Jaime Fiorito was born into the Balearic Beat almost literally backstage. The son of DJ Alfredo, he grew up around Amnesia while his father played marathon sets, absorbing a musical education that could never have been taught in a conservatory. By fourteen he was selling mixtapes on the floor at Pacha; by 1996 he was DJing himself, eventually becoming resident alongside Alfredo at Manumission’s Carry On and We Love Sundays at Space. A move to London for love in 2003 brought a stint at Phonica Records, deepening his obsession with the international roots of dance music.

But Jaime’s role has evolved from inheritor to archivist and agitator. He co-founded Indigo Raw Recordings, established The Heritage Project with his father, and has played everywhere from Panorama Bar to Tulum Treehouse. His philosophy is resolutely anti-genre: Chicago house, Detroit techno, disco, synth pop, Latin rhythms—anything capable of shifting the emotional temperature of a room belongs in the same conversation. He calls himself a musical anthropologist, and the description fits.

Today, that instinct is concentrated at La Granja Ibiza, where Jaime serves as Music Director and created Farmers Ritual, a gathering built around global sounds and intimate communion rather than conventional club machinery. His father’s legacy is therefore not something he merely protects; he keeps testing it, carrying Ibiza’s original spirit into new rooms, new generations and new geographies.

Martha van Straaten’s passport may say Germany, but her musical coordinates have long been harder to fix. A Berlin-based selector who splits her time with Mexico, she emerged from the city’s techno and house culture before discovering a wider rhythmic universe in Brazil, Voodoohop and Chancha Vía Circuito. That encounter shifted her towards music less interested in genre boundaries than in atmosphere, movement and the strange electricity of unfamiliar sounds.

Her sets move through Latin American voices, folkloric percussion, psychedelic electronics and bass-heavy downtempo, deliberately resisting the tyranny of four-to-the-floor. By day, she favours what she calls a freer, more joyful energy; after dark, the selections can become deeper and more hypnotic. Her path has taken her from Fusion, Fuchsbau and Feel Festival to Wonderfruit, while Berlin rooms including Ritter Butzke, Salon zur Wilden Renate and Klunkerkranich have become familiar territory.

Brazil, in particular, proved transformative. Her first visit in 2014 gave her what she felt she had been missing: intensity, drama and a more instinctive relationship with joy. Mexico later offered something similar—a place where she could feel, in her own words, more completely herself. The result is a selector’s music rather than a producer’s catalogue: colourful, nomadic and deeply human, German in technique but increasingly Latin American in spirit. Her real instrument is not the studio, but the journey.

Few artists carry as much geography in their sound as Pablo Sánchez. Born in Caracas, shaped by late-’90s New York and now based in Barcelona, he emerged from the city’s underground with the backing of Satellite Records before becoming one of Venezuela’s most enduring electronic exports. His route has never been linear: DJ, producer, label head, surfer, traveler—each role feeding the next.

At the centre is a warm, deep and eclectic strain of house, drawing equally from Detroit, Chicago, Berlin and New York. His catalogue stretches across Culprit, Sol Selectas, liebe*detail, Moodmusic, Wonderwheel and GAMM, while his own Sisternoise Records has become a home for both established friends and overlooked talent. Alongside his solo work, Basic Need—his long-running collaboration with Swedish producer Alexi Delano—has produced everything from club material to a remix of Venezuelan folk icon Simón Díaz.

There is a quieter Sánchez, too. Under the alias Mutant Joy, he has explored ambient music, stripping away the dancefloor architecture almost entirely. Three appearances at Sónar, tours through Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Berlin, and a decade-spanning Revisions compilation testify to a career built less on fashion than curiosity. Sánchez’s music feels like a passport stamped repeatedly—restless, warm and perpetually looking for the next good wave.

