« … in every place I have loved. »

Dear Friends of Fictions,

Some housekeeping: My June 11^th email was the first I sent through Ghost.

• It is possible you haven’t received it if your address got lost through the export.
• If you answered to that newsletter, I would not have received your reply and it would be lost forever (unless you’d like to copy paste it and send it back to me).   
• This should now be fixed and if you want to reply today, it will be forwarded to my private email. Please know though that I currently have very limited access to emails or Wi-Fi and that my phone is off. I will need to catch up on a lot of correspondence so I might be even slower than I usually am. 

Gig calendar at the end of this essay!

In the last newsletter, I tried to capture May 2025, which included the second half of our Trans-Atlantic crossing, the boat’s arrival in NYC on May, 12^th, a four-day train journey to the East Coast which I started the very same day, a first encounter with the Pacific Ocean, a short night in Los Angeles, a quick visit at Metta Forrest Monastery, an unexpected solitary drive through Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Colorado and the arrival of my pilgrimage in Detroit. 

My commitment to grounded travel and the complications related to sailing and training meant that the journey constantly had to be adapted, an exercise which I tried to approach as a mirror of the vaster unpredictability of a life’s journey. By the time I left Detroit, I had another 10 gigs to play and no more boats sailing me back home. My ESTA was running out. The political situation did not look good. Whilst May had written itself with a sharp awareness of death at the back of my mind, June and July challenged the boundaries of my imagination.   

The process of writing today’s newsletter has been even more consuming than usual. Forms started taking shape when I was reading Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone queer sci-fi epistolary novel, This Is How You Lost the Time War. Burning villages, space travel, time stretch and love letters—that’s where the quotes are borrowed from, situated by page. 

In an experiment that felt all at once intimate and deeply collective, these two chapters increasingly gained in density. A lot is left off the page, yet there is plenty below. I tried to document what we were doing in ways allowing you to tune into a frequency that resonates with you. Turn the dial on, search the FM, go forth, go back, switch off … Hopefully you find something, somewhere. May this water the seedlings of countless wild and generous ideas towards collective, compassionate and regenerative futures. So much more is possible! 

To you. 

PS. Yes, you. (p. 7)

JUNE: Love letters on overground and underground frequencies

Willow Defebaugh, Atmos’ editor-in-chief recently wrote about seeing her “queer journey […], as its own death process. Whether through coming out or transitioning, all queer people go through a kind of rebirth.” June was the first Pride month of the second Trump presidency.

After spending a few days in Detroit, I made my way to Raleigh where Matt picked me up, en route to Durham. I knew very little about contemporary North Carolina until my host described it as one of the widest queer communities in the US, alongside San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Asheville is apparently known for its progressive and inclusive vibe, and Charlotte has a growing LGBTQ+ community with numerous resources, bars and events.

30.05 - Party Illegal at the Pinhook with Nono Gigsta, One Duran and Switch in Durham, North Carolina

Party Illegal has been running for years in Durham, counting affiliates such as DJ Deadname whom I later met in NYC. The event that night started with open decks. I got to hang out with the artists playing before me, comparing the cost of living in Durham vs New York or discussing queer resilience. During my set, the choreography of bodies in the room had the quality of silk, electricity and tidal creeks. Halfway through, C Powers’ I Will Not Live In A Fascist State made its way between rRose and Nihiloxica tracks. 

It's written big and bold on my rider that I do not want to be offered free merch related to my gigs. There was a point where both my best friend and I had too many pajamas featuring my DJ moniker and I had, perhaps obvious, environmental concerns. There are already so many objects in the world and I’m not sure we really need another sweatshop produced garment every weekend. But Matt’s Party Illegal’s design just had the name of the event on a super cool recycled tie-and-die T-shirt and I wore it everywhere in June, including on my Lot Radio show. 

Also, Matt’s dog knows a trick by which he abruptly falls on the floor, raising his seemingly lifeless paws in the air when his parents point gun fingers at him. This wasn’t why I made a merch exception but it did set the bar very high in a series of pretty mind-blowing host/promoter pet encounters. 

In the Carolinian train headed North, images of the past three weeks spent crossing the country visited me: series after series of trees with names I’ll never know, endless deserts, maybe inhabited by tiny ant kingdoms functioning in complex social structures, migrants picking fruits under the scorching heat in geometrically organized fields, and a porch painted in a combination of colors—nebula blue and buttercream beige—which someone had carefully chosen and someone else, or perhaps the same person, had meticulously painted.

Sometime after my last flight in 2019, I became obsessed with the idea that geographies are one dimension in which causes and conditions unfold. I wondered if my commitment would open up insights into some of the mechanisms—natural cycles, biological processes, power dynamics—that we exist within. My time in Durham somehow reminded me that there are so many scales of realities, pockets within pockets, countless of which cannot remotely be understood horizontally. You’ve never met someone, and simultaneously, you listen to a childhood memory, meet their clever trick-executing dog, and sense that they, too, have fears and hopes. You’ve never heard of somewhere, and the next minute, you’re met with its infinite layers of life, the vastness of its past, present, and future.

I don’t think taking trains has granted me any deep insights into the nature of reality out there, but at times, it has felt intrinsically related to my ability to imagine it.

NYC was going to be the basis for June. The city found me juggling with a similar mix of emotions that would characterize the rest of the tour: I felt curious, confused and utterly exhausted. The last 2 days had merely allowed a few hours of rest and due to delays, I only made it to Brooklyn shortly before midnight (sorry, this essay is going to be very very boring like that).  

I reached Light and Sound Design (the place) with my 3 weeks backpack, eager to discover its Last Saturday Dance (the party). While the monthly event had been happening in several venues for years, it found a home when KG opened his working studio as a loft in 2022. L&SD then became so much more, running events, hosting panels and discussions, experimenting with dance and meditation, offering individual or collective acupuncture session or the weekly ‘Present Sounds’ listening evenings—this program is open to all. The Last Saturday Dance, however, is an invite-only dance ritual with a loyal following and a slightly cult reputation. The venue and parties both reference Love Saves the Day and operate in a graceful reverence to the David Mancuso lineage. 

May’s Last Saturday Dance gathered deepcreep, Lovie, NAP and L&SD/LSD’s mastermind KG. I first came across Daniel Rincon’s work via the Cowboys and The Sound Of Trains mix and had been obsessed with all NAP mixes/productions/label things ever since. At LSD, Daniel played one of my favorite sets of 2025 so far and woeps … I found myself guilty of doing the thing I always swear to avoid with music: superlatives and bests. In my diary, I wrote: “The perfect party exists. It happens at LSD.” I suspect KG and his community believe less in perfection than in direction, revolt and “trust”. Dancing in this environment helped me remember that my body was built for sweetness, a body that tears itself apart in defense of what it loves. (p. 96)

The next day, I excitedly reported to my best friend on the phone, describing the several scales of entrance fees, the warm welcome I’d received at the door and at every other stage, the food and the “epic-looking fruit spread,” the lights and the flowers, the free mushroom tea and plenty of alcohol-free drinks, the zines on the table and the political messages on the walls, the diverse and unpretentious crowd, and the natural flow with which the whole community seemed to take care of itself.

