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Dear friends of Fictions,

I should be on a boat right now. With no signal. 

But I’m sending this off from home, in Berlin. So, I guess I’m not. 

The last weeks have very much pushed me at the edge of my commitment to grounded travel. Earlier this year, in a frantic leap of faith, I decided to finally sail across the Atlantic, a project I'd been working on for nearly 5 years. A few weeks later, I had to cancel America gigs, as the departure date of the boat was constantly moving around. The whole thing never feels not fragile. Sailing is, quite literally, not a straight-forward affair. And working this all out is an—unpaid!—full-time job. (new schedule at the bottom of this email)

Luckily, the support of my community is holding me up, and some last-minute freelance jobs are keeping me afloat. Still, it’s strange to think of that heightened panic over making rent as 'survival mode' when everything seems to be unraveling on a global scale.

It’s a busy, sleepless and humble Nono writing today. I considered skipping the newsletter this month but kept thinking about the ongoing conversation around the economics of nightlife. In a piece entitled “The Party’s Over”, Ed Gillett commented on the financial challenges that grassroots venues are currently facing. Quoting a conversation, Gillett wrote that “this entire debate is meaningless unless we acknowledge the wider context in which it’s taking place: namely, that we’re currently living through the biggest transfer of resources from working people to the hyper-wealthy since the invention of capitalism.” 

Last month, I published the first part of “12 places and 12 songs that defined my 2024”, focusing on 6 moments through the lens of friendship and grief. My plan was to publish a second part with 6 moments in which I would discuss material conditions. I wanted to share the sum of all my fees and put it into relation with the money spent on mobility, inspired, too, by Joe Delon’s recent “What Does A Tour Cost”. 

(Thank you Sarj for encouraging me to talk about money “as an anticapitalist practice” and for proofreading this newsletter.) 

In 2024, I played 39 shows and earned a total of 14123,31€ in fees, which would be an average of 362€ per gig. The transport budget is pretty messy though, as the situations are all different. Sometimes my agent deals with the booking, sometimes I do. Sometimes the promoter pays for transport, sometimes I’m on an interrail pass (which includes non-music related journeys) or sometimes it’s a landed fee (meaning I have to pay for the tickets myself). Although I'm struggling to come up with a precise figure for my transport budget, you can probably guess that it’s pretty high. I’ve gotten much better at finding the cheapest options of grounded travel but I have most likely earned much less than 300€ per gig on average. As part of this experiment, I’m hoping to do a more thorough job at systemizing transport expenses.  

All my close friends know that I spent most of 2024 insisting this would be my last year DJing. My hope is that by documenting some of these hardships, we can have conversations about what’s broken—and where we want to go from here.

There’s beauty in between, too. Not the naively romanticized and marketable charm of an influencer on a train, but something else entirely—something I’ll try to do justice to below.

1. Around the Alps - Spring 2024

Earlier this, I played at Marseille’s cult venue META. It does not appear on Google Maps. You have to take a tram to the outskirts of the city, climb behind some bushes and make it to a tiny warehouse. The posters (not so far from Fictions style) are clear, confronting and uncompromising. The sound system is loud. The crowd is queer. I get the hype. 

Le Metaphore collectif doesn’t quite need or, in fact, would remotely care to book a 1500€ headliner. I shared the bill with ohjeeLo and SHLAGGA who were both really really good. A resident at the venue, the former played one of the most inspiring sets I heard that year. Drones, dubs and saxophones: sign me up! I rushed to the booth when SHLAGGA played a track from Japanese punk drummer Chiko Hige. By Street consequently made it into my very cherished proto-dubstep jazzy tunes Rekordbox playlist. 

One month later I travelled back to France for Nuits Sonores. The festival invited me to play a DJ-set, host a workshop, talk on a panel and teach a masterclass—most of them related to climate justice. Given the time spent travelling between Berlin and Lyon, I appreciated the opportunity to participate more deeply in their programming as well as immerse myself in the full experience. 

(PS: I contributed to the 2024 Nuits Sonores related Reset! Atlas with a piece in which I argued that the ecological impact of festivals might be intrinsically linked to their size).

2. A fluid togetherness at Freerotation - Summer 2024

Every musician receives the same fee at Freerotation and transport is covered by the festival on top of that. 