A platinum pop hit might have been the beginning of Parra for Cuva’s story, but it was never the destination. Born Nicolas Demuth and raised in the Lower Saxony town of Northeim, the German producer began with classical piano before discovering jazz, hip-hop and electronic production. His breakthrough came in 2013 with Wicked Games, his atmospheric reworking of Chris Isaak’s classic featuring Anna Naklab. The track went platinum and reached No. 6 in the UK, briefly making him a pop phenomenon.

Demuth has always been more interested in what came after. Albums including Majouré, Darwîś, Paspatou, Juno and Mimose gradually revealed a richer language of organic percussion, piano, field recordings and downtempo electronica. He records the world around him—schoolgirls singing in Ghana, sounds captured on travels—and folds these fragments into meticulously layered compositions. His albums are collaborative ecosystems, often involving more than a dozen musicians.

By 2026, Parra for Cuva had become an artist capable of translating that intimacy onto major stages. His sixth album, Nacar, arrived in May, following 2025’s ambient Nightjar on Cercle Records. Yet the scale has not diluted his principles: he still writes in quiet spaces and builds music from solitude, then takes it into rooms holding thousands. Even his Nacar tour introduced a “balanced ticketing” model, subsidizing cheaper tickets with premium ones. From childhood-bedroom experiments to sold-out 3,000-capacity shows, Parra for Cuva has made quietness itself a kind of spectacle.

Before electronic music, there was the piano. Viken Arman entered the conservatory at five, was making hip-hop beats for French MCs by twelve, and had effectively chosen the electronic underground by thirteen—a precocious collision of classical discipline, street-level rhythm and an almost obsessive curiosity about sound. His father, a graphic designer, introduced him to computers and an early demo of Pro Tools; Arman recalls immediately grasping the idea of audio collage. That instinct—to cut, layer, conceal and reveal—would become the grammar of his music.

Paris provided the laboratory. In 2009–10, he co-founded the Minimal Trip collective, helping bring adventurous international electronic artists to the city while developing his own identity in clubs such as Rex Club. The late DJ Mehdi became an important mentor, helping steer him from his hip-hop beginnings toward electronic music. His early releases on Délicieuse Musique established a distinctive language somewhere between minimal house, jazz, electronica and the hypnotic pull of Armenian musical memory. He treats his heritage less as a flag than a seasoning: old Armenian choirs and melodies can be buried deep inside a track, sometimes almost impossible to detect unless you listen closely.

That sense of musical archaeology expanded into an entire ecosystem. Arman founded Denature Records, turning the label into a home for artists including Stavroz, Acid Pauli, Nicola Cruz and dOP, while his SouQ festival grew from Paris into an international gathering spanning Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. His own trajectory moved from Burning Man and adventurous club spaces to the global stage: a Cercle performance overlooking the forest of Orléans became a million-view landmark, while his Willow EP reached No. 1 on Beatport's Electronica chart. Along the way he has shared musical territory with the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra, Tigran Hamasyan and Michel Portal—and once stretched a Paris performance at New Morning into a six-hour improvisation.

By the time Alone Together arrived in 2023, Arman's music had become less about genre than atmosphere: a nocturnal architecture built from jazz phrasing, electronic repetition, hip-hop instincts and fragments of ancestral memory. Now based in Berlin and developing the VIZAR live project with César Merveille, he continues to operate somewhere between producer, musician, curator and cultural connector. His records do not announce their secrets; they hide them. And perhaps that is the point: with Viken Arman, the deeper you enter the music, the more rooms you discover.

Some DJs build careers by conquering cities; Peter Power built his by disappearing into them. Born in Ireland and arriving in Berlin from Dublin in 2009, he found himself at the intersection of a particular underground culture—one where the distinction between club, ritual and communal gathering was deliberately blurred. His Kleine Reise residency and venue became the anchor, eventually evolving into Kleine Reise Records, a sister imprint to the cult psychedelic label Multi Culti. For several years, Power was the person behind the decks and the bookings, acquiring the rare reputation of a “cult DJ’s DJ”: an artist whose influence travelled further than his name.

