Somethings can never be turned off! Some (reduced) thoughts on the invasive nature of sound! As always I direct you to Substack where the piece sits in full.

Dance music holds multiple timelines at once. People who were there when it happened. People who discovered it decades later through grainy mixes and Discogs searches. Different routes, same investment. The culture doesn’t survive through purity. It survives through sustained belief. What matters isn’t whether your knowledge is embodied or researched. It’s what you do with it. Whether you use it to exclude or to connect. Full piece of Substack (as always).

Some thoughts. Not right. Not wrong. Just thoughts. As always, on Substack in a more complete manner :)

Do you remember the first time? Not the first kiss, though that matters too. But the first time something undid you completely. The first time you stood somewhere thinking: oh. Oh. So this is what I’ve been looking for. Mine was on a dance floor in 2021, quietly crying, confused by my own response to sound. I was being gently pulled apart and reassembled in real time. That’s when I understood: @skeemask_official doesn’t just play music. He loves it. Properly loves it. And that devotion moves outward, wraps itself round strangers, invites you in. This weekend at Fold, across seven unhurried hours, that feeling came back. What stayed with me most was the trust. Trust in the system, the room, the people who stayed. The music didn’t demand anything. It simply was. Somewhere past the third hour, movement became secondary. Listening became the point. There’s a tenderness in his approach that feels increasingly rare. You hear it in the silences between beats, in the way he lets a track breathe. His patience isn’t showy—it just is. For me, he sits among the greats. Not because of hype, but because of something quieter: integrity, consistency, care. This isn’t just admiration. It’s gratitude. For seven hours that felt both impossibly long and strangely brief. For reminding me what it means to be undone by beauty and quietly put back together. Full thanks on Substack.

Mixtapes are a beautiful part of dance music’s history. Have you ever really thought about what it means to make one for someone? There’s a particular softness to the impulse. You kneel over your library the same way you might over cut flowers, fingers hovering, weighing which tracks will arrive like a small surprise. Not grand, not performative, simply intentful. The handwriting on the insert, the glue residue from a sticker, the faint warp from being carried in a bag. Small proofs that someone spent time. Not declarations so much as invitations: come and listen to how I have heard you. Full piece on Substack now! Words by @georgie.lk / @viewinggallery Design by @louieparker_

A lovely and insightful conversation with @__jadesea__ is now published on Substack ꩜ ~I asked Jade when the last time she felt utterly blown away on the dance floor was. A difficult question, perhaps an unfair one, but curious, nonetheless. The kind of question that lingers because you already suspect the answer might complicate itself. She thought about it for some time. Days, actually. Then got back to me with an answer that opened up more questions than it closed. She couldn’t think of the last time she was completely enamoured by a night she’d had recently. When I shared what I’d written about her response, Jade responded thoughtfully, in a way that made me realise I’d perhaps asked the wrong question entirely. “Do I expect to be blown away on the dance floor?” she wrote back. “Sure it happens sometimes and should happen, but for me just ‘locking in’ is enough.” Locking in. Not transcendence, not transformation, not being blown away. Just the quieter experience of finding the groove, of settling into the rhythm, of being properly present with the music and the room. She mentioned staying after her own gigs or arriving early to listen to other DJs, those moments of locking in that happen when you’re not searching for anything, just listening. And then the detail that reframes the question entirely: “I don’t have many opportunities to see if I’ll be blown away because I rarely go to clubs now unless I’m playing at them, and most of my other time I’m with my daughter. So I’m not really out there, if you know what I mean, to see if I’ll be blown away.”~ Endless thanks to Jade for the time and wonderfully insightful conversation. Now for some hyggë time :)

What an earth is dance music ‘culture’? I don’t think culture is taste, genre, or aesthetic. It’s what people do together, over time, until it starts to matter. Until it shapes how you show up, how you move, how you recognise each other. For some this is day one. For some this is day 100. Dance music culture, for me, isn’t the music on its own. It’s the rooms and nights that form around repetitive sound. Bodies gathering, staying longer than planned, letting volume and duration do their work. Language comes later. Meaning arrives through repetition. It’s the showing up. To the dance. To the record store. To that random house after contacting an estate agent about a job lot. I’ve always experienced it as entering something rather than consuming something. You go somewhere. You give time. You give your body. You accept not quite knowing what will happen. The phrase gets used a lot now, often decoratively. Culture disappears when it asks nothing of presence or participation. I think so anyway.

