, and the fact they are entering their 12th year of operation, I would say they must be doing something right, striking a balance between providing a thoughtful programme and getting bodies through the door.

On the night I played there were more than enough people for it to be a success. The other two DJs, Bihotza and Miravalles, were great, and I relished the opportunity to play what I wanted to an open-minded crowd in a well apportioned, unpretentious setting. To get a bit travelogue-y about it after all: if you’re in San Sebastian, go to Dabadaba club!

Anyway, that’s not what I came here to write about. After my trip to Spain I had one night at home before my flight to the US for a short, or at least relatively short for me, tour. Two weekends, five gigs that became four when one was cancelled, three b2bs and one solo set. I’ve done the whole tour summary thing before (here and here) so I’m not going to do that again this time. But for the record, the accounting worked out broadly as follows (converted to EUR):

• +2850 DJ fees

• -950 flights
  -115 taxis
  -590 food + drink

• Balance = 1200 EUR

I will note one thing: even compared to my previous trips to the US, that’s an extraordinary amount to spend on food and drink in such a short space of time. And that’s in spite of several delicious and expensive meals being bought and/or cooked for me by my hosts in each city. From one angle, coming home from a trip like this with the equivalent of 300 EUR per gig may seem a bit inefficient, especially after all that carbon burnt, sleep disrupted, friends and relatives imposed on (admittedly willingly, in most cases), and so on. From another angle, though, and this does bear repeating, it remains a great source of gratification that this thing called DJing can drag me across the Atlantic to places I’ve never been before and still send me home with some cash in my pocket.

ANYWAY, that’s not what I came here to write about either. I’m going to try to write a little about each gig in each city and see what comes out.

Animal, NYC — b2b Dana Kuehr

The first gig of the tour was on a Wednesday night, paid next to nothing and, as it turned out, was basically empty most of the night thanks to -10ºC temperatures outside. So why did I do it? Well, me and Dana were going to be inaugurating a new regular party called Plot Twist at Hot Mass in Pittsburgh the following Saturday. Given Hot Mass’s prestigious reputation and my personal fondness for the organisers of the new party (Jack M and Maitake), I viewed this booking as both an honour and a responsibility, and figured it would be a good idea for us to have a bit of a warm-up beforehand. I also thought that one of Animal’s barmen, who I have a crush on, might be working that night. As it turned out, he wasn’t, but that didn’t stop us from having a good time.

Dana and I have actually DJed together before, but that was a two-hour peaktime set at Horst Club on New Year’s Eve a few years ago. I expected Plot Twist to be quite a different proposition, deeper and headsier, so the six-hour all-night set at Animal was an opportunity to feel things out. Over the course of the evening, we took it from 95bpm up to a very sensible 125 or so, switching between broken and 4/4 beats, and sneaking in some booty poppers here and there. I managed to surprise Dana with two JT tunes (‘My Love’ and ‘LoveStoned’, including, of course, the full ‘I Think She Knows’ coda) and she dropped her already-classic “I sit on your face” tune. We got some compliments from the handful of gays who had braved the cold; one of the other barmen took us on a completely unhinged ‘cocktail journey’ that got us absolutely smashed; my crush showed up briefly near the end and we had a drunken (on my part at least) conversation that I can’t remember any of the details of. It took me about an hour to get home on public transport because I refused to pay the 40 bucks for a taxi. That’s NYC baby!

Plot Twist @ Hot Mass, Pittsburgh — b2b Dana Kuehr

Our Wednesday night session had at least helped me feel more relaxed about the gig in Pittsburgh. A night out on Friday to hear DJ Fitness rip it up at Bossa also helped: both Dana and I were hooked on Pablo’s set, full of sick percussion, party electro and just a general wild energy that I hoped we might be able to access at Hot Mass.