“…and every DJ played amazing sets, and I loved how the Klipschorn sound system was being adjusted. They’ve been working on it for 10 years. Have I told you that they provide dance wax? No, but truly, the stars were the dancers. Imagine if you’d never been to a party in your entire life, and then try to imagine how you’d picture the craziest dance moves. That was it. Maybe even better. Like, the dancefloor seemed always perfectly occupied, in harmony between space and movement. Not only was there joy, but everyone seemed engaged, safe, and so very free.”

Ugo laughed. “Sounds a bit like our parties, or what we’d want our festival to be.”

I laughed even harder. “I don’t think our imagination had yet gone this far.”

The day after had I arrived⎯ill⎯in Buffalo, Alex and Frank suggested we visit the Niagara Falls. “Or maybe after your experience on the ocean, you’re … sick of seeing water?”

Witnessing the sheer force of the Falls⎯Sound! Speed! Rapids!⎯somehow repaired me back in time for the show. Most probably, it was actually weekly encounters with water⎯the lake with Sarj and Nic, the river with Jack and Isa, the beach with Kyle⎯that helped me through June. As deadly heatwaves took over Europe and North America that month, I was aware not everyone had the privilege of accessing cooling places. 

06.06 Groupwork with Nono Gigsta All Night Long in Buffalo, New York

Groupwork, what a party name! Only they could have picked it: a crew of passionate and dedicated pals, a sound system in a warehouse, no big theory and that oh so precious Midwest modesty. The party sold out before it started, not because of me⎯simply because locals trust it to be the rare and safe occasion to have a good time.  

I mean, I had a really good time. I remember patiently preparing the room with ambient and poems, indulging in a long hour of dub when we had enough people on the floor, before going percussive and building some tension and trust. The room was sweaty, so I was mindful of not going too hard for too long. A floating moisture conveyed the gratitude-and-not-taking-for-granted attitude towards my skin pores. Before I knew it, we were doing Beatrice Dillon, into techno, into jazz, into post-rock and a stepper within 5 tracks and the crowd was like “ok, sure”, just following the ride, bumping along. 

By the time I finished my set, Alex’ dog was somehow hanging out on the dancefloor. As for Frank, he parents not one … but three extremely seductive pooches. Strong strong entry in the promoter’s pet game, Buffalo! 

((Not entirely sure this is what Fiber had in mind when they wrote that they were “eagerly awaiting” my “de Tocquevillean report on the state of the States" ?))  

This all-nighter was probably a turning point. I was confused by how much I was enjoying myself on this tour. Everything I ever stood for seemed to clash with the US as an empirical project, as a nation-state and its political situation was escalating in proportions, I constantly worried we were failing to denounce and fight. Obviously, all the crews and souls I played for shared those convictions and concerns and many of them showed up in more ways than they ever had before. 

My diary of these days documents despair as well as a growing love inside for something I couldn’t quite name or place, yet wanted more contact with. This curiosity terraformed the counters of my inner maps, layered territories and our collectively constructed geographies. I want to meet you in every place I have loved. (p. 96) writes Blue in a letter to Red, as they travel through time and space. I wanted to love “it” in every place that we met.

I took a bath before sitting, sleepless, on the train back to New York (and if you find these entries repetitive, just try to imagine how repetitive it felt to experience them!!). On the way to Mona’s, I caught someone’s expensive perfume in the subway, pizza smells on the way out and was it barbecue smoke on the walk “home”? NYC seemed so much more complex to me now than the initial odors emanating when we arrived by boat. I felt ready to play my first set in town.  

07.06 Nowadays Nonstop w/ Aurora Halal, DJ Hyperactive, Hank Jackson, MORENXXX b2b Sterling Juan Diaz, Nono Gigsta in NYC, New York

Nowadays had booked me for the four-hour opening slot and I was surprised to find the crowd showing up so early, listening so attentively. Taryn’s lights were on point (and if you’ve ever worked the lights during one of my shows, you know that I’m a bit particular about them: none on me, a gentle amount on the dancefloor, blablabla). The sound was immaculate and was the most comfortable I have been in a booth in a long time. I finally managed to weave that whole quirky, loose 150bpm section that I’d been dreaming of exploring. 

At the bar, Mona bumped into a stranger who said they came to listen to this DJ called Nono Gigsta and had been afraid that it might sound “too artsy”, that they might not “get it”. “But”, they added, “I did get it, I finally got it!” 

Someone else didn’t have such a good time and after the night, they wrote on their (by the way, beautifully intimate) Substack essay: “Everyone I know hates the intro speech at the door, in which the political aims of the space are too clearly articulated, killing the vibe. “We have zero tolerance for violence, racism, transphobia, sexism or other discriminatory language or actions…remember that if you want to touch another guest…ask first if it’s okay.” These rules feel almost corporate.” 

Nowies strikes me as the NYC club people love to hate and hate to love. One of the difficulties I encountered when deciding whether it made sense to include it in the tour, was that they imposed a pretty strict exclusivity, which felt particularly frustrating given the scale of my project. Despite “the speech” (or perhaps because of?) I couldn’t quite find my spot in the crowd which frustrated me as I enjoyed the flow of Hank Jackson’s set after mine. I really wish I’d had the energy to come back later on the Sunday⎯I wonder how that whole story played out. 

12-14.6 Dripping Festival, Sparta, New Jersey

Parties are like little fictions that we set up with roles and rules. In fact, Dripping happens a 90min bus drive away from New York, on a camp site that also hosts renaissance fairs. Upon visiting the caves or spotting the slightly kinky outdoors wooden structures, I found myself fantasizing about all the ways in which this land had been using us little humans to dream up parallel worlds.

I had kept the whole weekend free for the festival which I attended from start to end, owing it to Leo, Daniel and Sol for not giving up on me (as well as for curating that line-up!!). 

After surviving that hurricane on the ocean, I felt compelled to translate the sounds of wind blowing “dark liquid up in the air, drawing swirls that would vanish towards the clouds”. I had produced a little intro and recorded some vocals with several ideas of how I could use them or try to recreate that sense of vertigo. 

E Wata was on before. I had somehow imagined I would start with something sound design-y within a broken and dubby zone. The duo was performing from the middle of the room and crafted a subtly trance like atmosphere. Everything was spacious, delicate yet tense⎯the air was held in poise.  

