Eris Drew describes herself as an ecstatic healer, a home anthropologist, and a raver at heart. Playing music for people is only the start of explaining what she does as a DJ. For her, DJing fits into a wider philosophy based on the transformative power of music, inspired by shamanism, ritualistic healing and her experiences as a raver in Chicago in the '90s. On the way home from a rave in 1994, Eris had a vision of an ancient healing technology embedded in all music. She calls this "positive goddess force" the Motherbeat. It has been her guiding light ever since, eventually carrying her to come out as trans. Today it remains central to everything she does. When she steps behind the decks, her mission is to send love through the speakers and heal the people on the dance floor.

In a short space of time, Eris has gone from playing small queer parties in the US to the major clubs and festivals of Europe. I sat down with her in London days after she played at Unsound festival, and before a three-gig weekend starting with a set at Corsica Studios that night. Throughout a three-hour conversation that covered everything from alchemy to ego dissolution, she struck me as a deeply reflective and empathetic person, one quick to make a joke at her own expense, covering her mouth as she giggled.

Later that night at Corsica Studios, I could see in action everything she had told me that afternoon. From the minute she started her set, the energy didn't dip below a ten, with both Eris and the entire room feverishly dancing from start to finish. The common thread running through her records was a bouncy broken rhythm and an urgent ecstasy, blending new bass and breakbeat records with old school rave classics. She even scratched in field recordings of bird noises, one of the special vinyl techniques she'd demonstrated earlier that day.

Towards the end of her two-hour set she eased into a gentle euphoria, playing Disk's "The Spirit," a track I recognised from her mixes and one of the records she's written a magic sigil on. She ended with "Hold Me (T4T Embrace Mix)," the standout track from her debut release with Octo Octa on Naive. A song about love, it felt like a fittingly emotional end to a joyous set. Everyone on the dance floor beamed at each other. In a scene which often takes itself too seriously, forgetting the powerfully positive impact music can have, Eris's loving outlook is a breath of fresh air. Her insightful philosophy about DJing, music and rave culture is something we could all learn from.

How was Unsound for you?

Unsound was really good. I was playing in Kamienna, it's an old building next to a train track with big pillars and a wooden floor. They set it up beautifully, but it was tricky with turntables. I had to be careful dancing. I'm not someone who can stand still when I'm DJing, I don't even think it's a good idea. Some people view dancing as being separate to DJing, for me it's part of the technique. If I'm in this state of motion, this ecstatic state, I find myself making different musical decisions. The change I make will be on the 16th or the 32nd—rather than just, "OK, now I'm gonna turn the bass down," my movements on the mixer become part of the dancing, and it leads to weird things happening.

I really relate to that, it's almost like different body parts take on different parts of the track. Do you often face a conflict between dancing and playing records?

Yeah, I have to edit my movements. I figured out a shuffle I can do when it's unstable. The floor's vibrating, and the record ran out to the centre twice. If that had happened to me two or three years ago, I would have been like, "Oh my God! Major fuck up, this is terrible." But the first time this happened when it was a good thing was at TUF in Seattle. It sounded like thunder and the whole room exploded. Ever since then, I embrace it as a chaotic act—it's the universe telling me to have a moment of silence. At Unsound the whole room went nuts when I then scratched in the next record, which I wouldn't have done otherwise, I was just ready to cue a mix. As I'm doing other turntablism techniques, it sounds intentional, like a runout. In Greek mythology, Eris is the goddess of chaos, so if I'm going to have the name I have to not get upset when things like that happen.

How does the concept of chaos play into your DJing?

It's something I've embraced. When you're embracing chaos, accidents and mistakes become part of the creative act. Things people view as technical problems I try to convert into something musical. At TUF I was having terrible feedback problems. It's not something I would ever talk about after the party, because people are like, "It was great, what are you talking about?" It cheapens their experience. But I played this Orbital record, it starts with quiet sounds, and it's feeding back like crazy. I had to let it play for a minute and a half, there's no way around it. I realised if I move the pitch fader I can manipulate the pitch of the feedback. So I created a drone and a rhythm with it, it became part of the piece. Afterwards people were like, "That part was amazing!" It's like, "That was all a huge mistake!" But instead of running from it, it's a very chaos magic concept to run to it. I also treat my record bag like a tarot deck. Sometimes I'll play a record and I'll know exactly where I'm going next, but oftentimes it's more of a pull, you're looking through and suddenly something grabs you. At that TUF party I got into this loop of like, "If you pull the record, you have to play it. Don't put it back." Now I follow that. There are occasions where deeper in my brain, not in my heart, I'll think, "No Eris, this isn't the way you want to go right now." But more often than not I try to honour that.

