Mixes on repeat this week
stranger
stranger has quietly become one of Rotterdam's most respected techno DJs, a best-kept secret cosigned early by Dave Clarke, Sven Väth and Marcel Dettmann. Behind the name is Mitchel Polderman, a digger who pulls raw groove from the most obscure vinyl and always seems to find the right record for the moment. His techno is firm and driven, rooted in the back-to-basics loop sound of the late nineties, and he runs the Self Reflektion and Paling Trax labels.
His New Year's Day set for Ratherlost carries a long history behind it, a relationship that reaches back to his five years resident at Reaktor. He rates them as Amsterdam's finest for serious techno, and the honor of returning runs through it: an unhurried arc of the old, the new, and the pleasantly strange.
@ Ratherlost, Lofi Amsterdam (NYD 2025)ANNĒ x Ben Sims
Two generations meeting inside the same groove. Ben Sims has spent close to thirty years as one of hardgroove's true masters, funk-rooted and relentless, three to five decks moving at once. ANNĒ answers from a newer vantage, the Thessaloniki DJ now on his Hardgroove label, carrying the same Detroit lineage with a more melodic, vocal-flecked touch. Together the contrast is the point: her shimmer against his raw intensity, one tradition from both ends.
Their latest back-to-back comes at Awakenings Upclose, the stripped-back format that puts the mixing under a magnifying glass. The two trade tracks and textures, her melodic selections against his raw intensity, driving and percussive throughout, and for Sims, a decades-long Awakenings fixture, it plays like home turf. The day earned its warmth the hard way: a front row braved the rain and, as they tell it, danced the clouds away.
Awakenings Upclose 2026FENIM0RE
A German producer devoted to analog hardware, FENIM0RE builds techno from rhythmic invention and texture: bouncy basslines that lock you in, seamless transitions, grooves that reach the body and the feeling at once. He records for Freddy K's Key Vinyl and Agora, and recent EPs like Blockbuster and Mercycist show his knack for pairing analog warmth with a contemporary club edge.
This is his closing set at GRÜV x BCCO in Paris, where RAW's warehouse party and Berlin's BCCO collective meet in perfect balance. FENIM0RE draws the night to a menacing, brooding close, raw enough for the floor and hypnotic enough for the heads.
GRÜV x BCCO, Paris (Apr 2026)Samantha Togni
From Italy by way of East London, Samantha Togni built her name on a fusion of industrial techno and hard dance. Yet the floor was never the whole story: she gravitates to records that build atmosphere and stir feeling, music made for body and mind alike. The same instinct shapes Boudica, the platform and label she founded to make space for women, trans and non-binary artists.
Her GRÜVCAST arrives fresh off her debut album, The Meaningless Beautiful on Boudica, and follows the same storytelling instinct. She made it chasing a particular feeling: the raw, half-unreal pull of a warehouse in the last dark hours, propulsive and deep in the groove but shot through with a strange, deliberately awkward edge. It's built to disappear into, as much a private thing in your own head as a dancefloor one.
GRÜVCAST17MARRØN
MARRØN is Jessey Voorn, an Amsterdam producer who took his name from the strong-willed Maroons and carries the same resolve into the music. His techno is percussive and tribal, hypnotic and rolling, unhurried on the surface yet relentless beneath. He co-founded and still resident-DJs Eerste Communie, one of Amsterdam's most respected collectives.
His Reclaim Your City podcast is a two-hour trip into his deeper, more hypnotic register. The selection is surgical and a little eerie, moving between dubby textures and precise dancefloor cuts. As the groove tightens it draws you into a faintly haunted trance, stripped to the essentials and made to get lost in.
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