BC016 – DJ Q&A: DJ Voices (December 2022)
The Nowadays resident and booker talks about her breakout year.
This newsletter tries not to deal in absolutes, but sometimes they can be unavoidable. Take the case of my “favorite” DJ of 2022. That’s a nebulous concept at the best of times. But this year, I really did have one, a verdict that was clear early on and remained that way: DJ Voices.
Born Kristin Malossi in Florida, Voices has been a booker and resident at Nowadays in New York for the last several years, and her fluid, wide-open selections have given me reliable pleasure as a listener, as well as in person, on March 12, when she played a set in Minneapolis for the local crew Acme Collective that left a packed, diverse, and wide-open crowd in a tizzy. It seemed mete, then, to talk with her for Beat Connection about her 2022. We got on Zoom in mid-December.
Here is a SoundCloud playlist with some of my favorite DJ Voices mixes of 2022.
MM: What’s changed for you this year?
DJ VOICES: Oh, wow. I mean, it was a huge year for me personally, to be honest. I don’t know how personal you want to get . . .
Up to you, honestly.
Yeah, I would say . . . I’ve been reflecting on this year. At the beginning of this year, I wasn’t sure if I would continue DJing. For the rest of the year, to be honest, I was sort of in a place where I was questioning my entire relationship to nightlife and had a lot of doubts, and was going through some personal things. And now, by the end of the year, I’m more in love with DJing than ever. I had a rekindling of my connection with DJing and with music. I really did a lot of soul-searching this year.
Was there a point at which it clicked that you are no longer in that headspace?
Yes, it was when . . . this is quite personal. But I did start to exit nightlife. I started declining offers, and had come to terms with the fact that I was maybe not going to DJ anymore. And it was the moment I started doing that, that it became crystal clear how much I really did want to do this. It was almost like I had to give it up to recognize how important it was to me. Honestly, I think it was still some fallout from the pandemic: Everybody was evaluating their relationship to this stuff. As we reopened, it was such a whirlwind that I didn’t have time to think about anything, and then as things sort of plateaued and became normal again, I did a lot of soul searching. I’m really happy with where I’ve ended up, to be honest.
What is your role at Nowadays?
I’m a resident DJ there. I also work there: I’m one of the bookers there, one of three. My colleagues are Gareth Solan and Jadalareign. We distribute the workload by days of the week. I focus on Saturdays and Sundays. And I do other things, too. You know, I do the advancing process. I’m in marketing for us. Lots of different roles. But mainly, I do the bookings.
How has working there changed you as a DJ? And what has it solidified?
It has changed me as a DJ. I mean, I get to witness amazing DJ sets every weekend. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t influenced by the way other people play. I’m a huge fan of other DJs. That’s where I find a lot of my inspiration from. I feel like I know a lot more about DJing since working there, and about the possibilities of DJing.
How much of your work day is taken up listening to other DJ sets?
A good amount. I would say though my biggest inspiration is definitely seeing people live. Yes, I’m definitely listening. Also, when I want to book someone, it’s after I see them live when I get most excited. But I am constantly listening to other DJ sets. Either if I’m like, either fully immersed in their mix, or you know, I’m just like clicking around getting a feel for it. I’m like, always, always checking in on other DJs.
I was thinking about this recently—that when I listened to a mix, and it makes me curious and kind of have no idea how this would translate to a club, it makes me more excited to see that person in a club setting. The sort of open-endedness, or a mysterious quality to a DJ Mix that I’m not sure quite sure how it’ll translate into a club makes me very excited to book them.
Who has stood out for you this year—like, a DJ you hadn’t heard until this year?
There’s a DJ here by the name of Razrbark that I really love. I’ve been listening to her mixes online. They’re really incredible and transportive. There’s also a DJ called Yumi who’s had an amazing year, who I’ve enjoyed following. She has a really unique style. I’m trying to think of non-New York DJs, but, of course, that’s what I know best. But yeah, those two really stood out to me as DJs that, that once I heard them, they really piqued my interest.
Who were the out-of-town DJs that you saw that stand out in your memory, in terms of performance?
Before this call, I was putting together a list of some of my favorite DJs that that I saw this year. So I’ll just read some of the out-of-town ones on this list: A DJ called Kia from Australia. Her sat at Sustain [Sustain-Release, a private upstate New York weekender] was very special. She played at the stage that’s, like, in the trees, and the music she was playing was like perfect for that. It was extremely immersive experience.
D. Tiffany continues to really wow, me every time I see her live. Special Guest DJ, who’s based in Berlin, plays really out-there, wild music that blows my mind every time I see it. DJ Masda, who’s a DJ from Japan who plays like some of the most stunning house records: He recently played at Nowadays during a Nonstop, and it was at the end of my day. I didn’t think I could dance anymore. And I just stayed through his whole set because every single record was incredible.
I saw Yung Singh at Berghain/Panorama Bar; that was probably one of the most fun wild sets I’ve seen. Huey Mnemonic, from Detroit, was amazing. And last weekend, I saw Barronhawk Poitier from DC; really, it was a performance, like a lot of voguing and lots of work on the mixer. He was going nonstop. He must have been exhausted by the end. It was it was so much energy from his performance. It was amazing.
