DJing as a Mediumship Practice

I was a dancer before I was a DJ. And I was a medium before I was a dancer. Increasingly over the last years, and almost certainly accelerated by the Covid-19 global pandemic, I’ve begun to experience that evolutionary process in reverse. I’ve slowly shifted away from DJing as the mainstay of my gig income and the primary driver of my presence at clubs and raves. There were years when the only reason I was going to clubs was to work as a DJ, and at some point, I started to get more interested in being on the dance floor than I was in playing and mixing tracks. This led to what I lovingly call my “fourth nightlife renaissance,” somewhere around 2017 to 2019 — long-arc cruises through New York at night, all its many spaces and places, explicitly as a dancer, in the years before the pandemic. When clubs closed in 2020, I had an unprecedented kind of time to reflect on those spaces and what had brought me to them over and over again, even into my 40’s. There were no gigs to speak of then, and I remembered a lot of things about myself and spent a lot of time with spirits and ancestors uninterrupted by the intrusive rhythms of capitalism. This current phase of working as a medium, talking about dead people almost constantly, and being largely unable to spend extended periods of time in nightlife spaces because of the overwhelm related to feeling everyone in the room’s dead talking all at once, grew organically out of those experiences. If I do go out, I get there at 10:30 and leave before midnight, or I arrive at 4:00 (or later depending on the function) and stay for an hour or so. I rarely play gigs and tend to say yes to the ones I do because of the money, the community, and/or the opportunity to say something important through music and performance.

Oddly though, I’m engaged with DJing as an art form more deeply than ever. Time- telescopically I’ve taken a step across the spiral-path back to ways I wove sounds together when I first began to DJ parties in my high school cafeteria, collaging other people’s recorded music. I experienced a similar crossing of time through practice during my first years living in Berlin. While I loved going out to dance clubs, my compositional sensitivity was extremely high, in a way that made DJing exclusively beat-oriented dance music less than compelling as an artist. Those DJ sets were long and through-composed architectural landscapes of mixed and meshed sounds, geared to the deeper motivators of body movement, rather than the metronomic and increasingly ubiquitous bpm-locked pulsations of the 4/4 and its multifarious permutations. The practice of DJing has been heavily research-based for me, but not in the ways that are more conventionally discussed, such as crate-digging or analyzing recorded mixes. While these research approaches are wonderful and important to the practice, my own research has often consisted of effusive iterations of: 

fucking girls in dark 
rooms, careening through club and rave 
space in a blend of numbness 
and ecstasy bathed in the wetness 
of the woman me that holds all the other ones and couldn’t come out for years unless i 
was drunk, high, and on a dance floor, interlocking rhythmic engagement with undulations of unidentifiable 
shifts in the climate of a room filled with dancers only marginally related but also definitely not unrelated to shifts in the tactile skin of 
what the dj is provoking the speakers and the air in the room to do, getting 
dressed alone or with others or also against others sometimes in ways that might 
facilitate these states of permeability, states of permeability, seeing ghosts in basements 
where strobes, lasers, fog, and repetitive throb predominate, shifts of hip, shoulder, chin, hair that are clearly storytelling, interactions with people I’ll never see again whose names I forgot as soon as they said them as I am sure they also forgot mine, turns into unexpected 
places which reveal unexpected and often invisible spaces in both time and topography, kisses with strangers, sweat shared, drugs shared, drinks 
shared, partners shared, space shared, internal spaces shared, remarkable and fleeting insights shared, terrible sets 
played by boring egomaniacs, startling moments revealed in the spaces between knowing 
and wondering by people who care if only for that one moment, 
breathing sweat, 
new ideas 
felt.

None of which explicitly has anything to do with DJing, despite the presence of DJs who are/were not me throughout all of it. None of which explicitly has anything to do with mediumship despite the presence of a medium, myself, throughout all of it. All of which explicitly has everything to do with dancing, present throughout all of it. All of this to say my perspective here is based on an overwhelming amount of this type of experience-based research. I am extremely far down the rabbit hole on this particular trajectory and despite my sincere desire to meet you at the entrance with a flashlight so you can follow the path I took down here, I doubt I will be able to. So, in parallel to that endeavor, here is an abridged — but I think nonetheless useful — flow chart as a guide:

1. The process of recording sound, including music, encodes moments that have passed into one or more forms of media from which they can be re-awakened through playback at a “future” time in relation to the time when those moments occurred. 
2. Bodies also encode moments in this way by storing rhythm (in the broadest sense of the word) internally as a coding device for emotional and other experiential landscapes that can be retrieved through the use of memory. 
3. These two means of encoding, storing, and re-experiencing moments that are no longer visibly occurring can be interwoven to produce powerful experiences of timelessness: recognition, meaning, and connection.   
4. As moments pass out of the lens of visibly existing in the present, they become ghosts.
5. Both body memory and recorded media hold these ghosts. 
6. Playback of body memory and/or recorded media releases these ghosts. 
7. DJs engage in the playback of recorded media in ways that awaken body memory in listeners and especially dancers. 
8. DJing is a mediumship practice.