When my turn came, I immediately felt the instinct to scrap my favored plan, go back to zero, and follow a different arc. I layered track after track, moving from very slow to very fast, building momentum over an hour toward a moment of silence halfway through. Silences have increasingly found their way into my sets; this one emerged as a pause before we dove into an hour of twisted dubstep. Perhaps in that transition, I came closest to capturing that feeling of suspension atop gigantic waves. In retrospect, it sounded like a time- and space-stretched thunderstorm: sharp drums first, then the depth of low-end. In other words, I don’t think it’s so much about telling a story as it is about using time to recreate space. (Shoutout to Mark for recognizing that Salem track in the second half!!!)

It's hard to articulate how exhausting playing these kinds of sets is. It feels so impossible to fully execute the vision that’s haunting inside yet indispensable to try. Perhaps the dissatisfaction in that movement is a soulful price to pay when one attempts to go certain places. There were also contextual elements testing my comfort: the front crowd was staring intently towards me. I could tell my hands were not executing the natural flow I usually trust them to follow, when I am the one discreetly witnessing them. I know how far I wanted to go and I’ll trust the feedback that something meaningful was found in following me, if only halfway. 

I'm glad I stayed for the whole weekend. I can't think of many other festivals that skilfully strike the balance between experimental programming and a joyful pill-in-the-field kind of vibe. Tiredness, introvertedness and conflicting schedules meant that I didn’t hear nearly as much of what I was hoping to witness though I did commit to Astrid Sonne, E Wata, Deepchord, Babyleo b2b DJ Plead, Mark Ernestus, Topdown Dialectic, CCL’s closing in the clearing and Currency Audio, the latter being an absolute highlight: an improvisational live performance jumping from jungle to dubstep and IDM and played on an electronic drum kit!  

Bonus 1: a dozen dancers rolling in the grass and screaming along to a drum’n’bass edit of Kings of Leon “Sex is on fire” in front of the Barn.

Bonus 2: seeing my first firefly! WTF! Fantastic insect!!

I spent the weekend with Sarj, a loved one and long-term rave partner who grew up in the US and is now based in Berlin. Inevitably, we got talking about both places and their politics. Should we be spending a Sunday at a festival when so many Americans were joining forces to push back against the Trump Administration? Later, we found out that millions had participated in No Kings Day-of-Action, making it one of the largest days of protest in US history.

About the US, Sarj said they felt like “the land here is sick, the food is sick, the people get sick.” I thought of This Is How You Lose the Time War, again: Space here is sick. Thick. Slick. (p. 127) At the same time, we recognized a unique capacity for counterculture, community or mutual aid.

As for dancefloors, we were enthused about that endearing American cute-queer-and-quirky nerdiness. We did however miss casual banter with strangers and friendly smiles in front of the speakers. Everyone seemed to attend the festival with their own crew and avoid other people’s gazes (*Midwest buddy voice*: “No but that’s a NYC thing!!!) 

That perhaps projected separateness seemed to have magically loosened up when I took my Dripping sleeping mask off at the end of Mark Ernestus’ Amapiano afternoon set⎯groove teaches deeper in the dark. A switch had operated, everyone was beaming, open and not only that: I recognized all these faces. Could it be that only 30 people lived in the entire country and every single one of them was now at Dripping? As Jack put it: “This is the American scene for sure. For better or for worse… usually better though.”

I left NYC at 4:26 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th and, after the usual few hours of delay, arrived in Chicago around noon on Thursday (a very acceptable 20 hours—not the 377 the app claimed). Josh picked me up at Union Station and walked me to his place, where I stayed for two nights. I wandered through the city; we cooked, and nerded out over the French contemporary bass music scene.

The only time I stayed in a hotel during this whole tour was in Detroit. There was a living room before the bedroom with a giant TV screen that said “Welcome Nono”. I turned it off when I entered and sat in one of the sofas⎯they could have sat 6 but it was just one sleepy little Nono. The check-out was early, four hours later I was gone. I wondered how much it had cost. 

20.06 - Flow State, Green Machine and Night Logistics present agraybé, Hot Take, Mithra, Nono Gigsta, Steve Noah and Hot Take in Chicago, Illinois

As I stood on the dancefloor listening to the opening set of the show in Chicago⎯a b2b between Hot Take and Steve Noah, I noticed several moods within me and through others: curiosity, unease and a longing for release. agraybé had travelled from Los Angeles for the occasion so, inevitably, we got talking about the ICE raids. “The thing is: violence against migrants isn’t new.” Acknowledging however the deeply worrying escalation of repression, she explained how it had led her and her friends to show up. 

Mithra aka Amir Mashayekhi, who played the second set, later wrote that he dedicated his set to his “beautiful family in Iran.” On June 20 Israel bombed Iran before the US conducted its own strikes two days later. Mithra who runs the label satellite era collaborated for the first time with three other Chicago crews to organize this show. They’d struggled finding a venue in the first place and when even that one fell through, they had to find a warehouse at the very last minute. The coming together and persistence in making this happen did, again, blow me away. 

What if this whole tour was actually a love letter that the North American scene was writing to itself? Despite the vastness of the land, I sometimes wonder if this experiment in connecting thirteen really interesting gigs over seven weeks could have happened anywhere else. Organizers had been passing on the word to each other about my possible crossing. Later, whenever they dropped me at a train station, they’d always ask me to say “hi” to this or that friend at the next destination. We’d often joked that the crocodile was actually a video game character and I increasingly felt like the mission they were trusting me with was to secretly smuggle buckets of love across the land. With everything the country was experiencing, I really felt like I wasn’t doing much at all, but I tried to do it well. I still regret that I couldn’t make it in time for gigs in Seattle and Los Angeles. 

Here are recordings of the sets that were played that night:

https://soundcloud.com/stevenoah/steve-noah-hot-take-06-20-25 

https://soundcloud.com/mithra_audio/mithra-dj-set-20-june-2025 

https://soundcloud.com/agraybe/agraybe-dj-set-fs-gm-nl

The only option to travel by land and by day between Chicago and Pittsburgh was to take a coach. This time, my 10 segment USA rail pass was of no use. 

Amtrak is a middle-class indulgence; Greyhound is another America altogether. It was a different frequency I was traveling on that day, the longest in the Northern Hemisphere. Passengers seemed tired, silently staring through the windows in the momentary comfort of air conditioning. 

USians like to say that it is capitalism which forces them to fly. This was something I had understood theoretically until visiting the country and now grasped more acutely through my body. These thirteen (delays…) awake hours on highways reminded me that there are also many Americans who cannot even afford to fly in the first place. 

21.06 - Humanaut with Nono Gigsta and Sam PV at Hot Mass in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

I travelled to Pittsburgh like one would get ready for a first date long hoped for. The city’s musical scene fascinated me and I’d heard nothing but loving praise about its club, Hot Mass. After having recently lost its venue, they found a new location which, in Jack’s words “is actually a huge improvement”. 