Do you find that a record will jump out at you, and it's only halfway through playing it you realise why? Like it knew this was the perfect moment.

Well, yeah. I was playing at a festival in Mexico, in a cenote, which is an ancient sinkhole. It was on an extreme incline, so it was hard for people to dance. I was in a weird emotional place, and I started pulling record after record that this guy Elliot had given me in the early '90s, from around the time I started talking about the Motherbeat in 1994. At that time I was hardcore raving, taking loads of ecstasy and acid, going out with my friends every weekend to warehouse party after warehouse party. I was living this life constantly. Elliot was a toxic figure in my life, he played into the suppression of my gender and identity for so long. Weirdly, he gave me some of the most beautiful music in my collection. But I was at a crossroads in my life, I could either come out and embrace that, or I could run away from that. I had a very conservative middle class upbringing—this is 1994, 1995, no one understood what trans was.

These records took on a bittersweet tone for me. Hardkiss records, early hardcore. I couldn't listen to "Papua New Guinea" by Future Sound Of London for almost 20 years. Anytime I'd play them, I'd immediately think about him and that time. I wasn't treating myself well, I had friends get into heroin, I had friends die. These radiant tracks were the soundtrack to our pain. Through this process of coming out, more of them made their way back into my bag. I realised during the set in Mexico, I had played six in a row. It was Hawke, "3 Moods In A Gurple Parden" and that was the first time I'd played it. I just started crying. I was like, "Wait, what is this all about?"

I processed it with CCL from TUF for hours afterwards, who was also at the festival. We both felt that the process of being who we are in the world, and forming communities with people like us, who like this music, is healing us. The records are saying, "You've done so much, you've overcome this trauma, you've transformed this music that used to mean something you couldn't even face, and now you're making people dance to it, you're feeling love and beauty through it." It was a big letting go, like the records wanted me to have a catharsis. I cried my eyes out during that set, I kept playing, and ever since then I know what that is, and I've started talking about it. I see DJing as a form of collage. You take existing cultural elements and by combining them you transform them into something that has new meaning, it has you in it. That's what's happening here, people are collaging these existing cultural artefacts and creating something really radiant and new with it, and exploring their identities through it.

When did you start DJing?

It was during that year in 1994. I'd been an "electronic musician" for a long time. I had an industrial band with my friends called The Flaming Clockwork Bunnies. We had this toy rabbit that you'd wind up and it would dance. We lit it on fire and it became our mascot. It was stupid, we were 16. The first club I went to was called Medusa's. It was before ecstasy culture hit youth culture in America, late '80s, early '90s. Medusa's was somewhere you could go when you were underage as it was a juice bar until midnight. The top floor was a video mixing room. This was a big deal in the '80s and '90s, they would mix videos together, and people would actually dance to this process.

Did they have music with the videos?

Yeah, they were music videos on VHS tapes. VHS has excellent audio, so it could be played on a system. The middle floor had punk shows with skinheads, both anti-racist and racist in the same place. Their shoelaces would show which side they were on. Then downstairs, DJs would play both industrial and house. It would be ecstatic house, then they'd play Nitzer Ebb, and people would form circles and do mosh pit kind of dancing. It was a wild place, and me and my friends came out of that. We were industrial kids who thought house music was cool too. I'd been collecting records just so I could have stuff, most music wasn't on CD and there was no digital, being a geeky kid I wanted to own records. Rave got imported in '92 and you weren't seeing big warehouse parties until '93, maybe '94. When I started going to these other parties it was a different thing to Medusa's. I was trying to express my queerness too, and that's when I was like, "This is me, this is my scene, this is my culture."