I already wrote extensively about Steevio & Suzybee’s festival back in July. I did not think, at the time, that the recording of my set there would resonate so far. I certainly didn’t think it would be picked as RA’s favorite mix of the year. But, there you go, there is a trophy sitting on top of my decks now, which my friends like to jokingly describe as my future tombstone. It’s got the shape of the RA logo: we’re picturing climbing plants growing all through and around it, some inches above my decomposing body. 

Macabre musings aside, you can probably imagine that I feel ambivalent about the eulogy. Isn’t it bizarre to rank DJ sets? Of course, it’s incredibly touching to read so many souls are connecting with that memory. Yet—and maybe this will come across as false modesty—I strongly stand by the fact that it was very much the festival—the land, the audience, the history of that event, my history with that event—playing through me. You can't just do the house of crocodiles anywhere and I've certainly continued having modest DJ experiences in other places. To the mystery of what is channeled through sounds, I bow down. 

(PS: At Dañs An Diaoul, too, all performers received equal fees. Is it a coincidence that events experimenting with transparent economics also tend to feel the most transformative?)

3. Joyful militancy in Ghent - Autumn 2025 

Described as a “truly folk fest”, Dakdak (literally, Roof-roof) aimed at amplifying the voice of youth in Ghent regarding housing: “Housing is treated as a luxury product, rather than the basic necessity and fundamental right it truly is. We want that to change.” With municipal elections approaching on October 13th, the party—held the weekend before—aimed to encourage local policymakers to keep pushing at the Flemish level for more social, affordable, and sustainable housing.

At the bar or around the open air, there were very simple graphics with information about the political parties and their proposals related to housing. The event—which included music, discourses and happenings—was free. AliA and Sofa Elsewhere’s sets were excellent. The organisers were sooo warm… and danced along!

I closed with a percussive and high energy set, before winding down with that floaty and whispery Trần Uy Đức interpretation:

Maybe I wouldn't be able to pay my rent with these kinds of gigs… but at least the event was fighting against high rents! For all the “dancing is political” discourse out there, this felt like a bold, pragmatic, yet unpretentious gathering. There was a humility and joy running through the whole event that was deeply refreshing and empowering. 

4. UK underground: Kinetic, Membrane, Cobalt - Autumn 2024

Economics were very much at the center of all the conversations I had with the promoters who invited me to play in the UK last year. 

An organizer of the Kinetic parties, the ever talented and articulate DJ Wiggles reflected on the risks taken when curating a line-up. There’s a lot of pressure in being a moving part in a promoter’s financial equation, carrying the fear that we may be responsible for their potential losses. I hate the thought that my “small” profile and practically non-existent social media presence might not “attract” a big enough crowd, just as much as I hate what these anxieties reveal about the deeply neoliberal logic embedded in contemporary DJ culture. 

But then sometimes students show up in the middle of the week at a party and they probably have no idea who I am but they have fun and that’s when I remember how much I love the job. This is what happened in Edinburgh on a damp and windy wednesday evening in November. Daksh played one of the most delicate opening sets I heard that year and I've kept on coming back to his radio shows since.

A few days later, I played all night long in the beloved Newcastle venue: Cobalt. The family run affair, which I had visited and documented in 2023, is very much struggling to keep afloat. Yet, so much care is put into the D&B sound system, the programming, the drinks at the bar, the artworks in and around the club, it being accessible … Honestly: I can’t think of one single venue in Berlin that would provide a dance music community experience nearly as impeccable as Cobalt.

I must have played this Normani track during all of those sets … I had it on rotation that autumn. The ultimate DJ hornybird banger.

“Do you wanna go deep, deep, deep, deep?

I'm a roll it like beep, beep, beep, beep

We can take a leap, leap, believe me

Turn it over like you turned a new leaf”

PS: I recommend To The Dancers, Susie Davies’ documentary about Cobalt.

5. Why oh why at Macadam - December 2025

A couple of weeks ago, a staff member from Macadam in Nantes was visiting Berlin and we met for a cup of tea. She’s travelling through Europe, meeting different venues and discussing their struggles. 

Despite the insecurities grassroots venues are facing, can these spaces still be laboratories for imagined futures? we wondered. Why are we even doing all this? she asked. I told her just how much Macadam had meant to my French friends. With a funktion one system sonorised by Gombeuil Audio and an excellent curation, the club had become a meeting point and space for healing for the dance community in the West of France. 

It was an honor to be invited to play there for the first time in December. In the club, I met Jay Jordan and Isabelle Fremeaux, the activists who wrote We Are Nature Defending Itself. I owe a lot to their work, in which they describe their resistance against the expansion of the airport in Notre-Dame-Des-Landes, near Nantes.