A significant component of what it has meant for me to be in a transgender body is an experience of liminality and indeterminacy in relation to binaries. Of course, yes, gender binaries like man/woman, obviously but also: young/old, experienced/naive, skillful/lost, human/animal, awake/dreaming, binary/nonbinary, living/dead. To speak of indeterminacy and liminality in this way is not to say that these things are vague or unclear, rather that they become highly specific in ways that are fluid, sometimes unpredictable, and that they can also crystallize into other highly specific states that are experientially distinct from previous states of specificity. This is what I’ve discussed in other contexts as drift continuity. To be clear, this is not to say in any way that I am not a woman, because I am. There are different ways of being a woman, and for me, all of the fluidity, indeterminacy, specificity and flux I’m describing is held within a context of womanhood that is not defined by a binary with manhood — it’s something else. Within that context, like DJ Autopay so perfectly articulates, “sometimes I’m more femme, sometimes I’m more masc.” 

This kind of indeterminate specificity around externally conceived categories and binaries has always been heightened for me on dance floors. In fact, it is very likely that decades of reflecting on what happens for me on dance floors, often while on them, is what led me to the understandings I currently have about my gender, my identity, and all the other things I’m articulating here. On dance floors I’ve worked with what DJs, lighting designers, bartenders, door people, fellow dancers, the space, the place, and other members of the community and the culture have provided to provoke states of consciousness that facilitate this kind of indeterminate specificity extremely well. As a DJ I strive to be the best person to work with in this capacity, because as a dancer it’s essentially what I’m there for, and indeterminate specificity is what allows me to both feel like “myself” and to feel connected, often very deeply, to the people with whom I am sharing the experience of the dance floor.  

Recently I’ve begun to refer to this complex of ideas as bodyvision. I came up with the term bodyvision as a name for the radio show I started doing in 2023. The show came out of me reflecting on what brought me to dance floors, music, and DJing, what brought me back so many times, and what got me to stay. Primarily, the ways in which music and my body — and I think the bodies of other people — interact, facilitating ways of knowing that stretch beyond Eurocentric, settler colonial, and capitalist ideas about knowledge. There is something about those contexts and practices that allows my body to “see” things in ways that pushes past binary ideas of gender by pressing beyond linear temporality. In that space, the relationship between a gender assigned at birth and a gender as lived in a body fell apart. What also gradually dissolved through experiences of what I’m calling bodyvision were attachments to binary thinking, particularly the compulsion to view the world through binaries. Being in a trans body on a dance floor and experiencing indeterminate specificity around gender has been a pathway to ways of being in the world that are not locked to linear timelines, not compliant with clocks and calendars. Being in the world in a way that includes glimpses of time not beholden to a linear regime means that along with all the other binaries that disintegrated the binary of living/dead did as well. 

My ideas about the dead came through experience long before they came through discourse. As a child I felt, and sometimes saw and heard, both distinct and more ambiguous presences that, even then, I intuited as being connected to ghosts and spirits. This spectrum of experiences with the dead, from those that had a distinct nature to them (like an identifiable spirit or dead person) to those that were more ambiguous (like a general haunted sense or atmosphere) feels related to, if not the same as, the states of indeterminate specificity I have experienced on dance floors. Seeking out writing on the dead has been an attempt to find context and shape for these experiences. The writing I have connected with most deeply — texts that really get at the fabric and texture of these experiences with the dead — are writings on Palo. 

Palo is one of a set of practices and ideas that exist throughout the Black Atlantic, and increasingly throughout the world, that are animated by Central African Kongo cosmologies and lifeways. Palo’s practices also include Indigenous knowledge, West African knowledge, and very likely several other knowledge systems incorporated through interactions between communities of resistance to colonization, enslavement, whitening, and attempted genocide. Anthropologist Todd Ramón Ochoa uses the term “Kongo-inspired” to describe the relationship between Palo practices and Kongo culture, and defines inspiration as “a hinge between the past and the future, inspiration being the active, forward-looking creative spark linking past forms with objects, powers and rules born anew.” Palo is intimately connected with the dead. It is difficult to define, and perhaps defining it here is only useful as an invitation to consider practices such as DJing, dancing, and going out at night from the perspectives it proposes. Palo is also intimately connected with music, rhythm, drums, repetition, and dance. All of these are core technologies used in Palo to achieve substantive, often embodied contact with the dead, and to work through that contact to navigate life in ways that would be impossible without it. In an attempt to invite you into this way of thinking about things in a way that does not demand definitively defining Palo, here are the voices of several other people speaking about it, about Kongo culture, and about the dead as conceived within the frameworks these propose, along with short reflections of my own:

