What is DJing without dance floors? This year, with much of the global club and festival network laid dormant, DJ mixes sometimes felt like a throwback to an idyllic past. Take the comments on Job Jobse's live Nachtdigital mix, which share a striking similarity to the comments under '90s rave classics on YouTube. But artifacts from the festivals and club nights of yore made up only a tiny fraction of the mixes that came out in 2020. With lockdown, pervasive unemployment and the increasing prominence of Bandcamp, this year saw a groundswell in producers making tracks and getting them out there quickly—two of our best mixes of the year are all-originals sets full of music made during the pandemic. The prevalence of livestreams and the time and impulse to get creative blurred the line between DJ mixes and traditional releases. Many of the mixes on this list could also work as standalone albums. Whether chatting on Twitch during a set or appreciating a mix made for music heads in lockdown, DJs created a sense of community in a year defined by solitude. Here are some of the many mixes that stood out to our contributors and staff.

- Anz
  spring/summer dubs 2020
  
  Anz's fifth production mix, spring/summer dubs 2020, was "built through turbulence and forged in feeling," yet somehow the tracks are fizzing with euphoria. Taken from an arsenal of a whopping 74 tracks made during quarantine, the UK producer compiled 84 minutes of summery UK dance music into this mix, which fans out over UK funky, 2-step garage, dubstep and jungle. The edit samples range from '90s hip-hop and R&B to the TikTok favorite "Renegade," which is remixed with raucous amen breaks.
- Conducta
  The Kiwi Sound
  
  Two years, two unbelievably good mixes from Conducta. The Kiwi Sound, the follow-up to 2019's #1 pick, hits many of the same notes: bouncy, bright and stacked with the best in fresh UK garage. It's a bold statement on the health of the modern scene, which has taken years to break through despite UK garage never really going away. Finally, everyone's favourite summer sound is back where it belongs: in the hands of young, talented tastemakers with the world at their feet.
- FAUZIA
  DISCWOMAN 87
  
  "Almost didn't do this as I didn't think it was good enough," FAUZIA says of her DISCWOMAN mix, "but my friends forced me to see it through!" The idea of this all-originals mix not being good enough becomes almost impossible to conceive about halfway through, when she's blasted her way through Plaid-style IDM, throbbing deep house and stonking dubstep. The mix seems to catch the artist just as she's found her voice, like a bolt of lightning captured in a photograph. As tracks from it have trickled out on various releases through the year, FAUZIA's star has only grown brighter. This mix, frozen in time, is basically where it all started.
- Scott Zacharias & Patrick Russell
  IT.podcast.s09e05 & IT.podcast.s09e01
  
  For a small but dedicated group within rave culture, it goes without saying that No Way Back, arguably the last vestige of the hallowed Midwest rave tradition, is the biggest event, of any kind, on the calendar all year. These two sets from this year's streamed edition show what's unique about the party, from the range of records played, to the peerless taste and panache of their selectors. Patrick Russell's set embodies No Way Back's bread and butter: leftfield techno and electro gems, drawn from decades of dedicated digging, perfectly arranged into a mind-bending slipstream of sound. Scott Zacharias, who usually plays the chillout room ("Outer Space") at sunrise, is the party's dessert, bringing a psychedelic soup of jazz, rock, dub, hip-hop, ambient, Italo, funk, soul and whatever else fits a sound he likes to call "sleaze." Together, these sets demonstrate the limitless possibilities not just of No Way Back, but of playing records in general.
- Job Jobse
  Sunrise at the last ever Nachtdigital
  
  All 140 minutes of this glorious mix encapsulate why we’ve been missing clubbing so much in 2020. It has everything: pop hits, rave classics, the hiss of the Nachtdigital crowd cavorting in the dawn sun. Early on, the heavens opened, followed by hours of unabated sunshine. Friends frollicked in the lake, partners kissed and embraced, and Job Jobse, the master of ceremonies, surveyed the sandy dance floor with the grin of a man whose dreams had come true. Listening to this mix brings it all flooding back.
- Juliana Huxtable
  Dekmantel 288
  
  To take a line from one of her own poems, Juliana Huxtable’s Dekmantel Podcast contains a "PALPABLY HIGH LEVEL OF IDGAF ENERGY." The Texas-born artist is impatient behind the decks, knocking through visceral techno, vocal samples and industrial interventions with marvelous fluidity, compounding them into a hypnotizing sound collage that advances towards evermore stimulating sonic extremes. Change is a constant in this mix, and no genre is out of bounds. The permissive approach means it's packed with potential peak moments, poised and ready to encite euphoria for a range of listeners, whatever their niche.
- Nicolas Lutz
  at Phonoteque
  