Giddy Gigsta played a four-hour set after Sam PV’s opener (which I sadly missed — but Nick Boyd b2b Sam PV on The Lot Radio? TIP!). One part of the crowd was into the weird and wobbly, while the other preferred it bright and rolling. I felt like I was standing between two divorcing parents. But listening back to the recording now, it all turned out just fine. When the lights broke through on the dancefloor, we softly swirled to The Sun Can’t Compare — a track that’s kept mystically reappearing throughout this North American love affair: “You are my dream.”

After the club night wrapped, I kept playing for “the homies” who graciously put up with my ever-growing (and very much cherished) jazz-meets-footwork playlist.

This first date morphed into a million little miracles. It all began with the mushroom that mysteriously appeared in Bida’s cabin that very morning — Bida being Jack and Isa’s pet frog, who truly deserves a category of their own in the Preposterous Promoter Pet Tournament. 

Having read in my last newsletter that I liked pickles, Jack and Isa got a home-made batch (along with many other delicious treats). That same newsletter, which reflected on the topic of death, also featured one of Davis Galvin’s tracks — and later, a conversation about the local cemetery unfolded between Davis and I, striking me as yet another synchronicity.

Ali Berger and I picked up on a similar thread, diving into Buddhism and music with shared enthusiasm. And — and! — I finally met my secret idol, Kiernan Laveaux, who gifted me a tape of her band. In her own words, the whole thing felt “kinda Lynchian.”

I didn’t manage to stay awake to read the results of the Democratic mayoral primary elections which ended in NYC on June 24th. I made notes of my dreams as soon as I woke up the day after: Zohran Mamdani was already mayor. I couldn’t quite figure out his gender, whether he had transitioned. We were working on a party together, but a dance party. 

The news confirmed that he had locked in the Democratic nomination. Next up is the general election on November 4, where Mamdani will go up against current mayor Eric Adams, GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa, and Cuomo running as an independent. Was it hope I sensed in the streets of Brooklyn that morning? Mamdani’s win showed, amongst other things, that being openly critical of Israel and its government is becoming more accepted within the party.

It’s interesting how the land enters our subconscious when we spend a certain amount of time somewhere. We are like fruiting bodies of the earth, her nebulous singing mushrooms. I’ll dream in a different language depending on where I sleep. Local figures and features will enter into contact with childhood places and memories. I cannot get over the fact that dreams collide territories and timeframes in ways that are not even experienced as impossible. 

\L/party/S\guide\D/ 

That same day, KG and I met to discuss dancefloor utopianism and the party happening later that week. Having played in a punk band, visited art school, and contributed to movies, Kyle reflected on how he’d perhaps dedicated more energy to hosting parties than any other Art forms. The Long Island-born explained that he enjoyed 'working architecturally' with the quietness of a soul that has found its own love language and has dutifully accepted the hardships involved in honing that skill.

In the invitation for the LSD party, KG wrote: “I am oscillating between [...] the despair I am feeling awaking to another bombastic declaration of war today or the sense of peace and connectedness that often comes for me around the summer solstice in New York City, as our interior lives spill out into the streets and parks. [...] This morning, more images and accounts of death and destruction and suffering in places I’ve never been and I found myself wondering if and how, amidst utter chaos, people there are finding ways of reveling, of communing, of worshiping the sun and the sea. [...] My gratitude [...] about living in this place shifted to an even more immense gratitude for living on this planet and not just in my beloved city. From that perspective I was reminded that the concept of nation states and borders and governments and militaries and visas are just ideas that humans have conjured up.” 

In introducing my work, KG later wrote: “Even more bold (and perhaps more to the point than actually trying to solve a climate crisis by choosing not to fly) is to challenge the assumption that one must follow the script.” This echoed a wider way in which I felt this experiment to be collective and my quest to be seen. At a time when I did not know when and how I could go back “home”, not a single person in the US suggested that a plane was going to be the solution. While some European peers assumed a New York-Berlin flight was next on the list, most of the people I encountered in North America offered their home and asked how they could actually help.  

I didn’t take any of this generosity for granted, knowing how each and every individual I had met was going through their own version of an existential crisis. In fact, LSD’s private RSVP email specified: “Next month, as a result of signing a new lease, I am facing the second in a series of three annual 20% rent increases, putting a strain on an already precarious financial model.  I have no idea how long this project will remain viable, but I am (still) determined to push on into the unknown with the support of this community in hopes of answering all the “what if?”s”

As we walked back from Academy, the record shop we had visited together, KG expended thoughts on radical economics (“We hope that by being transparent regarding our finances, we can keep our model fair and sustainable”) to decentralization of power (“As a white man, I don’t want to be the only one making all the decisions”), I got a better sense of why everyone was so keen to describe the Light and Sound Design project as “intentional”. Kyle kept on coming back to the question: “what do people need?”, a question that has been on my mind so very often too! 

I’d been following the L&SD newsletter since Ceci had put us in touch back in March. In April, Zoë Beery and Kyle sent a letter in which they announced that they had: “decided to leave Substack because of its rock-solid commitment to supporting fascists. [...] It started feeling really urgent in January, when the company launched a freestanding site for a reactionary news outlet founded by Bari Weiss, a journalist who first made a name for herself by trying (and ultimately failing) to get pro-Palestinian professors and students kicked out of Columbia (in 2006! Columbia's been in the wrong on Palestine for decades). Substack also isn't really what we need, since we're not trying to massively grow our subscriber base and then make tons of money off it. Instead, we want to grow slowly, by word of mouth, so that the studio family welcomes in new members thoughtfully and everyone who subscribes finds the newsletter useful.”

It felt good to encounter a community which cultivated a critical approach to social media, both in theory and more importantly in practice, without being radical in a way that would isolate them from contemporary culture (I highly recommend the conversation between Zoë and Kyle in Rave Café 004). The only content in the feed of the L&SD “I*****am” is a series of pictures posted in May 2024 demanding to “stop funding genocide” (shutitdown4palestine.org).  

27.06 - Nono Gigsta at The Lot Radio in New York City, New York

On the podcast of the show I played that Friday on The Lot Radio, a listener made a comment complaining about the “political” message featured towards the end. I cut the sample from an LRB interview Judith Butler had given earlier this year: 

“I want to say that the anti-gender ideology-executive order is only partially about transphobia, it’s inciting transphobia in order to justify and normalize right’s stripping. So, the very first instance was trans people will be stripped of their legal rights, trans-youth will be stripped of their access to gender affirming health care, “these are the words that will not be used in research that is federally funded”. And then we move on to rights of speech, rights of academic freedom. We move on to rights of undocumented peoples, at the same time as this war on Gaza is continuing, in which we see dispossession, displacement and genocidal acts taking place. So how much rights’ stripping can there be?” 