I was booked alongside TJ and did the perhaps corny thing of playing one of his tracks. I’ve been thinking a lot about this remix of Piezo. It feels like it couldn’t have come out much earlier than 2024, which is pretty rare these days. The way this interpretation plays with different perceptions of speed is so well executed. It’s worlds within worlds—yet it’s not trying to say a million things at once. Instead, it feels like we’re witnessing something from multiple angles, never losing the thread, never losing the groove, always getting closer to the core.

Isn’t music just, like, truly amazing? If I ever managed to finish a piece of music, I’d want it to sound something like this.

6. Iberian Peninsula by bus - December 2025

I’d never played in Portugal before. Lisbon is far from Berlin and poorly connected by train. There used to be an overnight train between the Portuguese and Spanish capitals but it was discontinued due to the pandemic. Infrastructure gaps, political priorities and a focus on air and road travel have delayed the official plan to build a high-speed train between Lisbon and Madrid. 

I’d been dreaming of playing Outra Cena but wouldn’t haven’t been able to make the 14.12 gig happen if we hadn’t connected it with Radioclube Agramonte in Porto on 13.12 and Sala Taro in Barcelona on 20.12. Both of these venues were incredibly welcoming and the gigs were cosy and fun!

I had a strange time in Lisbon. The city is just as charming as its reputation suggests. Everyone I met was lovely, and it was an honor to finally get to hang out with Joe Delon. The building that houses Outra Cena is beyond beautiful! The club wasn’t very busy when I played, but—economic anxieties aside—that doesn’t necessarily stop me from enjoying myself.

Yet, a few days into my time in the Portuguese capital, I was suddenly overcome by an irresistible wave of melancholy. The way mass tourism is affecting Lisbon made me uncomfortable. I visited a childhood friend across the Tagus and we had long conversations about gentrification: the rents, the venue Lounge closing … I couldn’t help but wonder if I was part of the problem. I was thinking of Philipp Sherburne’s recent words about Lisbon: “Maybe We Should All Just Stay Home (Not Really)”.

I’d made most of the journey on night buses (Bordeaux-Porto and Lisbon-Barcelona). Kalaf Epalanga kept me company with his novel Whites Can Dance Too. A member of Lisboa group Buraka Som Sistema, Epalanga describes Kuduro as his “passport to the world”. But “it took being caught at a border without proper documents” for him to realise he'd “always been a prisoner of sorts”.

“Only a madman—or a really first-rate criminal would attempt to cross the whole Europe by bus and train with the threadbare excuse that he’s a musician in a Lisbon band and that he was due to play a concert that night at one of the continent’s most iconic festivals of electronic music. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I had been in their (the officers) position.”

I identify as white. I hold two strong passports. No one stopped me at any borders. I can fold my short body into an awkward but somewhat bearable origami shape. My choice of moist muffled night bus seats as beds comes from a place of climate justice concern, numerous privileges, an ever growing desire to live my life in widening circles and I still don’t know:

Am I a madwoman, a d-d-d-djay, or a great song?

(PS: if you can, please consider supporting Planeta Manas in covering the legal costs and damages after the Police raid.)

NEWS: introducing our new DJ collective

Wheel of Fortune (WOF) is an amorphous musical incantation, conjured by the combined energies of CCL, Marylou, Nono Gigsta, and rRoxymore. B2b2b2b or solo improvisations, dub sirens or mic action—you never know exactly who or what you’ll get, and neither do we.

Dance moves behind, in front, and beyond the decks. We are the dancefloor’s players, and our mycelium begins where it ends—an infinite web of possibilities, rotation, and imagination. Embodied yet boundless, free in motion, rooted in—but not limited to—the spirit of DJing: eight hands, eight feet, four hearts, and seventy-eight cards shifting in constant, open-ended play.

The wheel turns. 🌀

UPCOMING GIGS:

27.03 - I will not be hosting my Fictions show as my slot is now on pause but David, Ugo and I will be at Cashmere Radio tonight! Address 

mid-May early July: US

16.08 - Iota Festival, Île d'Oléron, FR

30.08 - TBA, Vienna, AT

31.08 - TBA, Siena, IT

November/December 2025: UK

Winter solstice 2026: Fictions 2.0 event!!!!!! Mark your calendars <3 

ok, friends, mach’s gut! xx

nono