My main preoccupation going into the Plot Twist party was that Jack is a big fan of UKG — actually, let me rephrase that, Jack is a UKG MEGA-FANATIC — and so I had spent some time ripping some of my UKG records in anticipation of the set. But I also knew that, although Dana isn’t averse to dropping the odd UKG bomb (in fact, she provided one of the most memorable garage moments of the past few years when she played Paul Rayner at Sundaze back in 2023 - report here), I didn’t necessarily expect her to have packed a whole load of those tunes for this night. That raised the question of what kind of dynamic might develop in our b2b, if I was going to be insistently dropping UKG in a kind of ping-pong match with whatever she might be playing. I hate it when you hear two DJs go b2b but it sounds like they’re each playing their own sets in parallel. I didn’t want to be that DJ.

Looking back at my playlist for the night, around 25 tracks out of the 81 I “packed” were UKG or close enough. How many of those tunes did I end up playing? Four! And one of those was DJ Pied Piper’s ‘Do You Really Like It?’, which I’d downloaded and added to the list only because I’d started randomly humming it the day before and Jack immediately told me he loved it (obvs). The other three were: one of the rips I’d made, DJ Narrows’ ‘Fruit Machine’, which is really more like techy breaks than proper UKG; the G.O.D. remix of ‘Gunman’ by 187 Lockdown, a veritable staple of mine; and one more rip as one of the closing tracks, Groove Chronicles’s gorgeous remix of ‘We Can Get Down’ by Myron. In a sense I’m sad I didn’t play more, especially of the rips, mainly to impress Jack but also because they’re records that hold a lot of memories. I had wanted to bust out Sovereign’s ‘Fantastic 3’, for example, a reminder of Camden afterparties many moons ago. And I know for sure Dana would have been up for it. But I think in the moment I was really insistent on avoiding that flip-flop dynamic, and the UKG seemed too singular as a sound to be repeatedly interjecting into the overall flow.

In the end I think we got the balance right. Besides the time it took us to settle in at the start of the set, and the couple of times I had to go pee (which, due to the layout of the venue, felt each time like leaving for Seven Years in Tibet), we were fully and often thrillingly locked in. We had the example of Jack M and Maitake to follow, who had smoothly warmed up the dancefloor before us with lovely drippy bass and, yes, some of Jack’s floaty UKG. We had the benefit of the room itself, the new Hot Mass, which I’m not even going to try to describe properly here because I won’t do it justice. (Just imagine you’re in an architecture showroom, but it’s actually a suburban family home, but it’s actually a nightclub? I dunno, it’s bizarre and amazing.) And we had the benefit of a totally up-for-it crowd, who followed us even as we digressed into sludgey half-time, bright tech house, crunchy techno and, possibly my favourite moment towards the end, the big room ecstasy of Jam City’s ‘How We Relate To The Body’.

How We Relate To The Body | Jam City

from the album Classical Curves

I did multiple shots, got a bit high, played ‘Dip’ for the nth time, irresponsibly mixed out of at least one of Dana’s tunes too early, and generally had a brilliant time. It was -20ºC outside but the room was hot. I don’t know if what me and Dana did was what Jack and Isa envisaged for Plot Twist, but on reflection isn’t that the whole point?

Jumpsuit @ Black Hart of St Paul, Twin Cities

This gig came about because my friend Matthew Fit introduced me to Amy Pickett and Ben aka Allen Hz at the Lot Mass party on Monday afternoon of Movement weekend in Detroit a couple of years ago. We kept in touch via Instagram and when I was organising this trip hit them up. Minneapolis wasn’t in the news at the time, but it soon would be.

At the beginning of December 2025 the federal government decided to bring its ‘Operation Metro Surge’ deportation campaign to the Twin Cities, supposedly because as a ‘sanctuary city’ Minneapolis and St Paul was making it difficult for ICE agents to arrest criminal immigrants. The surge saw the deployment of thousands of ICE agents to a city with a modest existing police force of around ~600 officers. Between 3000-4000 people were detained, fewer than 100 of whom had convictions for violent crime. A significant proportion of that latter number were actually people who had already served time and been released into ICE custody at the end of their sentences, so not in fact trophies of the ICE campaign. This reflects similar data from previous campaigns in other cities like Chicago and Portland, showing that a very small percentage of those detained count as ‘violent criminals’ and that most of the people arrested have no criminal record. Service workers, carers, teachers, students, children have all been violently detained and often transported to Texas with no due process. The people detained are often US citizens or legal residents with work authorisations. There’s a full timeline of these happenings on the Wikipedia page.