The same listener also lamented about the mic being too low and constantly cutting through the music ⎯ which, said listener however approved of. I actually spoke much less than I thought I would, as I was hoping to shout out to all my friends and half of the North American population aka everyone helping out with this whole project. I’d brought some of the many lucky charms and gifts that I’d been given before and during the journey and showed some of them to the camera. 

As for my not spotting the mic volume being too low or finding mental space to read the several comments about it in the chat, hey, I don’t know it’s radio, these things happen :) Maybe there’s something poetic in that, in my whole-body resisting streams, struggling to mix comfortably or creatively on camera. It’s like a glitch in the matrix, an extension of my relationship to places and people. I actually really enjoyed the studio as a physical space which seemed much more embedded in the local community than I had anticipated. (+ s/o to Coral, Eli, Fiona, Hermi, KG, Mona, Matt &Taryn for coming over). 

Here is the tracklist, including snaps of the tour:

1. Amina Claudine Myers - Ode to my Ancestors
2. Okay Temiz - Johnny Diani Witchdoctors (definitely played this at Nowadays)
3. The Persuader - A Hymn To Him (love how that one blends/doesn’t with the jazz track)
4. 2562 (aka A Made Up Sound aka ex_libris) - Utopia (I used to listen to these two a lot whenever they came out in 2014 and it was fun to re-incorporate them in my current playlists when I refreshed my Rekordbox on the boat).
5. Oceanic - unreleased (alongside Batu’s Meridian, I think this is the track that I played most during this tour and it’s always an absolute highlight. I played Vaporwave01 after it in Durham which was a magical little moment.)
6. Agraybé - Lately (discovered this one when I was booked to play with Agraybé in Chicago.)
7. Akran - Nasty Tool (sometimes I listen to people’s shows when I work out, which is once every 3 weeks atm … but anyway when I get round to it I kind of enjoy having a nice and satisfying little roller in there.)
8. Relativity Lounge - zero-sum (from Mithra in Chicago’s label Satellite Era! In the show, it goes out and comes back again. I’ve been playing around with splitting tracks in two or more parts in my sets.)
9. Viiaan - Azulejo (Jason Code Remix) (remember looking up when I played this in Buffalo and enjoyed seeing people wriggling around in funny ways.)
10. Krys - BING BANG (Chokola) (a very gigsta track, if there ever was one.)
11. Angel Of Origin - Sagittarius G-Star (made it in my weird drums section at Dripping. Obsessed! Also: all profits from this ‘The Climb Has Gotten Steeper, But Climb We Must’ compilation are donated to grassroots transition support initiatives helping trans - particularly those trans people who belong to Black, Asian, multiple ethnicity, transfeminine, immigrant, and working class identities.)
12. Georg-I - Communication (Metrist Remix) (suuuuuper stretched down. I did this experimentally in Portland and it… kinda worked?)
13. 3WA ft Breez - Yoshimitsu (BANGER! The scenes when I played this in Detroit…) 
14. Yoko - Loco (a Denver producer and I actually played it at Intimat!)
15. Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly - Balada Para La Corporatocracia (Andy Moor Remix) (a very gigsta track too, if there were ever two)
16. Barker - Stochastic Drift (I played this between Seb H. and René Audiard around 4am in Pittsburgh which, looking back, the crowd was incredibly patient to follow me these ways at that time of the night).
17. Currency Audio - The State Of Being Present <<<333

30.06 Last Saturday Dance with Dominika Mazurová, KG and Nono Gigsta at Light and Sound Design in New York City, New York

As the LSD party was invite-only, I hadn’t shared much info except a passing mention of a NYC set in a secret location. I received more emails asking to join than I could include on my RSVP list, which contributed to my acute realization that this was probably my last show ever in the US. The heart ache was already strong. 

But entering the loft that night, I tuned into a sense of eternality. I remembered that Robert Creeley quote in the book that the Buffalo crew had given me: 

Everything’s before you

were here.

I tiptoed my way towards the booth, watching Dominika dancing simple joyful movements. I could sense her reciprocal relationship with the place: how it had shaped her sense of what to share, how she had, too, contributed to it in so many ways. I wish she and KG would have played all night long.  

I don’t think I would be the right person to describe what happened during the 7 hours that I played. I guess it was a fairly romantic set, even by Nono standards.

But I do have one vivid memory of marvelling at the bodies spiralling, barely looking at me. I could sense the pure pleasure they derived from their own and collective movements. My fingers spontaneously picked Is It All Over My Face which morphed into the instrumental of Oscar G’s Out of Your Mind. Suddenly it was Arthur Russel⎯who brought KG back to NY⎯and NAP’s selection from last month’s LSD all dancing along with us through a similar bassline. We were the delicious sprouts of a dancefloor that was sacred in all the ways its participants⎯past, present, future⎯are attending to it. If time and space were bent, here, it was with deep reverence. 

The end of sets is always odd. Sometimes I clap along because I want to thank everyone who made the moment happen and then, as I catch myself doing this, I awkwardly disappear, secretly begging everyone to stop. 

But after my last song at LSD, something else happened. Or another way to put it: nothing happened. Not a clap, not a sound, not a single movement. I let my collapsing body slowly sink behind the decks. Some time passed, in silence, and I started wondering if there was an issue, some kind of emergency. As I was kneeling down in the booth, I looked up towards KG who was standing straight in a meditative state, his eyes entirely closed, an undecipherable expression on his face. Was this a New York thing? 

Time feels different now—she remains herself, but also an echo of her love, a by- blow, a not-quite. (p. 126)

When KG finally dropped the needle on the next record, the entire dancefloor erupted into a loud, euphoric roar. I didn’t want to leave NYC.

JULY: Unexpected port of call

I did not want to leave NYC and did not know how I would.  

The plan, when I arrived on May 12^th with Artemis, had been to travel back with Anemos on July 8^th. Same company, different sail cargo. Economic and weather complications disrupted these schedules—that return was no longer an option. During the seven weeks which followed, I spent a large amount of energy and time trying to find a solution. 

One of the reasons I insisted on my constant tiredness in the first part of this newsletter, is that I don’t want to over romanticize the conditions of this tour. Collective energies and many privileges allowed this very unique and soulful journey and if I could go back in time (haha!), I would do it all over again. But perhaps slightly differently.

My agent was so generous in coordinating with promoters when my fees were modest and her cut small. Thank you Eilidh! For the sake of context, I should say that I took charge of the travel part, navigating an entirely new transport system, with vast distances and poor infrastructure—a system far away from deserving the adjective “public”. I spent a lot of time managing bookings, dealing with unpredictability and I rarely rested on trains. The looming uncertainty of my return imposed a final layer of stress.  

On the first day of July, I sat in Central Park, making a list of options: 

-     I could wait for Anemos which, at that point, was scheduled to leave NYC on August 1^st at the earliest. I would be in Europe anywhere between two to four weeks after departure. This implied cancelling some or most of the seven gigs I was supposed to play between the end of July and the end of August and would put me at risk of overstepping my 3-month authorization on the US territory where, by the way, everything was very expensive.