  Nicolas Lutz has long been the maestro of playing records for which you'd happily trade a limb in return for an ID. Thanks to him and peers like Binh and DJ Masda, overlooked corners of house, techno, electro, trance and breakbeat history are now prime influences for a burgeoning audience of DJs and producers, many of whom might not have formerly paid mind to the so-called "minimal" scene from which those DJs emerged. This mix from Phonotheque—home base for Lutz, DJ Koolt and the rest of the Montevideo techno scene—shows things are coming full circle. More than ever, Lutz is playing new music that his sound has directly influenced. He's also reaching for records that fit into his taste bracket but come from sources you might not expect. It would've been unusual a few years ago that he'd play something by, say, Overmono. It speaks to how different parts of dance music are coming ever closer into orbit.
- Theo Parrish
  We Are All Gorgeous Monsterss
  
  Theo Parrish's We Are All Georgeous Monsterss is more than a DJ mix: it's a casually delivered manifesto. In the fever pitch of the largest protest movement in US history, Parrish uploaded, revised and eventually pulled down an expansive six-part set that drew direct connections between racial violence and the appropriation of electronic dance music from its Black roots. "You don't know what this music means to us, you only know what it means to you," Parrish intoned. "Now granted, you take your ideas, you run with it, you create your own shit, that's great, you create your own universe of it. Please, go right ahead, there's nothing wrong with being inspired, but my god, you can't have all of it!" Quotes and archival interviews break up Parrish's own spoken word as he unfurls hours of unreleased material, spanning from melancholy jazz piano to frenetic beat tracks. All the while, the Detroit artist detailed various indignities, from being pulled over to getting kicked off the decks at Berghain. If this is what Parrish, a massively respected innovator within the form, faces day-to-day, what does that say about the general experience of Black artists within the club scene? What went wrong?
- CCL
  Blowing Up The Workshop 111
  
  DJing isn't always art, but Blowing Up The Workshop, Matthew Kent's dearly departed mix series, reminded us that it often can be. The series was historically important, hosting mixes from Galcher Lustwerk and Ben UFO that stood the test of time. But the series also helped migrate the concept of DJing away from the utilitarian and towards the deeply personal. CCL's contribution to 111—the seven mixes that sent BUTW out on a high note—fit the bill. Kent described the set, which spanned from dream pop to dubstep, as "a beautiful collage that feels like the reason I started the series in the first place." Akash pulled together a wistful 30-minute set of Bollywood tunes for 111, complementing Chris SSG's masterful three-hour ambient set and Dr Banana's moody garage and 2-step mix, to name just a few. BUTW felt like a natural home for all of these disparate styles, and this freedom often led to mixes worth cherishing. Kent's now moved on from BUTW, focusing on Mana Records, the label he runs with Andrea Zarza, but with any luck, BUTW's boundless approach will persevere.

2020

Mix of the year

Josey Rebelle
Josey In Space
Beats in Space Records

In the first few minutes of Josey In Space, we hear beautiful poetry about the Black experience from Tenesha The Wordsmith and Daniel B. Summerhill, in the shimmering track "I Dream So Loud." "I've seen dreams deferred / As many times as I've seen kids wish upon them…. Now / Not later but right now / More than ever I dream so loud." In the next track, we hear a one-off vocal sample: "Can't we rebel or something?" Those words stay in our head as we listen to the rich, unpredictable, deeply personal mix that follows.

The beauty of DJing is you can play literally whatever you want, something that Josey Rebelle, a DJ since the age of 13, understands more deeply than most. Josey In Space, the second official mix in Tim Sweeney's Beats In Space series, has the same eclectic flex as her club and radio sets, drawing an arc from '90s hardcore to chilled UK hip-hop via house, techno, acid and jungle. But it's also highly focussed, bringing together these disparate sounds to give us something carefully considered: a paean to Black club music over the last few decades, from both sides of the Atlantic.

"Yes, music is beautiful, it makes you happy," Rebelle told Chal Ravens this year in a cover story for DJ Mag. "But it's also a serious business, and you approach those decks with serious intentions to destroy the dance floor." Here, Rebelle's intentions are less dance floor destruction, more musical storytelling. But the dedication to craft is no less intense. Arriving one year after the BBC's #1 Essential Mix of 2019, Josey In Space once again shows Rebelle to be one of her generation's best.

As a bonus, here are five of our favourite RA mixes from the past 12 months.

- Vlada
  RA.742
  
  The Russian DJ serves up sleek, elegant, understated house.
- Kabuto
  RA.747
  
  Smooth house from a crucial Japanese DJ.
- Nazar
  RA.749
  
  Rough kuduro and gqom from Hyperdub's breakout star.
- patten
  RA.751
  
  An hour of decade-spanning, rave-ready original material.
- NDRX
  RA.726
  
  Soaring techno from the Bassiani resident.