His music followed the same restless geography. Jungles of Ufordia, released on Multi Culti in 2015, announced an eccentric universe of organic percussion, psychedelic textures and hallucinatory atmosphere, while a remix from Voodoohop figure Thomash underlined the connection. Soon Power was spending time in Brazil, eventually becoming part of São Paulo’s Voodoohop orbit and absorbing the rhythms of Bahia and the surrounding jungle. Under the Ufordia identity, his catalogue became almost fictional in character—a parallel world where tribal grooves, ambient passages and strange rhythmic mutations could coexist without needing to explain themselves.

Afro Damba, released in 2017, pushed that philosophy deeper into the source material, weaving voices and rhythms from Africa and neighboring islands into music that could move from meditative flute passages to full-blown psychedelic dancefloor ritual. The descriptions surrounding Power—Irish-born mystic, lucid-lifestyle dreamer, cosmic traveler—might sound deliberately fantastical, but the musical journey underneath them is remarkably concrete: Dublin, Berlin, Brazil; club culture, jungle rhythms, psychedelic house. Across Multi Culti, Wonderwheel Recordings and the Bacchanalia project, he has helped define a strain of electronic music that feels less manufactured than excavated.

The name Canson came from a piece of paper. Searching for an identity before his first release, Amar Derradj looked across his studio, noticed a Canson notepad—the French fine-art paper brand—and decided the word had the right shape, sound and logo. The story is almost too neat for an electronic artist whose career has otherwise been built around instinct. Zurich-born and trained in machine design and audio engineering, Derradj encountered techno at 17, bought his first synthesizer in 1993, and gradually moved from record-shop counter to studio, from weekend experimenter to full-time musician.

But Canson has always resisted the conventional idea of the DJ. “I am not a DJ,” he insists, because his performances are live: tempos shift, vocals appear and disappear, melodies are altered and track choices respond to the room in real time. His first record, released in 2000 under the alias Anatol with Cosili, preceded the Canson project, while subsequent releases on Sub Static and Cityfox established his reputation within the Zurich underground. His musical compass pointed toward the deep minimalism of Maurizio and Basic Channel, Main Street Records and Roman Flügel—a stripped-back vocabulary that would later find a natural home in Berlin.

That Berlin connection became central. Canson emerged as a regular presence around the Bar25 lineage, playing the legendary family of spaces that ran from Bar25 to Kater Holzig and ultimately Kater Blau, while releasing on KaterMukke and URSL. He describes the wooden Kiosk hut at Kater as one of his favourite places to perform—an appropriately intimate setting for music designed to breathe and mutate in real time. Yet the mythology of the club never overwhelmed the musician: Canson continued to make his music in remarkably humble surroundings, eventually abandoning the traditional studio and hardware setup to produce entirely on a laptop from his living-room couch.

There is something fitting about that contrast. The man trained in machines now works almost entirely without them; the artist who says he is not a DJ remains a fixture of one of Berlin's most storied club families; and the name itself came not from some grand artistic manifesto but from a notebook lying nearby. From Zurich to Berlin, Los Angeles and beyond, Canson has built a career around the same principle that animates his live sets: keep the machinery simple, stay alert to the moment, and let the music change according to the room.

Valentin Huedo was born into the sunset. Raised on Ibiza and drawn to electronic music as a teenager, he won a DJ competition at 18 and soon found himself playing Pacha alongside island legends Pippi, César de Melero and José de Divina. His defining break came at Café del Mar, where he became the venue’s youngest-ever DJ and held its sunset residency from 2004 to 2014. Mentored by Balearic pioneer José Padilla, Huedo absorbed the island’s particular alchemy: melancholy, warmth, rhythm and the sound of a day disappearing into the sea.