-      I could try to find another sail boat (thanks to everyone who took the plea in my last newsletter so seriously!! I love you). I was aware the options were limited, having learnt enough about them in the past five years. There is a chance this might change in the future with initiatives like Neoline x Sailcoop, Flotilla4Change, etc. In the meantime, I was hoping my new sailor pals could find me a little last-minute hop somewhere but despite hours of research, nothing quite lined up.   

-       I could get on the Queen Mary 2 which was supposed to leave NYC on … exactly July 8th! However, a cruise ship is estimated to emit around 2x as much CO₂e as a Trans-Atlantic flight and beyond personal footprints, I wasn’t sure spending a week with wealthy retirees matched the spirit of the game.   

-       I could fly from somewhere in North America to somewhere in Europe. 

I made my way towards the Metropolitan, hoping that its collection would help me zoom out, confront me with different scales and re-connect me with something bigger than this singular situation. Intentions needed to be redefined. 

I was walking through the rooms of the museum until I came across a long wooden crocodile shaped structure: “… ideas of voyaging—across the open seas and over thresholds separating ancestral and human realms—are strongly evoked in the arts of Oceania. Asmat artists navigate these dangerous liminal spaces by producing large scale WUKAMON (spirit canoes) and ancestral poles.”

The title of this section said: “The Ocean is both the past and the future.” 

In NYC and at present, we were nearing 5pm. I was asked to leave the building as the MET was closing. In the streets, I watched people hastily running under the rain before I looked up towards the sky, trying to feel every single drop. Pearls of ocean were rolling down my face. 

What about Artemis? Was that a fifth option? When we’d parted ways in May, the boat’s schedule estimated the crew would arrive and leave Cuba some time in mid-June. Ever since, I’d stayed in touch with the captain who kept me updated with their journey (“nice weather, barbecue, no wind, very slow crossing”). 

What were they up to that day? “Hoping to arrive in less than a week-maybe before, maybe later. Never been to Havana, no idea how long we’ll need to unload.” I still had some gigs to play in Canada and Cuba felt far.  

On the subway between Manhattan and Brooklyn, I did some research on the embargo. The exact same day, Trump had signed a memorandum imposing tighter restrictions on Cuba, reversing some measures introduced by the Biden administration. The existing ban on American tourists going to Cuba would be enforced more severely. At present, there were only 12 categories of travel which were permitted such as family and educational visits, humanitarian projects and sports competitions. Tourism wasn’t included but USians had the option of ticking some of the other categories to visit the Communist-run country.  Though I was travelling with a French passport, it was unclear whether I could ever go back to the US with the same document, which was an issue if I didn’t make it in time before the boat left. 

More questions remained. It was a gamble. Yet the fifth was my favored option. The ocean.

Leaving NYC on July 4^th was my accidental fuck the fourth move out of the country. Thankfully, crossing the border was smooth. I told them I was visiting someone who’d made the Trans-Atlantic crossing with us and had now settled in Canada, which was true.

We met up. The first thing he said was how much he missed the ocean. “I’m sure she misses you too, I replied. You know, you’ve become kind of famous. When I go to gigs and people have read the newsletters, they sometimes mention the captain or the enthusiastic passenger.” 

And I had missed him: we shared an idiosyncratic way to process information, awkward socializing skills and a certain obsession with non-human forms of life. I gave him my binoculars as a present. I couldn’t stop thinking of his excited screams in the presence of dolphins every time I looked at them. He could use them for birdwatching in Canadian forests, until he would be able to observe marine life again when he moves back to Europe, in two or three years. He is not planning to fly back and forth in the meantime. 

 04.07 - Layer 05 with Dizzy Play, DJ Hi Chew, Jaijiu, Jujube, Nono Gigsta, Sweets Of The Night & T Nex in Montreal, Québec

He’d never really been to a rave-or-however-we-call-it. It was nice to see the weird thing we do through his enchanted eyes. The Layer05 crew had brought Sako's sound system, Pomelo, in a hidden forest-y area on the outskirts of Montreal. I realized it was the first time I played outside since the beginning of the tour—I enjoyed how sounds bounced in the air with no walls to restrict them.

The rave wasn’t exactly legal and sure enough the police showed up exactly when I was going to play my first track, though at least we got to enjoy Sweets of the Nights’s amazing set (which included Jan Loup’s track Phonomènes!!). Do I owe it to my former lives behaving exceptionally well that the cops actually allowed us to continue partying? They walked around the site finding it to be safe enough, and simply asked to stop the campfire and to keep the site clean afterwards. The infinite respect I already had for the organizers and their crew instantly multiplied by 2. (still—still—not loving the police)

I started my 3 hours set with Call Di Police, as the sun rose from behind the trees. 

My body would revolt the alarm if I allowed it to go to sleep. I tried to stay awake in those short intervals of time between the rave, a quick shower at the host’s place and my train towards Toronto. I realized a few stops too late that I was headed in the wrong direction. Would I make it in time to the central station?

I tried to breathe deeply, behind an increasingly heavy curtain of exhaustion, sensing panic creeping in. I struggle making sense of conventional reality at the best of times; when I'm well-rested and safe, I can enjoy the fluid interplay of perception, but under stress or fatigue, it becomes harder to shape a coherent interpretation that connects with the world as it’s commonly understood. I can’t decide the difference between past, present and future and colors all blur into one another. My fingers played with Coral—Taryn’s anti-stress present: the star with the eyes—trying to comfort myself into its “solidity”.

I arrived 5 minutes after the train to Toronto had left Montreal. An enormous rush was throbbing through my temples. I was about to be sick. I scanned the station for a bathroom. 

She thrashes with the pain of growth inside her: new organs bloom from autosynthesized stem cells to shoulder old bits of her away. Green vines twine her heart and seize it, and she vomits and sweats until the vines’ rhythm matches hers. A second skin grows within her skin, popping, blistering. She claws herself off upon the rocks like a snake and lies transformed. And more: A different mind plays around the edges of her own. (p. 125)

Some kind of limit had been reached right there, in front of that cubicle. Something resisted, my whole body and soul rejected it. It wasn’t just the transport difficulties, constant sleep deficit or the ever-growing expectations on my performances. It was all these miles and kilometers crossed, the thickness of space passed through, the webs inside the webs suddenly resurfacing. I could no longer metabolize any of it. 

So much humility in that moment. Those places didn’t want to be extracted from or flown over. Those places wanted to transform me. Or else it wasn’t slow gigging.

On the phone, my best friend reassured me: “You’re almost there.” Almost where? Where was the arrival of all this? Two hours later, I sat on the next train.