In the weeks leading up to my visit, two observers were shot dead by ICE agents, a detainee died in custody at the Whipple building (a federal office near the airport to which agents have been forcibly removing people and keeping them in cells in poor conditions with no oversight, often for days at a time), and another detainee was shot by an agent who claimed he’d been threatened with a snow shovel, a claim the government repeated at the time but has since been shown to be completely fabricated.

I’m repeating all this here because I think it’s important to reiterate the gravity of this period, especially in the light of reports that the surge is “drawing down”, with the news cycle already moving on to whatever other sensational happening comes along next. My experience in the city involved being welcomed with open arms by everyone I met, treated to immense generosity by my hosts, and having plenty of time and space to sink into some of the wonderful things the city offers — while also being conscious at every moment of the spectre of raids. We ate at some amazing restaurants, including an Ecuadorian restaurant called Chimborazo that had at times been operating with a locked door and security guard outside to repel ICE. During dinner at another great restaurant on the first night, I received a message from someone I was due to meet the next day asking if I was OK, as there had been raids in the neighbourhood I was staying in. On Friday I had a coffee at a cafe called Pilllar that had become a kind of hub for organisers and patrol members to congregate in. Across the Twin Cities, non-hierarchical Rapid Response groups had been set up by volunteers connected via Signal groups to spread the word of ICE actions and deploy patrols of observers and chaperones, for example to protect workers and children going to work or school. Despite the horrific circumstances, almost everyone I spoke to talked of the good feeling and hope arising from ordinary people coming together to look after each other and resist this incursion.

But everyone I spoke to was also traumatised, and I imagine will be for some time. Governor Tim Walz has described the action has having left the city with generational trauma and it is difficult to see how people, especially those profiled because of their race, profession or living circumstances, can go back to living their lives without feeling constantly under threat of abduction. The supposed ‘draw down’ has been met with inevitable scepticism, as many agents remain active in the city. The narrative of things winding down in Minneapolis is likely to result in reduced scrutiny of federal agents and loss of accountability for their past and future offences. Politicians and commentators can smoothly shift their focus; Twin Cities residents won’t find it so easy to move on.

To that end I’m linking to some groups and resources that have been involved in organising in Minneapolis + St Paul, and who are an example of what communities can learn and gain from appalling situations like these:

Defend the 612 (website) - a loose structure through which local residents organise and run Rapid Response groups to observe and protest ICE and protect neighbours.

Pilllar (website) - the aforementioned cafe that has become a community hub for people organising against ICE.

Smitten Kitten - a sex shop helping organise food relief, rent support and other mutual aid initiatives for families in the city.

I will also add a note here on the party on Saturday night at the Black Hart of St Paul. The promoter, who I met before the night got underway, told me someone she commutes with regularly had been taken to the Whipple building just two days prior, and had only been released many hours later. The promoter had spent that time outside the building in freezing temperatures waiting for their release. It’s a strange sensation allocating emotional space for that reality at the same time as you’re putting on a party, but it brought it home to me how that has just been daily reality for the people of Minneapolis and St Paul these past couple of months.

The venue was amazing, a funny mix of pub, sports bar and queer refuge, with a super comfortable booth raised high above the floor, like most booths used to be back in the day, pool tables, big screens and a functional soundsystem. The crowd that turned out was super diverse in all dimensions, including age, which made me very happy. And everyone was down to dance. Ben played a slick warm-up from boogie to house, I did my 2.5 hours of pretty much everything and anything, and then Amy took us home with a power hour of pure Prince.