Todd Ramón Ochoa reports that his Yayi Nkisi (Palo initiatory mother) told him that the body is “a version of the dead, literally brought into being by those who had birthed her and then made to ring in intense material agreement with the strange, indifferent tones the dead had taught her to hear.” Further, the body is “…a form of the dead, material insofar as matter was understood as a momentary condensation, precipitation, or coagulation of the fluid immanence of the dead.” Ochoa’s experiences with Palo led him to propose frameworks of “the ambient dead” and “the responsive dead,” which articulate states of indeterminate specificity that other research frameworks do not. For me as a trans person, conceiving of the body as a “momentary condensation” of the dead, rather than as a fixed construct defined by genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, and gender assigned at birth, is infinitely liberating — possibly because it suggests that my body is made up of many things. 

Yvonne Daniel explains that in the Kongo-Angola culture in Cuba that Palo is part of, “The division between the sacred and the ordinary does not have boundaries in common within their understandings; ritual behaviors can easily look like ordinary events.” This shift from the sacred as something divorced from everyday life to a perspective of an everyday life permeated by the sacred speaks to the presence of the dead in activities as simple as walking to the store, or moving from the living room to the bedroom. Seeing DJing and dancing as everyday activities reframes them in ways that I think are important, and Daniel’s observations propose a model of sacred connection in nightlife that is more consistent with my experience than ideas like transcendence are. 

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús builds on Ochoa’s work, identifying that the formulation of, “African-inspired,” which he uses to analyze ways that Cuban palo practices draw upon forms of Africanness without relying on notions of original essences, is helpful in thinking about the various articulations that are brought into being through practices such as […] palo monte (also regla palo).” Moving away from ideas of purity and original essence, especially in relation to African cultural perspectives and technologies, allows for more complicated and useful conversations about music forms like house and techno. These forms emerge from African American communities but meaningfully extend beyond a simplistic analysis of African survivals because of the ongoing folding in, by those communities, of new cultural materials, ideas, innovations, and experiences. This shift away from essentialist readings of identity also cracks and destabilizes arguments about the essential nature of gender. 

Solimar Otero, in detailing the appearance through mediumship of a Palo spirit at a spiritual mass, describes how “her entrance into the liminal frame of the gathering creates a temporal palimpsest that allows for the perception of different kinds of time. Perception here is subtle, and spirit guides illustrate that attention to sensory detail is vital for communicating with them. That is why the very idea of materiality takes on a different perspective when defined by spirits.” I think this one speaks for itself. 

Elements of the rhythmic devices that form a part of the drumming traditions of Palo exist throughout dance music in the U.S. They enter it even in its pre-electronic formations, through Delta Blues and New Orleans Jazz, sounds that spread throughout the country through the Great Migration and through recording technology. Kongo rhythms also entered and inspired dance music during waves of immigration — people and sounds — into U.S. cities from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. The communities that entered the U.S. from these places brought traditions already permeated by Kongo cosmology and its attendant rhythmic technologies along with them, often literally embedded in their bodies. My own embodied experiences with Palo’s ritual technology and communities have extended the experiences I have had of indeterminate specificity on dance floors and dance music into even more detailed and specific realms. These experiences have allowed me to see things about my own dance floor experiences that were previously imperceptible. They have provided access points to a time outside of time, marking methodologies and maps of connectedness that chart currents which exceed and flood another binary: individual/collective. 

Conceiving of DJing as a mediumship practice, and particularly doing so “inspired” by the cosmologies and technologies of Palo, entails doing what DJs do first and foremost: interweave temporalities and spatialities. Audio recordings hold both the time and space during and within which they were recorded. And what a DJ does, consciously or unconsciously, is layer all these temporalities and spatialities by encoding them onto yet another temporality and spatiality — the time and place when and where the DJ is playing. This encoding accumulates meaning as bodies in movement receive it, and perhaps more importantly, these bodies in movement, at least on a good night, guide the flow of the temporal encoding engaged in by the DJ. 

This is possible because of the glitches in clock and calendar, and because of the indeterminate specificities evoked by interaction between recorded sound, as a living embodiment of the dead, and bodies, as living embodiments of the dead. Within this experiential framework, all kinds of rules and categories, and most especially binaries, dissipate like smoke in the wind, leaving space, hopefully, for ideas about being that are less restrictive than those we are currently offered as devotees of the dance floor. Ideas about being that, once glimpsed, become very difficult to shake. 

Work Cited  

• Autopay, DJ. “More Femme More Masc (It’s Pride Black Pride Mix),” on HOA011 (The End • The Beginning...). HAUS of ALTR: 2020. 
• Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M. Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 
• Daniel, Yvonne. Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 
• Ochoa, Todd Ramón. Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. 
• Otero, Solimar. Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 
• Sublette, Ned. Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2007.