05.07 - Hiroki, Nono Gigsta and Saff at Bambi’s in Toronto, Ontario

I was sad to miss Saff opening the night, as they’d been so caring through the process of organizing the event, helping me through my missed train—and later sending me off with glutenfree baking goods! I hadn’t had a croissant in a decade! But I was lucky enough to hear Hiroki playing though. The producer of Fallen Angels and many more beloved tracks had the dancefloor truly boiling at peak time.  

By the time I made it behind the decks, DJing was the only thing I was capable of doing. A direction took shape in the first tracks that I worried was going to be too weird and quickly realised I couldn’t escape from. 

At some point, I found myself playing Beneath’s Lifted and wondering what would have happened if he hadn’t repeatedly believed in me as a DJ all those years ago. Suddenly, Max’s head appeared through the crowd. A staunch Beneath fan, Max had shown up in Toronto for his fifth Nono Gigsta set in North America (shout-out to Buffalo and New York crews for respectively completing four stops on this tour). 

This set contained everything—all of the performances of the past few weeks. I didn’t even know I was capable of playing the way I did that night. In the streets in front of the venue, someone asked me how it had felt to have travelled all these places by land and sea. I had no idea what to say—not because I didn’t care or could barely speak, but because playing that final set was the closest I could come to expressing how it all felt. 

In the bus towards Detroit, I couldn’t sleep edition number 2147431 of this trip. I listened to Richie Hawtin, thinking about the time the Canadian got caught at the border in 1995 and was forbidden entrance on US territory. 

Core Ten, by Plastikman

from the album Consumed

Richie HawtinJeremy Cherfas

They got us off the bus before Detroit to control our documents. We waited in line with heads slightly tilted towards the floor, an anxious solidarity through our silence. There was a huge portrait of the American President on the wall. It was framed like a renaissance painting. I caught myself making a mental list of all the ways in which the Trump administration had drastically worsened its border policies and extended its travel bans, largely according to racist principles. I diverted back to practicing my cover speech.

At the end of his interrogation, the agent asked me what my highlight had been so far. I hadn’t expected that one and before I fully blanked, I heard myself saying “New York City”. He raised his eyes and his voice: “NEW YORK?!” I gasped. He looked shocked and sounded confrontational. This clearly wasn’t the right answer. I considered adding some nuances or simply correcting myself but he just handed my passport back: “Well, if that’s your thing.” 

And so now, I was almost accidentally back in Detroit for a few hours. Kinda weird. Also kinda not, at this point. I stretched my legs, bought snacks for the journey and a phone call with Ugo on the stairs in front of Submerge. 

In Toledo, the train to Miami was late. I had to be in Cuba within 48h. I was looking up alternatives. The train still wouldn’t come. 

Should I ask for help? Build a team to come up with an alternative plan? I looked around in the station: it was just me, one middle-aged guy reading a Philip K Dick novel and several Hamish families. I heard a solemn voice inside saying: “the year was 2025”, as if I was trying to convince myself. 

Just like that, the train appeared. I barely remember those 44 hours.

08.07

The Floridian arrived around midnight in Miami. Artemis was leaving Cuba in twelve hours. Tick, tock, tick, tock.  

Darkness had fallen on the city and I had a whiplash to the bus terminal in Vegas, when I ended up renting a last-minute car halfway through the night. There must be a solution, there is always a solution.  

Another call with bestie: “What solution? Did you think you were going to show up at the port with a little hitch-hiking sign saying ‘Cuba’ hoping some random yet trustworthy guy would be standing there with his arms crossed like he’d been waiting for you all along? That he’d say “no problem”, throw your backpack on his boat and sail you perfectly in time in Havana? Even if you found this person right now, it would be tough to make it in time.” 

Apparently, a pedal effect had been plugged in my mind as I heard his last words echo: TIIIME-time-time-time-ti-ttt…. I laughed pretending I hadn’t been optimistic or naïve enough to imagine the trustworthy stranger appearing like a genie out of the lamp as a real possibility

I hadn’t and yet I had. I’d spent the last few days reading all the history of failed ferry plans, making calls to someone-who-knew-someone-who-etc. and holding on to one vague reddit comment of someone who claimed they’d very recently entered Cuba from the US with a sailboat.  

Although this time/space/love experiment was never solely about carbon counts, it remains one of the parameters we were playing in. It’s fiction and it’s also science.

According to atmosfair.de one single flight between New York and London emits 1,5t CO₂e which, depending on the source you compare it with, is equivalent or much more than the average sustainable footprint of a person per year (Atmosfair.de adopted the often cited 1,5t per year but a 2001 Akenji et al. suggested we should actually orientate ourselves towards 0,7t CO₂e). On June, 19 a study published by Piers M. Forster et al. and which includes over 60 climate scientists indicated that the window to stay under 1,5 °C is now just about two years.

A one-way flight from Miami to Havana would emit 67kg CO₂e per person. In other words, this route would emit x22 less than a Trans-Atlantic flight. 

 The bizarre thing about all these calculations is that they are empty. Time is constructed. But that doesn’t mean none of it is real or that the stakes aren’t high or higher than ever.

I arrived at the airport with a few hours to wait before the first flight to Cuba. The corridors were endless, bathed in a bright, clinical light. Some people were trying to sleep through the noise of a piercingly loud engine scrubbing the floors. I couldn’t ground myself in the land beneath my feet, so I focused on the person driving the sanitizing machine: What are they thinking about right now? When do they sleep? What do they dream about? What are their favorite food, their favorite animal, their favorite song? How much do they get paid? 

I called another friend who’s an activist and fellow mobility justice campaigner:

-  I think I’m just about to fly.

-  Well, even Greta flew.

-   Greta was forcibly put on a plane because she protested against a genocidal state by showing up on a flotilla with a bunch of other activists …

-  You’re stuck in an increasingly authoritarian country with a visa that is running out, and very much the wrong visa by the way, after having crossed borders and thousand of kilometres by land and sea.

-   Shows where I mostly played other people’s music in middle-class environments when probably we should actually have spent those weekends strategizing and protesting. I don’t know. I’m sorry. Maybe I sound a bit …

-  Nono, you sound exhausted. Look at it this way: maybe that flight will determine what’s worth fighting for and how. For now, get out of there and who knows, you might even enjoy the view above the clouds. And, please, have a nap before you start your revolution.

09.07

I wasn’t exactly overjoyed. 

Perhaps there is magic to be felt in the miracle of floating in a bird-like engine, but that magic didn’t sing in my blood. All I could see was the giant plastic container that separated me from the sky. 

I wondered what my life would look like if I allowed those sanitised palaces and heavy flying boxes to be a part of the package. Would I be more rested? Would I have more energy to keep on top of communication? Would I be a different friend or lover? Would I be a better or a worse musician? What stories would I tell? Would I spend more time on different kinds of disruptions? Maybe, maybe not. Impossible to know. 