I started following this DJ, Mystic Bill, who you still hear about today. He was interesting because rave plopped itself on top of the existing house scene in Chicago. On Milwaukee Avenue on any night there would be 150 people, mostly black, Hispanic, very gay, in a little loft getting the fuck down. Billy would play both those parties and the raves. The rave would be gabber and trance, then he would play more ecstatic sets in the morning, playing a mix of Chicago warehouse music and imports, cool Belgian stuff, early UK tech house. His name's Mystic Bill, so there's a hippie queer mysticism interwoven in all this. He was my guy, and I would go to the raves and these house parties, and I just got the bug. By the end of the winter of 1994, I graduated school and my final act of living at home was to buy turntables. They're still the ones I have today, they've only been repaired twice.

I'm assuming they're Technics?

They're MK-IIs, so they're old ones. That year I decided I wanted to be a DJ, but I didn't hang with a crew, I was very much teaching myself. I had one really nice friend, his name was Mazi, his moniker is Audio Soul Project. He had good technique and I would watch him. But it was really a lot of time in my dorm room at University Of Illinois, Chicago, which I got kicked out of in 1995 for raving too hard. My first set was at UIC, they would do Friday night parties where students could DJ. I convinced these guys to let me play four records. I mixed them all terribly. I played Deee-Lite's "Bring Me Your Love," the Hardfloor remix of Robert Armani's "Circus Bells," a song on an English label called "Who's No 1" by Dig The New Breed. Funny thing is, these are all records I still play.

It's interesting you're still playing some of those records. Do you feel like your sound has evolved since then?

Really, it's weird, my style is very much where I was in 1994. A few years ago, this ecstatic idea started coming back, rave wasn't a dirty word again. All of a sudden breaks weren't a joke, it was like, "What cool new things can we do with breaks?" A lot of the records are the same, but the DJing is so different. When I started I was not doing any turntablism techniques, I was just trying to make one record go into the next. There was a real orthodoxy in Chicago, you're either a hip-hop turntablist or junglist, or a house DJ. House DJs didn't touch the record, scratching wasn't cool. Even by 1994 house was an established artform that had been quickly appropriated across the world, so people in Chicago had a protectionist attitude. As I repressed myself and my expression of gender, that went into all areas of my life, my relationships, my mixing, the records I would let myself play. My sound used to be darker. When I started Hugo Ball, it was a pretty chaotic time in my life. I'd gotten divorced, I was processing a lot of frustration and anger, I felt like my life was over.

What did the Hugo Ball party change for you? Was that a significant moment?

It was important. It was a harebrained idea. Two 40-year-olds deciding to form a crew and do an art party in smartbar, which was a very housey-house place at the time. I started it in 2012 with Justin Long and it became the most popular party at smartbar. It got my name out there and gave me confidence. I also formed an important relationship out of it with Sold. I'd buried the Motherbeat philosophy right in the middle of the Hugo Ball manifesto. Sold picked up on it and we started talking about these ideas. They, along with my girlfriend Jennifer, were very supportive in making the Motherbeat my guiding principle. Why not take your myth and run with it?

So was the Motherbeat concept just a myth from when it came to you in '94 until you put it into action at Hugo Ball?

It was always there with me. My friend James and I, we had taken a bunch of acid at this party Mystic Bill was playing. It was a proper rave set-up, you don't see the DJ, it's just a monolithic wall of sound. Everyone was facing the stack. We leave and it's still in our ears, our blood, our bodies. It was a foggy Chicago morning, my other friend who was driving us home could barely see. The music's off as my friend's nervous, so all James and I hear is the air conditioner. We start hearing rhythms from the air conditioner, and my friend looks at me and says, "It's the Motherbeat." I was like, "Yes. It is!" It was one of those synchronised acid moments where you're having the same experience. I realised this music is not just futuristic computer stuff. I was an '80s child, and rave was sold to us as the futurist movement, it wasn't rock & roll. I realised that the music actually contains something universal that's been there since the beginning. I didn't have that in the seconds I was looking at my friend. My processing evolved over the years. This experience revealed to me the healing technology embedded in music. It's there, whether it's people doing ritual music in indigenous culture, or a rave party.

