CfP: The DJ Set. Special issue of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Music and Dance Culture. Edited by Lorenz Gilli, Johannes Hentschel, Dennis Mathei, and Ivan Mouraviev
Best regards, Lorenz, Johannes, Dennis and Ivan. _________________________________
CfP: The DJ Set.
Special issue of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Music and Dance Culture
Edited by Lorenz Gilli, Johannes Hentschel, Dennis Mathei, and Ivan Mouraviev
This special issue of Dancecult aims to expand and deepen scholarly discussion of the DJ set: the live event and musical object around which much of electronic dance music culture revolves. We intend to continue the conversation catalyzed by musicologist Mark Butler's study Playing with Something that Runs in 2014 about how DJ sets are prepared, performed, conceptualised, and mediated, following this journal's own special issue on the DJ in 2011 as well as Kai Fikentscher’s (2000) and Butler's earlier work (2006). We invite proposals for research that will build on these and more recent efforts by taking analysis of the DJ set and DJ performance, broadly understood, into new territory with respect to genre, space, sound, technology, identity, history, music and cultural theory, and more. In doing so, we identify a need for more scholarship that specifically explores what DJ sets are and what people do with them as musical events and objects that are shaped by power and social forces. This call recognizes, in turn, that DJ culture is undergoing significant transformations that may be changing the nature of DJ sets themselves. An estimated 37% of clubs have closed since March 2020 in the UK, while musical histories are only gradually being written for—and clubs are largely failing to secure the safety of—DJs and partygoers who are women, queer, trans, and people of colour (Garcia-Mispireta 2023: 191; NTIA 2024: 27). Livestreaming and digital DJ tools are also more abundant than ever, with the dominant market players that produce them attempting to consolidate their power further (McGlynn 2024).
The DJ set or simply "set" is the overall auditory output produced by one or more DJs as part of their performance. It is a more or less coherent musical entity in which individual records are typically understood to contribute to a larger-scale sense of flow or story. Sets are a central organizing force in the aesthetics and culture of electronic dance music, stimulating listening and dancing subjects on the dance floor and elsewhere. Historically, a DJ creates a set with records, a mixer, turntable(s), and specific mixing skills in a certain space. Since the turn of the millennium, sets are increasingly performed with widespread digital technologies including CDJs, digital controllers, mixing software, and Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs). These tools have enabled creative changes in the field of electronic/dance music and popular music in general, stoked ideological debates about authentic performance, lowered financial and technical barriers to entry, and introduced the DJ set to other genres or spheres of consumption.
Recognizing that digital technology has also enabled live composition and laptop sets to become major elements of electronic/dance music performance, in this special issue, we focus more narrowly on the tradition of "spinning records" and DJ sets comprised primarily of existing songs and tracks, whether using analogue or digital media—aiming to illuminate the specificities of this practice as it continues to evolve.
Scholarly work has already extensively focused on the DJ, with emphases on disco, house, hip-hop, and to a lesser extent reggae, illuminating them as skilled artist and cultural hero. The essay collection DJ Culture in the Mix(2013) explores the myriad roles ascribed to and performed by DJs, from the technological and commercial to the spiritual and erotic. This builds on the Dancecult "Special Issue on the DJ" (Gavanas and Attias 2011) which lays out how DJing intersects with, for example, whiteness, gayness, masculinity, mobility, DIY culture, analogue media, and fascism. Although implicitly ever present, in these studies the DJ set and actual performances are rarely the primary focus. Similarly, analyses of electronic/dance music at the level of individual tracks are well established but their methods, tools, and concepts have yet to be substantially applied to the scale and context of the DJ set. The last decade has, nevertheless, seen a small but growing body of work that begins to fill these gaps, offering, for example, a more systematic methodological and aesthetic framework for understanding DJ sets (Henriques 2011; Gilli 2025), a Black feminist approach to DJing as ethnomusicological research and erasure resistance (Denise 2019), alongside analyses of EDM pop sets (Galvez 2019), DJing in grime and dubstep (de Lacey 2023; de Lacey and Mouraviev 2026), and the spatial and atmospheric conditions within which a DJ set is placed (Mathei 2023). More work is still required to address key issues in the field, such as the historically undermined contributions of women, Black, Latino, and queer DJs, the rapidly developing new technologies DJs use today, the increasingly (re)commodified distribution through internet platforms and broadcasters that gatekeep and amplify particular voices, the spaces of performance, and the spaces, processes, and (infra)structures through which DJs acquire the classic skills of programming, mixing, and scratching.
