Sónar 2025 - SonarMix 024: MikeQ - Pure dancefloor heat

31/05/2023SonarMix 024: MikeQ - Pure dancefloor heat

After 20 years in the game, MikeQ is a bonafide ballroom and house legend. He’d already been producing and DJing for over a decade when he burst onto the scene in the 2010s as part of a rapidly diversifying club scene (his early releases were on pioneering deconstructed club label Fade To Mind).
And now, the New Jersey DJ and producer is bringing his mix of ballroom and house to Sónar by Day for the very first time, on Friday 16th June. “People should expect a very MikeQ experience,” he warns us, and he’s recorded a SonarMix to give us a taste of exactly what that is - “a pre-intro to my sound”, as he says.

SonarMix 024 is pure dancefloor heat from start to finish, an hour of classic and modern house, broken beat, and hi-NRG club tracks peppered with exclusive remixes and edits from Mike’s personal archive. From the moment the beat drops on Geoffrey C’s ‘This Is Hot’, the temperature continues to rise, right up until Beyoncé runs through a list of vogue and ballroom icons on the Queens Remix of her towering 2022 single ‘Break My Soul’. There’s jazzy broken beat from Baltimore legend Karizma, foot-stomping ‘gueto club’ from Brazil’s BADSISTA, the obligatory drop of Masters At Work’s ballroom blueprint ‘The Ha Drop’, and countless vogue edits and unreleased productions that you won’t find on Spotify or anywhere else.

The sheer amount of unreleased material featured on the mix is proof of his reputation as one of the most dedicated artists around. Right now he’s working on “MUSIC,” he tells us via email, “...EPs, singles, production for others, label music and hopefully a MikeQ album for the first time as I reach my 20th year in the game”. He’ll take a bit of time out of his packed schedule to enjoy himself at Sónar 2023 though: “I’m excited for BADSISTA b2b Cashu, Black Coffee, The Blessed Madonna, Honey Dijon, Kode9, Little Simz and TSVI.”