When did you connect with The Lot Radio?
Within the first few months of their opening—maybe 2016; I could be wrong. It was just a small project that a few of my friends started hanging out and playing for. But yeah, I was there. The first few months I had a morning show. I was mostly playing ambient and listening music. I DJed under my first name. This was how long ago it was before I was DJ Voices, also. It’s evolved since: I’ve done a few different shows a few different time slots, and I’ve landed where I am now.
When did you become DJ Voices, anyway?
That was definitely 2016. I think it was doing stuff like The Lot, where I was like, “Oh, I guess I could have a DJ name. I might as well create one rather than just play as Kristin.”
At that point on the Lot, were you playing ambient records just because you thought that would be good for the radio? Or was that what you were playing?
That is not what I was playing. It was more it was like an 8 a.m. slot, so it was very early in the morning. It wasn’t exclusively ambient, but it was definitely more of a listening style. I didn’t want to play dance music. Now, if you put me on the radio at 8am I would have no problem playing dance music. I think I just was a little green then. And I just think it’s also nice to have time-appropriate music. But that was just where my confidence level was at the time.
But I started off playing New York house. That’s where I got my start, very house, all vinyl, collected in the record stores here. It was just the sound that I was drawn to. It was a musical renaissance for me. I really didn’t have much experience with dance music until I moved to New York, which was 2011, from Florida. I grew up in West Palm Beach, and then I went to school to college in Sarasota.
According to a number of Floridians I know, everybody called everything “trance” there.
I wish I could speak to that. But I was not involved in electronic music at all. When I lived in Florida, I would not have known what trance music was.
That’s amazing. You’ve got to really hide from that stuff in Florida.
Well, I mean, for me, it was commercial house, like Jock Jams stuff, which I thought was really great at the time. That was stuff that you would hear on the radio. I really liked that. But it was all commercial house music. And that was big in South Florida at the time. You would hear dance music, but I wouldn’t have known where to go to see that. And that’s not what I was listening to in my spare time. I was deeply immersed in bands and guitar music. That’s what all my friends were involved in as well.
You’re surrounded by dance music, but you don’t have much of a sense of it as a culture. It sounds like you’ve moved to New York, and suddenly you become aware of it. Is that fair? Or is it because you’re meet you meet the right people or go to the right places?
When I went to college in Sarasota, I did get a slight introduction to dance music there. There were dance parties on campus and people would DJ. I was always curious, but it was a different group of friends. And I enjoyed the music, but I didn’t know anything about it. And I didn’t really think much about it otherwise, but I was introduced to dancing together in a room through college.
Then, when I moved to New York, I started working at a restaurant. And one of my co-workers there was deeply involved in The Bunker. And we would work every Friday and Saturday together. And she would say, “Okay, I’m gonna take you to the best parties now.” I would go to The Bunker, which I still hold in such high regard. I feel really lucky that that was my introduction to dance music in New York, because it could have been so much worse.
Oh, it was an oasis. There was nothing else going on in the early-mid-2000s.
I don’t know how familiar you are with this period [when I was introduced to it], but The Bunker was that Public Assembly, and then around that time, it’s like a lot of like 285 Kent and Glasslands, stuff like that.
I was there for a lot of that. What do you think of as the remit of your Lot show, Nothing in Moderation? Does it have one?
That show came out of: one, I just loved the phrase. And I think as a DJ, you’ve got your radio show, then you’ve got all these requests for mixes, and it can be overwhelming. I like all sorts of different music. I really love like drum & bass and faster stuff and halftime [D&B], but then I also really love playing more mid-tempo stuff. It was almost easier for me to focus on one aspect of my DJing for The Lot—and also, the aspect of my DJing that maybe I don’t play in the club as much, which is not to say that I don’t at all. I definitely do play drum & bass and stuff at that tempo, higher tempos in the club, but just not as often. So it felt like the appropriate place for me to express my love of that music on my show for The Lot Radio.
You did a lot of traveling this year, right? Where did you go outside of New York for work, besides Minneapolis?
In the States, I played in Seattle, Vancouver, Pittsburgh—maybe D.C. was last year? And then I did two two-to-three-week tours in Europe this year. I did Berlin twice, London, Bristol, Dublin—which is my favorite place to play—Copenhagen, Bilbao, Spain.
Why Dublin?
They like to have fun there. They love to party and they’re very open minded with music. They also love the more bass-adjacent stuff that I tend to love playing. And I also know quite a few people there. The crew there that’s like Ema and Jio. Those are like two of the main people who put on parties there. They’re always really welcoming. It’s just a lot of fun. It’s high energy. Every time I play in Dublin, it’s really fun.
Tell me about your Minneapolis trip.