As we landed in Cuba, my instrument of perception was completely shut down. I wanted to marvel at suddenly being dropped on a Caribbean Island. I felt nothing. I walked to the bathroom at the airport and had a flashback of the painfully overwhelming density that had seized me in front of that cubicle in Montreal. And then I felt things: profound sadness but, also, underneath, so much, so so much gratitude for the Earth articulating itself through us.   

The thing about imagination is that our Western cultures conceptualize it as an activity that occurs in individual brains. What happens when we picture imagination as something which takes place in bodies, single and collective, a process from below, around and beyond? 

10.07 

It all hit me 24 hours after we’d taken off from Miami. Perhaps this would have been the time required to sail between Florida and Cuba. My instrument of perception was travelling behind me, still committed to the Earth. At least one of us was!!!

It hit me and the contrast was stark. In the US, in the day or in the dark, whether there is someone in the room or not, the lights always seemed to stay on. Cuba had power cuts and shortages of all sorts. 

Our boat had been scheduled to leave on the 9^th but the port formalities in Havana didn’t quite go as planned and the crew was struggling to gather the food necessary to cross the Atlantic back the other way. The U.S. embargo, import dependency, a suffering agricultural sector, rationing, fuel and power shortages, the massive inflation that has happened since the 2021 currency reform and an economic crisis that has escalated since the covid-19 pandemic made it difficult to source food. Plus, the guards at the port would only allow a certain amount to be brought aboard in one day. 

I jumped in on the mission. In one of life’s bizarre tricks, one of the three passengers who had travelled with Artemis (it had been me, the student who had relocated in Montreal and this third person), happened to be in Cuba. He’d asked me to bring dollars as economic conditions, banking restrictions and international sanctions made it difficult to withdraw cash.

He helped me buy a sim card from ETECSA, the state-owned telecommunication company. There are no others. The place looked like an office, there was no advertising. My friend and I discussed the complex ways in which revolutions and theories play out in space and time or debated about communism vs. anarchism.

We found a state-run market which sold mangos, pineapples, onions, cucumbers, potatoes, and limes. All the food was very ripe which posed an issue before spending three weeks at sea. The eggs, too, made the cook nervous: it was hot outside and power shortages meant they may not have been kept cool. People would sell a few things from their doors: pasta, sweets, one brand of shampoo. 

Meanwhile, I had had the freedom of entering the country—with money—and was about to leave it on a sailboat. I’d felt powerless in the States. This bore no comparison. But what mystified me the most, was how much, whether I am in the US or not, I am constantly fed news about its demise, its importance. All along, history continued and continues to unfold in an infinity of places. 

Less than 24 hours left in Cuba, which—obviously?—I was already falling in love with and where I doubt I would ever come back. What did the deities of this place want to teach me? I remembered Angus’ words in his 2016 RA piece about Cuba: “music is everywhere”. A lot changed on the island in the last ten years, but this much was true. I walked through the streets for hours, in awe of the innumerous sources of music constantly harmoniously colliding into one another. Havana was my new favorite DJ!

11.07

That was it. I was back on Artemis. 

Our team, this time, consisted of the captain (who’d kept me updated), 14 crew members (whom I’d never met before) and two passengers (including Nono). The other traveller was Australian and I casually told him about a recent booking request for me to play near Melbourne next year. He proceeded to discuss all the potential ways I could attempt to reach his country without flying. Any time I’d hear his mouth reducing a geographical segment to a sentence, I sensed tension inside. “You know what, I think I should really sleep this one off first.”  

The sail through the bay was superb: Old Havana displayed turquoise stripes and pink pre-war Chevrolets. On Starboard, the Christ sculpture shined white amidst a plethora of Royal Poincianas in full bloom. Kids laughed, ran and jumped in the water. 

Before switching my phone off, I re-listened to one of my favorite voice notes, the way one listens to a favorite track on repeat before being separated from it.

“I’ve just had some thoughts and I’m going to try to share them before they vanish.”

I can almost hear the beat from the party my best friend had taken a break from to send me some words, feel the pulse of excitement that runs through his veins at the peak of his enjoyment, smell the damp soil that surrounds the clarity of his midnight insights.  

“I realized something: all the evidence that we thought we could get away with. All the things they sing about in songs and poems … They will all happen to us. And exactly like that.”

There’s a pause. I hear him breathing. The depth of the queer partnership that has united us for over three quarters of our lives has taught me to hear what unfolds between the lines. I’ve listened to it a million times but this one time it cuts even deeper. 

We transition through life and evidence plays through us. Some things we thought we knew, we actually don’t but, I hear him saying, “that’s ok”. Others just become truer, truer in ways “we can’t even fully grasp right now”. A lot happened on this journey that I would never have imagined. So much of it turned my inner maps upside down. For this, I am most grateful. But the things that matter, they feel truer than ever, truer in ways I would die a million times for, in defense of what I love. (p.96)

The voice note ends: “I love you. I love you, so profoundly.”

His past self laughs on the phone. I switch it off and my present self smiles too. An endless silence inside. Suddenly, that silence after my set at LSD sinks in. It’s like listening to the Earth’s heartbeat on acid, the pause between two pulses extends forever. This time, I don’t shy away from eternity, I sense straight into it. Something truly sacred opens up. 

I remember the track KG played as that silence simultaneously ended, the last track I played to end my last show in Toronto:

A thunderstorm rolls from the water towards our ship, like the cascading drums in that track. I hear the pulse coming back. The sound of our souls. We are reborn.

xx

Nono

PS: let me know if you'd like me to record this as a podcast?

Thank you Anne, Ceci, Carole, Kyle, Max, Mona, Ollie W, Ollie Z, Sarj, Taryn, Ugo and many many many more. I love you <3 

On the road again: 

27.07 - Wheel of Fortune at Pe:rsona - It’s unlikely the boat will arrive in time for this gig. I’m heartbroken that I’ll miss friends coming from Berlin, the Netherlands, the UK and eeeverywhere in France. But “I am in you and you are in me.” Looking forward to hearing and reading reports of this magical gathering. 

09.08 - Femme Bass Mafia in Berlin - I’ll only be in town for a handful of days. Come catch me on the dancefloor or later in September.

15.08 - La Route du Rock in St Malo - I used to work as an intern for this festival back in 2011, the year Aphex Twin played! Excited to help out for the first time as a DJ.

16.08 - Iota in Oléron - Heard kyute things and the line-up is kewl!!

24.08 - TBC in Ljubjana, Slovenia

30.08 - Czirp Czirp in Vienna - Apparently, it’s a silent disco?! Always excited to try out new things.

31.08 - 53 100 near Sienna - On closing duties for this fest I adored playing at two years ago. 

11.09 - Workshop, panel and DJ set at Paris Electronic Week 

21.09 - TBC in London, UK

11.10 - TBA in Poland, if you know you know :)

07.11 - TBA in Brussels, Belgium