Overall, proposals should focus on issues and questions intersecting with the music and performance of the electronic/dance music DJ set. We welcome contributions from a wide range of scholarly fields, disciplines, and methodological approaches, and strongly encourage proposals about DJs and DJ sets from the Global South and marginalized—racial, gendered, sexual—identity groups. In addition, we are especially interested in proposals incorporating audio and/or visual media, such as recordings and examples of DJ sets in action.
Suggested themesPossible themes could include but are not limited to:
- musical analysis of recorded DJ sets or parts thereof, but excluding analysis of individual tracks or songs
- analysis of DJ sets using visual representations of sound and/or body movement, such as video, graphs, sonograms, or spectrograms
- affect, atmosphere, and negotiation of the "vibe"
- skills: mixing and programming, including but not limited to turntablism, beat matching, transitioning, EQing, blending, chopping, and sampling, and their interdependence with technological developments
- knowledge: situated, practical, and embodied know-how and making sense of sound through the DJ set, from learning, preparing, and rehearsing to performing and improvising
- performance theory, dance research and dancing to DJ sets
- DJ dispositif, consisting of technological, spatial, sonic, and social entities, and the agency, affordances, and aesthetic strategies/tactics therein
- the DJ set as composite, postmodern sonic object; DJing as sampling, pastiche, bricolage, collage, curation, or meta-/macro-composition
- aesthetics, techniques, staging, and technology across different genres, subcultures, and scenes, especially regarding differences between mainstream and underground, centre and peripheries, old-schools and new-schools
- expression of gendered, racial, sexual, or disabled identities in or through the DJ set
- the changing nature of liveness, mediation, and the audience-performer relationship in DJ sets, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic
- institutions, platforms, streaming services, broadcasters as cultural gatekeepers and/or amplifiers, and their normative impact on the DJ set
- intersections of practice and research and their challenges and benefits, for example in the research-like process of preparing a DJ set or using DJ performance as a scholarly methodology
- archiving DJ sets as cultural objects for preserving immaterial cultural heritage
- economic and legal issues mediating the DJ set, such as copyright and royalties
- DJ sets outside the club: in meditation and relaxation apps, chill-out areas, listening bars, gyms, fashion stores, yoga studios or fashion shows, and their aesthetics, production, and/or reception
- the DJ set and its relation to psychedelic substances, practices, and culture
Feature Articles will be peer-reviewed and are 6000–9000 words in length (including endnotes, captions and bibliography). For policies, see: https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/section-policies
From the Floor (FTF) articles. The special issue will include a themed From the Floor section hosting imaginative submissions reviewed by the guest editors, and FTF editors. With this "call within a call", we aim to complement academic essays on the above topics with opinionated or otherwise subjective takes on the DJ set from individuals and collectives within the scene. We especially encourage alternatives to academic writing that may be journalistic or poetic in style, and innovative presentational formats including interviews, musical essays in the form of bespoke mixes or conceptual DJ sets, and reports in the vein of Resident Advisor's The Art of DJing. In addition, we specifically encourage proposals that take the form of commentary, such as responses to hot-take opinions or questions like "What makes a DJ set fail?", and criticism, including reviews of recorded mixes or live performances and responses to broader fields of practice that elicit novel perspectives on the DJ set.
For all FTF submissions, we will give preference to work that plans to be enriched with image, audio, video, or other online content (with the appropriate copyright permission), and which is submitted in compliance with formatting rules as stipulated in the Dancecult Style Guide (pp. 18-19).
Please note, every FTF contribution must include 750 to 2500 words of accompanying text in the final submission regardless of format. For technical or conceptual guidance, refer to the section policies and the Dancecult Style Guide or contact the guest editors before submitting.
Dates and deadlinesThis special edition is scheduled for publication in Dancecult in November 2027.
If interested, send a proposal consisting of a 250-word abstract and author biography of up to 100 words to the editors by 1 June 2026.
Please send proposals for feature article and From the Floor submissions to: the_dj_set@mail.de
If your abstract is accepted, the deadline for submission of a full article draft to the guest editors for comments is 1 November 2026. If the full draft article is accepted, the deadline for online submission of your full article to Dancecult for blind peer-review is 1 March 2027.
For enquiries and expressions of interest, email the editors at: the_dj_set@mail.de
References- Attias, Bernardo Alexander, Anna Gavanas, and Hillegonda C. Rietveld, eds. 2013. DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music. Bloomsbury Academic.
