EX.675 Playing Favourites: Donato Dozzy

In this Exchange live from Dekmantel 2023, Resident Advisor's editor-in-chief, Whitney Wei, asks Dozzy about the songs that shaped his craft in our Playing Favourites flagship series. He takes us back to his childhood, playing the first track that introduced him to electronic music before moving chronologically through his life and the pieces that acted as lynchpins in his creative development. He discusses how he grew up in a musical household, listening to classical orchestrations with his parents before finding Italo disco and the stylings of Giorgio Moroder, Lory D and The Future Sound of London. These albums, he says, influenced how he builds his sets, leaning into slowly unfolding narratives as he moves from one track to another. "When I started releasing albums, I decided that I wanted to create stories," he says.

 

Cover 004: Bill Kouligas - A Maverick Visionary

Panoply. Pandemic. Panorama. When Vasilis "Bill" Kouligas started the PAN label 15 years ago, he wasn't conscious of the power behind the name, a prefix describing "all" or "of everything." But it's now clear how it represents a web of meaning in unexpected, preternatural ways. Pan—the Greek god of nature and pasturelands—was the name of his late grandfather's hiking team in Athens, whose gold medal Kouligas has held onto since he was a teenager. Pan is also a locative suffix, modulating the beginning half of a word to place it "on" or "above"—or as Kouligas said, representing "the space in between." 




 

Sacred Spaces: On Coming Of Age At the Club

At 6 AM on Saturdays, I was usually asleep on the New York City subway. I'd find a nice corner on one of those lavender blue plastic seats, prop my arms up on the metal railing to use as a pillow and shut my eyes to the fluorescent subterranea until I gently rattled my way down to Flatbush. I'd even mastered the art of being able to wake up exactly as the train doors opened to Beverley Road, the station nearest to where I lived. But on occasion, if I'd had too much to drink, I'd open my eyes and clamber out somewhere in southern Brooklyn near Sheepshead Bay, shivering at the violet daybreak as I waited on the outdoor platform for a ride in the opposite direction. More often than not, I was coming home from clubbing in Bushwick. I remember those fatigued and acutely solitary hour-long journeys almost as vividly as the heaving spectacle of the parties themselves, and in a way, still cherish them for my naive dedication towards chasing the evocative nocturnal experience that is never quite guaranteed.

Sacred Spaces was a limited edition book released by RA in winter 2022.