Just before I played, Willy the sound tech asked me if I’d brought any protest music. I had indeed given it some cursory thought, though my choices tended to come down more on the side of platitudes than genuine righteousness. And they were mostly tunes I play on a regular basis anyway. But these were the selections I made with the general state of the USA in mind:

• Spoonface & Colonel Red - ‘Move Up’

• Re-Flex - ‘The Politics Of Dancing’

• Liquid Measure - ‘Take Me Up’

• Eris Drew & Octo Octa - ‘Trans Love Vibration (Eris Goes To Church)’

Spaghetti Strap @ Signal, NYC — b2b SPRKLBB

I had two hours of sleep after getting home from the party in Minneapolis before I had to get up and catch an Uber to the airport. I was playing in NYC that evening and with the time difference and worries about snow delays I felt the 7am flight was the only option. The NYC party, Spaghetti Strap, was both the best- and least-known quantity of the trip. It’s a Sunday soiree at Signal in East Williamsburg, a venue I’d already played at with Gwenan last April. I had also been to the August edition last summer to see co-founder and resident SPRKLBB play b2b with BEIGE from Detroit. I knew the vibe would be sassy, queer and unhinged. I knew it would be a sold out event. And I knew that by the time me and Andy came on at 5pm it would be going full-throttle.

That didn’t make it any easier to prepare. Andy plays records, no digital, but I never bring vinyl to the US with me, partly because it’s too heavy, but mainly because the border is stressful enough as it is (and increasingly so) without having to explain why I have a bunch of records and headphones in my bag. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to only play digital in a b2b with him. How could I square this circle? Well, I arranged with Andy to go round to his house the day after my gig at Animal, before going to Pittsburgh, to raid his record collection. Andy keeps his records in the basement of his house and the last time I visited him the basement was partially flooded.

This time, thankfully, despite the extremely cold weather, the basement was mostly dry and the records somewhat organised. We spent a couple of hours of both of us pulling records out and playing them, building up a little stack on a chair marked ‘JOE’ that he would keep separate for me for when I returned from Minneapolis ten days later. A couple were records I own and love, but most of them I’d never heard before and would only hear again if/when I played them at the party. Exciting, huh?

To be honest my preoccupation was less the selection, as I like Andy’s records and knew they’d pop off at the party. And at least I could be mostly sure he’d like them, because they were his records! No, I was more worried about the dynamic between us playing b2b. You’d be hard pushed to find two DJs with more differing approaches to playing records. Andy, as I’ve written before here, uses records as raw material for the mix, chopping and layering and warping the different elements of tunes as part of an ever-mutating flow. I, by contrast, and as I often boringly explain to people, play one tune after another. In Pittsburgh I’d been worried about playing more than one UKG tune in case I disrupted the balance of the b2b with Dana, but that seemed like a minor quibble compared to the energy shifts that might happen between mine and Andy’s mixing styles.

I thought back to his set with BEIGE last August. As far as I recalled, they too weren’t as hands-on as Andy, but I remembered the energy being strong throughout. I remembered the two of them opening with some sick grimey 2-step that made my friend Sam do gun fingers. At one point Andy had an LP of canary song on the third deck, which he’d bring in and out of the mix at different pitches (I never knew the DJM900 could do that) and occasionally turn off at the switch, to the sound of canaries dying tragically. I thought about all these things and I figured the best I could do was keep the energy strong and sustained through the selection and do my absolute best when it came to transitions. After all, a smooth transition can also create fireworks if timed just right.

One thing working in my favour was the setup at Signal, which has to be one of the best booths I’ve played records in. Although I know, rationally, that I can mix two records together for longer than 15 seconds, my brain often tells me just before a set that everything is going to go wrong. But then when the setup is as good as it is at Signal, after one transition mixing records suddenly becomes the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t even have to think about it, the two tunes just stay in damn time. Me and Andy agreed to play two-for-two, and after Andy had opened with a couple of rolling housey numbers I stuck on a Housey Doingz 12” of his and breathed a sigh of relief. Even if what I was doing on the mixer might seem a bit pedestrian, at least I wouldn’t be fucking up.