Since I was closeted for so many years, Motherbeat was my way of recognising the feminine energy I perceived in the music. I had that experience not because I'm some special person, but because I needed to see the music as a gateway into the feminine. For so long, the only time I would express this without filtering myself was when I would dance, and listen to these records by myself and wear a dress. I didn't understand it at the time, but I knew there was a connection. The music carried me to this place of coming out, and now I get to live my art and share it with people, so she's been taking care of me. I put it in the Hugo Ball manifesto, but I only told everyone what it was last year when I published the YouTube reading. I had spent that year studying magic, ancient religions, psychedelic ideas, chaos magic, taking in an anthropological view. Trying to form some context around it. I wrote that right after the TUF party, because it was such a magical experience. I believed it at that point in a way I never had before. Suddenly other people could feel this thing that had been my personal ideology, my guiding light.

You've spoken a lot about the TUF party, it sounds really special.

It was unbelievable. Just before I played at TUF I'd played in the forest of Pennsylvania during an amazing eclipse with other trans artists, in a very queer, safe environment. I played on this tiny stage in the forest. We cut all the lights, and every time there was a breakdown or quiet part of the music all you could hear were these insects. It felt like a campfire ritual. My body was changing, I was having a sort of puberty at age 40, which was pretty weird, but also kind of magical. I got to TUF and all the debris from the forest was in the bottom of my record bag, and I spread it around the booth, kind of witchy stuff. I was really letting go, letting myself do these things. I start playing in the dark and the sun's coming up behind me. By the end no one's even looking at me, they're all worshipping the sun, their eyes are closed. I kept leaving the booth to dance with everyone. We looked like a bunch of hippies, like pictures you see of '60s love-ins, but in the nicest way. That's when I realised this idea of a positive goddess force is real, and others can feel it too. At that party I really started playing with channelling energy when I DJ.

What do you mean by channeling energy?

It's hard to explain, but I have a technique now. When I'm in the flow state, and I'm in a magical place, I form a mandala in front of me with my eyes closed. It's like a geometric sun circulating. I send messages and energy through it to the crowd. I'll say something like, "I love you," or breathe in deep and send a feeling through it. At first I was like, it doesn't matter whether this is real, because it makes you feel good and it grounds you and centres you. Maybe I've just done too many psychedelics over the years so I can create holograms with my eyes closed. A lot of people can access visionary states through breathing and stuff like that, you don't have to be on drugs.

Do you do this sober?

I've done it sober, I've done it microdosing too. But yes I can do it sober. I thought that drugs were necessary for a while, it wasn't until I saw it during sex that I realised it isn't just about drugs. I've also seen it during dance rituals, and in nature.

Do you try and do this at every gig?

I try to, but it depends. If I'm not emotionally open it won't work. If the turntables aren't working, or someone just misgendered me it can be hard. If I'm in an ego state where I'm feeling self-protective, this doesn't work. It's easier in places where I have a relationship with people, it's easier in nature. I didn't do it at Unsound, because of the technical issues I had to stay a little more in my head.

You play only records, is that right?

Yeah, that's right.

Are you often facing technical issues where you can't get into that state? It's well documented that a lot of clubs are not correctly prepared.

Yeah, it can be a real pain in the ass. I'm a nervous wreck going into every gig. What's gonna be the problem this time?

Would you ever want to switch over to USBs?

I have loaded up a memory stick, but when I'm in the flow state I don't go near it. Something I've studied over the past year is alchemy. Most people think alchemy was just people in the Middle Ages trying to turn lead into gold. The more philosophical alchemists were actually fascinated with the idea of a material that could reflect consciousness. I guess records are like alchemy for me, because they are someone's creative extrusion etched into physical form on vinyl. I've had some of them in my collection for 24 years. I have all these memories attached, like I remember Elliot handing me the Hawke record. Each one of them triggers a memory or set of emotions, and just touching them feels like magic. It's inexplicable. It feels like something magically charged with memory and intention.

How do you organise your records then, when you put together these different memories?

A lot of people think I'm this BPM junkie, because all my records have BPMs written on them. If I'm gonna slow a record down, I do need to know what tempo to continue on. So it is useful when I play, but mostly it's to organise my bag. It's a numbering system effectively: I start at the front with slow stuff, going backwards to fast stuff, and I have my field recordings, drops, samples in the very back. This way I'm like, "I want to play 'Acid Rain' by Disk, oh that's about 127, it's gonna be about here in the bag." It helps me find things really fast.

Is that also how you organise your record collection at home? Do they have a sticker on them?