- Butler, Mark J. 2006. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music. Profiles in Popular Music. Indiana University Press.
- Butler, Mark J. 2014. Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance. Oxford University Press.
- de Lacey, Alex. 2023. Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music. 1st edn. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003295792.
- de Lacey, Alex and Ivan Mouraviev. 2026. “Analyzing DJ Performance in the Dub Diaspora: Case Studies in Grime and Dubstep”. Journal of Popular Music Studies 38 (1): 66–93. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2026.38.1.66.
- Denise, DJ Lynnée. 2019. "The Afterlife of Aretha Franklin’s ‘Rock Steady’: A Case Study in DJ Scholarship". The Black Scholar 49 (3): 62–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2019.1619122.
- Fikentscher, Kai. 2000. “You Better Work!”: Underground Dance Music in New York City. University Press of New England.
- Gálvez, José. 2019. "On Analyzing EDM DJ Sets: Problems and Perspectives for a Sociology of Sound". In Contemporary Popular Music Studies, edited by Marija Dumnić Vilotijević and Ivana Medić. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25253-3_14.
- Garcia-Mispireta, Luis Manuel. 2023. Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor. Duke University Press.
- Gavanas, Anna, Bernardo Alexander Attias, eds. 2011. Special Issue on the DJ. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 3 (1).
- Gilli, Lorenz. 2025. "DJing as “Phonographic Work(Ing)”: A Systematic Approach to Analyzing EDM DJ Sets". In The Oxford Handbook of Electronic Dance Music, edited by Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta and Robin James. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190093723.013.22.
- Henriques, Julian. 2011. Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing. Continuum.
- Mathei, Dennis. 2023. "Die Produktivität der Technokultur: Sonic Bodies, Produktionen und Werte-Schöpfung". Doctoral thesis, Leuphana University. https://doi.org/10.48548/pubdata-707.
- McGlynn, Declan. 2024. "Pioneer DJ and Serato Merger Rejected by Commerce Commission". DJ Mag, July 18. https://djmag.com/tech/pioneer-dj-and-serato-merger-rejected-commerce-commission.
- NTIA - Night Time Industry Association. 2024. "Night-Time Economy Report 2024".
Dr Lorenz Gilli previously worked as a product manager for background music services before joining the Department of Media Studies at the University of Siegen as a research assistant, a position he held until the end of 2024. In his dissertation, he developed a theory of aisthetic experience, which he applied to DJ sets in electronic dance music, and proposed a methodological framework for their analysis. He has published several articles on DJ sets, DJs, and EDM. During the 2000s, he was an active psytrance DJ. He is currently employed at the University Library of Marburg, where he works on a project focused on digitizing and archiving the cultural heritage of Nobel laureate Emil von Behring. His main research areas include popular and electronic dance music, media aesthetics, digital humanities, and cultural heritage.
Dr Johannes Hentschel studied music education, music theory, and Romance studies in Freiburg i. Br., Lübeck, and Helsinki. During his doctoral studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), he used computational methods to address the development of European tonal music since the turn of the 17th century. Since 2024, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Anton Bruckner University in Linz/Austria where he uses corpus research methods to devise meaningful computational models of musical form. Beyond his research, Johannes is active as a multi-instrumentalist, singer and conductor.
Dr Dennis Mathei works as project manager in media research and market research with focus on radio and music research. His PhD at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (2023) dealt with the creation and mutual dependance of aesthetic, social and economic value(s) in the actions of actors within German house and techno culture(s). A publication on electronic/dance music on German radio is part of the recent issue of Dancecult. Dennis has been a DJ for 20 years and has had residencies in Bochum. Besides genres of popular music and especially electronic/dance music his research interest is in the study of music and sound in theme parks.
Dr Ivan Mouraviev is a Research Fellow in music at the Amplification Project (2025-30), University of Huddersfield—part of the Leverhulme International Professorship led by Prof. Steve Waksman—where he is working on cultural and historical questions about amplification in low-frequency sound, loudspeaker technologies, and musical space and place. Ivan's specialisations include the study of sound, performance, and experience in electronic dance music and DJ cultures. His PhD at the University of Bristol (2024) traced the creative strategies of Jamaican dub and the genres it informs, combining performance analysis with fieldwork to show how dub-diasporic DJs ultimately challenge dominant interpretations of EDM’s politics and affects. Ivan has published in internationally recognized journals such as Dancecult and the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and has additional interests in studying how musical genres and communities are mediated by internet platforms and the streaming industry.
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