His influence soon extended beyond the booth. He became a celebrated resident at Blue Marlin, curating its compilations, while his Café del Mar Chillhouse Mix 5 launched a successful career as a compiler. Awards followed, including Best Ibiza Resident DJ at the DJ Awards in 2010 and 2011. Since 2016, his sound has continued through the WooMooN residency at Cova Santa and his daily Zoológica show on Ibiza Sonica Radio, carrying the island’s musical identity far beyond its shores.

In 2024, Huedo released The Escape on Kenneth Bager’s Music For Dreams, finally crystallizing decades of Balearic experience into his debut album. From mountain-bike rides through Ses Salines to sunrise records and packed dancefloors, his music remains inseparable from Ibiza itself: an ongoing conversation between nature, nostalgia and the Mediterranean light.

At 16, Hatis Noit heard a Buddhist nun singing alone in a tiny oratory in Lumbini, Nepal, and suddenly understood the power of the human voice. Born in Shiretoko, Hokkaido, she would pursue that revelation without formal musical education, teaching herself through Gagaku, opera, Bulgarian and Gregorian chant, avant-garde composition and pop. Her name, drawn from Japanese folklore, means “the stem of the lotus flower”—an apt image for music that seems to emerge from silence rather than conventional song.

After early work with the Japanese “funeral classical” group Mutyumu and the voice-only Universal Quiet, international recognition arrived through Erased Tapes, which released her Illogical Dance EP in 2018 with Matmos. David Lynch invited her to perform during his 2019 Manchester International Festival takeover, while The Guardian named her a “One to Watch.” Her 2022 album Aura pushed the concept further: almost every sound comes from Noit’s own voice, layered into wordless, otherworldly compositions.

Her voice has since travelled far beyond the concert hall, into film, fashion and art commissions, including Netflix’s Katla and Milan Fashion Week. Inori, built partly from recordings near Fukushima, transformed grief into an intimate meditation on place and memory. In 2025, Aura Reworks brought reinterpretations by Laraaji, William Basinski, Jlin and others. For Noit, composition is visceral: she sings a piece repeatedly until it moves her to tears. That is when she knows it is finished.

For an artist who keeps appearing at the right places, MoM remains strangely hard to locate. There is no conventional biography, no public birth name, no hometown to anchor the story. His own digital traces offer only fragments: SoundCloud identifies him with Spain, while Tulum appears repeatedly in his working life. Even the name is an act of misdirection — yo soy MoM, “I am MoM.” The biography dissolves; the music remains.

And the music is unusually well travelled. MoM is a Spanish producer and selector whose elegant, deep sound moves through organic house, acid house, funk and disco, assembling rhythms and voices into slow-burning narratives. His obsession with sampling is audible in re-edits of Nicolas Jaar and other unlikely sources, while collaborations with ANüT, CharlieM and Landikhan reveal a producer less interested in genre than emotional geography. His Power of Life, with Landikhan, appeared on Damian Lazarus’ Rebellion, while MoM: The Crosstown Mix Show 031 placed him directly within the wider Crosstown Rebels orbit. Meanwhile, Esperanza, with ANüT and CharlieM, became part of the Scorpios Music catalogue, further tracing the connective tissue between his deep, organic sound and some of the scene’s most distinctive labels and curators.

The anonymity, if anything, has become part of the allure. For more than two decades he has moved between New York, Berlin, Tulum, Bali, Dubai and the Californian desert, while repeatedly returning to the beaches of Cádiz, where his full-moon sessions with Acid Pauli have become almost ritualistic. Beyond the booth, he runs Home Agency, booking artists worldwide. MoM, then, is less a biography than a network of places, people and sounds — a man who seems perfectly comfortable arranging the stage while leaving himself just beyond its light.

The mysterious Señor Kin is a selector whose sets feel like secret, late-night radio broadcasts from a forgotten corner of the world. Blending obscure vinyl gems, vintage dub, warm boogie, and slow-churning house, his selections are curated with a playful, unpretentious wink. At La Granja, Señor Kin kept the spirits high and the energy loose, reminding everyone present that the ultimate goal of high philosophy and slow living is simply to enjoy the moment.