No, no, my record collection at home is a total fucking mess. I have 8,000-9,000 records in a storage locker. They're in shelves but not organised at all. I only started doing the sticker thing a year and a half ago. I would buy these used records with BPM stickers on them, but nobody I know does this anymore. As I was reading about how sigil magic worked, I was like, "OK, I can write other things on my records too." My Disk records are the plainest records ever, white labels that just say "Disk." I thought, why not write on here how the record makes me feel, or what the intention should be when I play it? It reinforces my intentions, someone into magic would say it's like a spell.

Could you explain what a sigil is?

A sigil is a way of doing chaos magic, popularised by Austin Osman Spare. To create a spell and magic you take a word and write it over itself in a way that no one could know what it says. Sigils are symbols that are then mixed together, but they're often words. It's a way to code intent, just the act of doing it is a magical act.

OK. Do you write those on special records then?

Yeah, it's sometimes writing messages, or I'll put 23 on a record 23 times, as 23 is the number of Eris the goddess of chaos. Part of my whole philosophy is to engage with playfulness. I'm not a scientist, I'm sort of a home anthropologist. These are creative acts, and there's value in that. In a world that seems prescriptive, these personal things can be really beautiful.

Yeah, especially if it gives meaning to you. What's the process of preparing for a gig? Is there more to it than just organising your record bag?

The preparation of the bag isn't really what I'm doing to prepare for a gig. I haven't actually done a full unpack since the forest gig. Before that gig, I was doing these private rituals, thinking a lot about the forest, spending time in nature. I travel with a working set of about 100-120 records, and create a bag from that for each gig. One thing that was interesting about coming to Europe was the cultural differences. When I'm coming to England, it doesn't matter how I feel that morning, there's hardcore in my bag. Playing in Paris right now, maybe I'm not gonna play hardcore for two hours.

Have you found a difference between playing in Europe and America? Has it changed the way you DJ?

It's definitely different. Those first two tours were an uprooting in a sense. Before I started coming to Europe I'd mostly play at queer parties, TUF collective, Hugo Ball, Bunker New York, Midwest Fresh. I went from those to playing like a big warehouse rave in Sheffield, with a very student crowd. I love playing these events, but they're different. Huge crowds where I didn't necessarily see myself in anyone. It was hard to find my grounding. So much of my belief in DJing was having experiences like TUF, where people are writing to me afterwards saying, "I feel healed by this, I feel a sense of visibility after having this experience." But you could be in the most corporate club and someone's there who's dialled in. That could be the one place they go and wear something a little expressive, or let themselves dance. They're my core people, I'm trying to reach them the most. It would be very cynical of me to go into these clubs like, "Oh, this isn't for me. These aren't my people." No, they're there. I didn't start out going to these perfectly curated queer parties, with anti-harassment policies and gender neutral bathrooms. Not at all, these big parties were the wild west of America, a free-for-all, no rules.

That's very true, it's important to remember everyone starts somewhere.

I try to bring a total purity of intention into every set. Even if I'm like, "What's this festival about? Where's the money coming from?" I tune that out, focus on the people there to commune with the beat, and the transformative power in the music itself. Something in psychedelic literature and spiritual practices that really resonated with me is that at their heart they involve ego dissolution. Everything everyone told me my entire life growing up was, "You're a boy, you're a boy." These signals were put into this gendered sense of self, this ego, which I needed to rip open to see myself.

I feel like a lot of other people are having the same experience. The person raving for the first time that seems cis today can turn out to be trans four months from now. So I try not to be cynical on that basis. Something my girlfriend Jen always writes me before my gigs, you know that expression, "Give 'em hell!" She always says, "Give 'em love!" It's so cheesy, but often I'll get the message when I'm like, "I'm so tired" or, "That person who gave me a ride misgendered me, why are they really hiring me?" These ego things. Then I'm like, "No, no, no, you're here to be yourself and put love through the speakers and hope that it heals people." That is a tremendous opportunity and power and I shouldn't just ever let my ego get in the way of that.

It's bigger than any of that.

Yeah, but it's important to see how you protect yourself with your ego. Some hippies would say you should never have an ego. No, you need it. People are shitty out there, you've got to take care of yourself on an organism level. If you're living in that state constantly though it's hard.

I wanted to ask you about something Jacob from Honey Soundsystem told me. He said he saw you scratching in bird noises over a break, which sounds pretty unique. How did that come about?