Gerardo [Morado, a.k.a. El Niño Indigo, who promotes in the Twin Cities as Acme Collective] just reached out to me on Instagram: “Hey, I’d like to book you.” And I thought it was really cool because Minneapolis has like a lot of music and its history. I didn’t really know about much of the scene currently happening there, and it’s not really a place that I ever really thought I would play. So, I was very excited about the prospect of that, because I love when DJing takes me to unexpected places. I really love seeing the different scenes in the U.S. And especially coming from New York, where, to be honest, I feel like we’re quite oversaturated with choice and venues; if you’re not enjoying one party on a given night, you can go to a million other ones. I really enjoy going to places where it feels like they don’t take things for granted. It’s amazing what he’s done out there. I feel like he’s really grown his party. And now it’s like, it’s definitely a place people will want to play. He does such a good job. He’s so thoughtful. I had such a blast there. I was only there for like a night. But it was a very memorable part of my year, for sure.
I enjoyed that set a lot. I’ve kept track of a few of your sets this year, and I want to ask about a couple. The one I’m obviously very interested in is the most recent, the Resident Advisor set. Were those tracks you were saving for something big? Or were they things that you hadn’t quite fit into other online sets?
That was a unique mix for me, because the prompt I was given from Resident Advisor wasn’t just an RA mix, it was around their anniversary, which was celebrating clubs worldwide, so they said, “Make it a tribute to Nowadays.” To be honest, I felt immense pressure to make it something worthwhile. But then in a way, I sort of started to relieve myself of the pressure because I was like, “Oh, well, this is about Nowadays. Let’s look back at my playlists from some of my favorite nights there. And let’s pull tracks or let’s think of songs that I’ve heard most often that are memorable moments.” Not all of those songs made it into the mix. I would say the majority of those songs that are in the mix are me playing for the first time, just digging in anticipation of that mix, but a handful of them are ones that have are connected to special moments on that dance floor.
How do you organize your tracks? Are you precise and nerdy? Or are you looser about it?
I think I’m quite loose. I think I’m not the most organized. The way I do it is, I usually leave my Bandcamp cart to build up, and then I’ll make like a big purchase. I’ll download all of those, and then I’ll make each month a recently-imported playlist on Rekordbox that I just continue adding to for the month. In that playlist, I’ll go through them. I’ll have already made playlists for upcoming gigs or upcoming mixes or radios, and I’ll sort them through that. And if none of the songs that I’ve bought really fit into any of those gig playlists, I’ll add them to a genre playlist, which I’m trying to get better about keeping up to date.
I recently saw Aurora Halal’s live Art of DJing; we did it actually at Nowadays through Resident Advisor’s birthday party. She mentioned that she constantly goes through her Rekordbox collection and deletes songs that she knows she won’t play, which is the opposite of how I’m always holding onto it in hopes that I’ll find a moment for it. But recently, I was really inspired by that, because I feel like my Rekordbox collection is just a mess that is too intimidating to really go through on a regular basis. It’s a huge undertaking, but I’ve started to go through and delete songs that like I know will never get played. I still have them on iTunes, they’re not gone. They’re not wiped from my computer, but they are no longer in my Rekordbox, which I really want to be a working collection of songs that I will play. I’m trying to get more organized.
Let me ask another question about the RA set as it relates to what you just said: Was that weeks of culling? How long was your deadline for that? And how much time did you give yourself to actually pull things?
To be honest, it wasn’t a very long lead-up time; it was maybe a month and a half. And I had not yet finished the FACT Magazine mix—when they give you that opportunity, you can’t say no. I was like, “Wow, to do a tribute mix to Nowadays that’ll be posted on Resident Advisor? I would love to do that.” But it would assure a very short window for me, especially because I do take a long time. And to be honest, I got really anxious about it, and I put it off for a few weeks. So it was two weeks of going through all my playlists, of going through all my Rekordbox collection, of thinking back to memories that I had. Yeah, that was a very stressful experience, to be honest. It came together at the very last moment.
One of the things that struck me about it in relation to The Lot shows, in particular, is you like to do long builds. And here’s three hours where you get to really do that.
Yeah, I guess I do. That is just how I play. I don’t think it’s really even a conscious decision I’m making. I think it’s just my intuition guiding me there.
One of you my favorite of The Lot sets is the Ciel one from April.
That was the first time Cindy and I had played together. And we recently played together again, in a live setting for Resident Advisor’s birthday party. Something I’ve done a lot this year, more than years past, is playing back-to-back sets. That was definitely the most connected I felt to another DJ. I felt like we had a lot of overlap. I was very comfortable playing with her. It kind of felt like second nature. So that was a fun one.
You mentioned the FACT Mix. You were in the middle of it when you made the RA mix. Did you have something mapped out? Did they make a request of the sort that RA had?
No, they didn’t. And the FACT Mix, I have to confess: I missed the deadline for that three times. That came out about a year after it was supposed to, because of the stuff I mentioned earlier, of me questioning everything. I was very creatively blocked for the first half of the year, and then the floodgates just opened and I was able to start making mixes again and felt really inspired. And so finally the FACT Mix came together. And definitely I felt like the FACT Mix was a bit of a departure for me. I think I’m always drawn towards so-called psychedelic sounds, but I feel like that one was particularly psychedelic and maybe a little more heady. Honestly, that’s probably my favorite mix I’ve made this year. I really love the way that one came out.