The infamous 12 channel MCI mixer. The channel faders would have been the emi style levers and as has been said he replaced them, because he couldn’t get ahold of the original ones, and the ones he put in were much more fluid to use. He’s got choice tracks routed to a choice tape track and channel 2 is bringing up the tape return from the playback head on the same track, but channel 2 routes back to the same track too so he just needs to bring that one fader up to start off a recursive echo effect, echoing back on itself and filtering thru the channel eq. King tubby was an electrical engineer from education who build or modded all his equipment to his specs. He also worked in other studio’s (Treasure Isle, Channel 1, Randy’s etc) and for various sound systems (a dj crew with their own sound system setup) as disk cutter, sound engineer or electrical engineer and was famous for modding mediocore equipment to hi end specs.

The first thing I remember is the weight of the bass pressing against my chest like a second heartbeat. I let it in, not as sound but as language. It spoke in pulses, syllables of low-end grammar, teaching me a way of being that had no words. Time on the floor is slippery. It doesn’t pass, it folds. Hours stack sideways, a loop inside a loop. You forget what came first: the beat, your body, or the moment they recognised each other. Someone brushed past me, their shoulder wet with condensation, their skin humming like a live wire. We didn’t speak, but for an instant I was inside their rhythm, like our bones had agreed to move together. This is what I mean when I say communion. Not holy. Not sacred in the old sense, but something rawer: strangers kneeling at the altar of frequency, offering themselves to the endless rise and drop. I kept thinking about how fragile it all is. A power cut. A complaint. A door kicked in by the wrong person. And the cathedral collapses. Yet for as long as the system holds, we believe. We close our eyes and fall into the repetition. Because repetition isn’t redundancy. It’s revelation. It’s hearing the same kick again and again until it reveals its infinite faces. Toward the end, I stepped outside for air. The night had bruised into morning, sky a dull mauve. People sat on curbs, chain-smoking, eyes red, voices hoarse from shouting into the void. The world carried on as though nothing happened. But inside my ribs, the floor was still alive, vibrating with the memory of strangers who had been, for a few hours, a single body. Maybe that’s all raving is. a rehearsal for another way of being together. temporary, fragile, unsustainable—but proof that it’s possible.

New Years Day! @houseofgaffe @plurprojectuk Here’s the thing about full-day events: there’s almost always a moment that doesn’t quite land. A set that’s slightly off, a point where you find yourself in the smoking area longer than necessary. But New Year’s Day at Gaffe? Not once. Not a single moment where I wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be. I can’t remember the last time I felt so grateful for a full day. It was this overwhelming sense of rightness, of being held by something bigger, of surrendering completely and finding that surrender met with absolute care. But really, it’s always the people. Gaffe was thick with them. You could feel it in how space was shared on the dancefloor, in the conversations that bloomed, in the collective commitment to actually being there—fully, properly there—at the start of a new year. The decision was never really mine to make. This lineup, in this space, with these people, on this day—it was always where I was going to end up. What a treat it is to have found this culture that accepts you completely. To have spaces like @houseofgaffe that fight to exist. To have crews like @plurprojectuk who do it for pure love of the thing itself. I didn’t get on a train up north. I didn’t catch a flight to Belgium. I made the journey to Tottenham Hale, and it was exactly where I needed to be. What a way to start a year. What a delight to be involved in such a culture. Personal highlight: Marco Shuttle seeing the dim, moody club room and just thinking fuck it. I’m playing to the setting, not the time of day. Desyn playing LFO was also special.

@friendsoffriendsfestival returns to Big Boot Lake this July for its third year. A gathering where the land’s quiet curve gently pulls everyone into each other’s orbit. Groove-driven house at Hidden Lake. Stripped-back underground sounds at the Saloon. High-fidelity listening at Big Ears. Live jazz and reggae threading through the woodland. Each stage crafted with intention, each moment placed deliberately. Founded by @bethanymoreton and programmed by herself, @billy_kennedy_ , @okristian___ and @big_____ears , this is a festival that doesn’t ask you to belong — it reminds you that you already do. This isn’t about scale for its own sake. It’s about a like-minded energy that deepens as night falls and outlines soften. Eventually, you stop noticing where one circle of friends ends and another begins. That’s the point. Friends of Friends is a space where connection feels inevitable. Where atmosphere does the work. Where you remember how good it feels to be part of something collective, without agenda. Words by @georgie.lk / @viewinggallery Design by @louieparker_

Songs that became intertwined with my chamber in 2025. Obviously many more, and many more thoughts on the matter, but upon recent conversations and culls, the chosen snips feel appropriate. More comprehensive on the Substack of course!