At first I would play these novelty field recording records because I could use them to make the Motherbeat analogy. People think the birdsong is a synth oscillation, so it makes the point that the music's been here since the beginning, what sounds like techno is a flock of birds. I always loved these radio mixes with DJs from a DMC background and they'd do lots of scratching. There was a playfulness in it that I liked. Scratch records have drops that might say, "Yeah boy!" or the rave alarm. I thought, why not use field recordings for that? One principle of chaos magic is that you embrace the chaotic energy around you and use that to create meaning. There's randomness to the birdsong I can't control, but by scratching it in I can create a rhythm and place it more intentionally in the music.

You said earlier that you didn't always do scratching. When did you start adding that to your technique?

Last year. It's something I'd do at home kind of badly, I'm still getting better all the time. I still hit bad scratches sometimes, but I try to embrace mistakes as an act of chaos. Something else about technique I should mention is I don't do PFL mixing.

What do you mean by PFL?

It's "Pre-Fader Listen" on the mixer, where you can mix the headphone cue with the master. Old mixers didn't have that, so I never had that option. On some mixers you could click in the master at full volume, but if that's competing with your cue, it's really hard to differentiate.

Oh yeah it's a nightmare.

I learned to never listen to the master in the headphones, you only listen to what you're cueing. Once you've got that cued record mixed in past a certain threshold, then you switch to cue the other record and bring it out. With a big system the only reference point for what's playing are the monitors. They have to be louder than the system, so they're fucking loud. If they're good monitors and you're not getting harmonic distortion, it's not so bad on your ears. But if the monitors are two little Yamaha monitors at the same volume, I'll be blazing the fuck out of my ears. Sometimes the best parties are on some shitty ass soundsystem though. A lot of DJs get very fastidious about sound, but that's not the renegade attitude. It's often a lot of men controlling these very pristine soundsystems, which I find aren't very powerful. I'm like, "I just wanna redline it so bad!" To get as much power out of the system as I can.

You're playing in Corsica Studios' room two tonight right? You will not be let down by the soundsystem. I mean it's sometimes too loud, but it's very powerful and encompassing.

Something I had to get used to touring in Europe are these dB meters, "Don’t go over 103 dB!" I've never seen those in the States. It's good to be concerned about people's hearing. Reading about shamanism I learnt about these techniques of the shaman, breathing, dancing, repetitious music. Those were easy to connect with rave. But one of the techniques is called "ordeal," it includes walking on pins and ascetic practices like not eating. Some kind of suffering. I thought how the hell does this apply to rave? Our culture's decadent. We dance our butts off, it feels good, we take drugs or drink, or not, and it's fun. Then I thought, some of the best experiences are when you're at a festival for a few days and you're exhausted. It's because your ego's dissolved in these states.

There's a reason parties are at night, we're fucking with our sleep systems in order to have an elevated experience. If you're dancing at six in the morning, you might say to yourself, "It would be nice if this could be at noon." I don't think it would feel the same. I hate to say it, but the insane volumes are part of the ordeal shamanism of rave culture. It's not that I want everyone to be deaf when they're 50, but that's part of what we're doing, we know it's too loud and we're doing it anyway. We live in a world that's very set on keeping us comfortable all the time. You're supposed to eat this and you're supposed to do that. Well, in rave culture we blast our ears out and stay out too late, do all the things that we're not supposed to do.

Yeah, it's not a healthy culture.

But maybe it's spiritually healthy I guess is my point.

Something I've noticed very distinctly in your mixes is your mixing is perfectly in phrase. One section ends and another begins seamlessly. I was wondering how you're doing that on vinyl. Do you count the bars that you would need to count in before a breakdown, and then bring the record in?

Yeah. I spend a lot of time arranging. What I can't do live I indulge in completely when making mixes. I let the arrangements dictate the mix, so I'll try it one way, then try throwing it in two bars earlier, and the break happens exactly at the right time. I work with the records. It's like the radio mixing style I was talking about. I would listen to the Friday Night Dance Party on B96. These DJs would only get 20 minutes to do the mix because the Federal Communications Commission had all these rules about station breaks and advertising. When I did my Rinse mix, or my Mixmag mix, I tried to honour some of that arrangement programming. I try to keep the flow really energetic, so that every moment's exciting. Doing one of those mixes takes me about three weeks.