That realisation then opened up space for me to consider the selection more. I was happy with the smooth, groovy, even slightly restrained tone we took at the start of the set. I had some expectation that at some point Andy would lean into the craziness, and I wanted to do that too, but for the time being I was happy to hold back. I played Gladstone Deluxe’s super deep ‘Garden Dub’, from one of my favourite EPs of 2025 (here), and it felt good to insist on something so cerebral at 5.30pm on a Sunday. It also made my friends Miles and Cleo in the crowd very happy, and then without any premeditation Andy mixed it into one of Miles’s own tunes. This felt like a flow.

Soon after that I thought it might be time to get a bit cheekier, so I reached for this electro house-y bit of mid-00s tech house, ‘Free Radicals’, which I’d ripped years ago and only wheel out when I’m feeling particularly fruity. This was the beginning of a stretch where I felt like me and Andy diverged for some reason, and I struggled against the feeling of a tug-of-war. We lapsed into a bit of a pattern where each of us would play a very stripped back drum-forward track as the first of our two tunes, a kind of ‘reset’ (intentional or not) of what the other person had played, followed by a more exuberant selection. I guess that dynamic might work OK, but as I’ve been repeating throughout this report I really don’t like the idea of a pattern in a b2b. I also became conscious of how hampered I was by not knowing the records I’d taken from Andy’s collection. It’s difficult enough to play tunes you don’t know when you’re DJing by yourself, let alone with someone else.

Luckily I could remember more or less the vibe of each one, so when I wanted something more drum tracky I could reach for this Pangaea remix of Pev & Kowton, or if I wanted something more garagey there was the record-with-the-black-label-and-yellow-text. I started combining vinyl with digital, going from Andy’s garagey record to the rip of Peekay’s ‘Sweet Sensation’ I’d made for but not played in Pittsburgh. Slowly I felt us getting back in sync once more. I got a bit sassy with the extended version of Chico Blanco’s ‘ENAMORADODE’, which I’d never played out before and sounded amazing. Later, Andy played a deep techno-ish tune that I took immense pleasure in executing a long (for me) mix out of into what I thought was Mike Huckaby’s remix of Steve O’Sullivan’s ‘Sandcastles’, only to discover the version Andy had on vinyl is a re-edit that strips out all of the fun squiggly synths from the original remix. Andy did some third-deck effects to fill in the gaps before I mixed it into Aaron-Carl’s remix of Justus Köhncke’s ‘26$’.

By the final 45 minutes or so I was pleasingly drunk on very expensive cocktails and enjoying the flow of things. I did feel like maybe Andy had held back a bit: he didn’t pull out the Switch remix of Lily Allen ‘LDN’, which he’d shown me back at the house, nor did he play any Black Eyed Peas acappellas over the top of anything. Whether this restraint was for my benefit or not, I’m not sure, but it was strange to feel like I was the one taking left turns rather than him. He did have one joker up his sleeve though. As the booth got rather congested towards the end of our set with the arrival of Ciel and Lis Dalton, and after I had dropped my final salvo of SH’s ‘Owner Of A Superstylin Heart’ mashup into D’Kawa’s ‘Voices In My Head’, Andy slowly started bringing a vaguely familiar guitar motif into the mix. “This is going to be a pop edit, I just know it” said Cindy, her tone somewhere unplaceable between curiosity and distaste. Then, before we knew it, Andy had dropped the OG version of Steeler’s Wheel ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’. Given the party featured three b2bs, this was not only highly appropriate but also intensely refreshing after the intense DANCE MUSIC of the previous three hours.

I guess that turned out more traveloguey than I wanted it to. Every time I go to the US, and especially when I have the opportunity to visit new states and cities, I am left with a strong impression of how fucking mad it is in a good way, how great the music is, how brilliant the DJs are, how much there is to dig into. But I’m simultaneously left with the impression of how fucking mad it is in a bad way, how unequal and wasteful it is, how shitty life is there for so many people, how it seems to be leading us all into collective ruin. And if I have significant qualms about going to perform in places like Saudi Arabia or Israel, then surely by those same criteria I should have significant qualms about going to perform in the US? Well, I do, but I still go. I guess I have double standards. I selfishly want to soak up as much inspiration from the place while I can. Out of the contradictions comes the most amazing creativity. It’s impossible to resist.