I suppose you have to think closely about the timing of really melodic tracks with synth lines that could easily sound terrible if they're put in at the wrong time.

That's a big part of the arranging process. I'll take something that if I mixed them differently would sound terrible, mixing where it's just the bassline, or sound effects, the more minimal parts of the tracks.

Do you have a synaesthetic understanding of melodies and music? Does it create colours or shapes? I find it can be easier to work out how to mix melodic music when you can feel it in this way.

Oh yeah, absolutely. For me it's visionary, when I form the mandala behind my eyes, I think it's functionally related to that. As I hear different emotions in the music, or new parts coming in like the melody dropping, the visions change and react to it. I have this weird experience where I see frequencies as three dimensional blocks. There's this thing in the first Tron film called The Bit. When it says "Yes" it's one shape, and when it says "No" it's the other shape. I see similar blocked shapes with music, the low frequencies are like pillars coming out of the speaker and the trebles are like thin rays. Whenever I'm in a visionary state the music's impacting what I'm seeing. Interestingly a lot of people who take acid won't have visions, it depends on a person's mind.

I used to say I didn't like dry German industrial techno, with people not really dancing. I'd be like, "Why aren't people dancing? That's how I get to these spiritual places." My view of shamanism made me think about neurodiversity. I realised they're getting something magical out of this experience that I'm not, and I should be humble and respect whatever that is. The different ways people experience the world impacts how they experience dance music, and we should make room for that.

You've mentioned shamanism a few times now. I read you've said before that word's not an ideal word, but do you see your DJing as a form of shamanism?

The point I'm at is this: ecstatic healing traditions exist all over the world, and when everything is working right, rave is an ecstatic ritual. It was eye-opening to describe my sound as ecstatic, then read anthropological material and find out that's the fucking word they use. It was like, "Gender variant people were often the shamans? And these people often had goddess visions, and that's why they were chosen?" I started seeing so many parallels. I learned what each shamanistic technique cross-culturally was. They're all present in rave.

It's a really appropriative term though. The "Shaman" were a group in central and northern Asia. They were some of the first medicine men studied. The word shaman was then used to describe ecstatic healers in every culture. I do use the word, but always with some qualification. People don't know what I mean if I call myself an ecstatic healer. But if I say shaman, people think "medicine person, ritual healer." I think an anthropologist looking at rave 200 years from now could comfortably say it fits within other ecstatic traditions, as a global move towards reintegrating archaic traditions back into the culture.

I think it's extremely healing to be with other people and enter these states, it's through community that something becomes sacred. It's why anti-harassment and safer spaces are so important, because we cannot ask people to dissolve their ego at places where they're in danger. There's no such thing as a truly safe space, but there's a lot you can do to make it safer. And just because the ideal can never be met doesn't mean everyone shouldn't be trying to meet it.

It's so important and it's not possible to have those experiences without feeling safe.

With my Motherbeat parties I'm trying to get back to the feeling of the early raves. They would reduce risk by not serving alcohol at these parties. People weren't negating the hyperdimensional effects of psychedelic drugs with alcohol. If you take acid and you drink, you're gonna get fucked up and have a muddled trip. With ecstasy you'll feel the speed, but not the love. Any good psychedelic will not recommend you give acid to someone who's wasted, especially someone who's had trauma. If people are coming to these parties to heal, or to express marginalised identities, that means they've got trauma, they've been marginalised. It can get pretty dark for people.

At Motherbeat I don't serve alcohol, I don't care if people bring any, but we're taking the emphasis off it to focus the experience on being safer. It's wild, no one's talking on the dance floor. I'm nervous to say, "Throw a psychedelic party with no alcohol and all your problems are solved." But I gotta tell you, when people aren't drinking they act different. Why is it that people who are otherwise rational act like animals in clubs? Because rather than dissolving their ego they drink alcohol, an ego builder. Drinking is fine, I never want to sound like the teetotal trans librarian, "Read my books on Shamanism, don't drink!" But if we're gonna do these psychedelic substances in intentional ways, it's OK to say, "Hey, think about combining that with this before you do it." Because that was the dominant way people partied back when it was really great for me, so I'm trying to honour that and maybe bring that back.