It was late summer in London, 2018. I was sitting on an overground train speeding through East London, deep in focus as I updated one of my most-opened notes items on my phone, titled Priority DJs to See ASAP. It is a list I am constantly curating and updating – a Type A brain’s natural tendency to turn even free-flowing hedonism into an organised to do list. (Those that know me won’t be surprised that I am extremely good at getting through this important list.)

I was listening to Chris Stussy’s 2017 release Nightdriver, opening the notes document to put him in the number 1 spot. Except this time, there were many obstacles in the way of me diligently ticking off the item:

Firstly, I was pregnant for the first time and feeling very very (insert more ‘very’s) sick. I have watched in awe as women like Amelie Lens and Ida Engberg have continued to work in a club environment with their unborn babies. I wish I could have done this, but (transcendental magic of pregnancy aside) I felt unwell throughout my pregnancy and certainly not resilient enough for loud music, dancing, or even really standing up too much. Fun.

Secondly, after I had given birth to my beautiful daughter, and just as I was on the cusp of returning to the dance, Covid hit and I found myself in lockdown.

Thirdly (yes, really, there was another obstacle) as we crawled wearily towards the end of the pandemic, I was pregnant again with my son, and had to accept that I was facing another year or so of NOT seeing Chris Stussy.

From a musical point of view, this made me anxious. Generally, over my twenty-plus-year obsession with electronic music, I find that my precise state of mind, or time of life, will coalesce beautifully and perfectly with a very particular moment in an artist’s developing sound. But, this exquisitely-matched meeting point often isn’t that long – a few years at most. Of course there are many enduring artists, DJs, and producers who I will listen to for the rest of my life, but often that space in your listening library becomes nostalgia, or appreciation, rather than ‘this resonates with who I am right now in this very second on this planet’.

I waited for five straight years of loving Chris Stussy, before I was ever able to see him play. And during that time, I felt it was likely that at some point over those years he would just…stop being my favourite.

Instead, what I witnessed from my pregnant or locked down sidelines, was the evolution of a sound so focussed, and so increasingly intricate – a sound that built on and paid homage to the era-defining textures of the past, and yet simultaneously updated and reimagined them in ways that were completely and utterly new. Chris Stussy’s sound is a raw, creative, breakthrough musical response to the state of the world.

In a funny way, I found myself able to pay closer attention to his evolution, because I was unable to go to any events. Instead, I sat at home, and I put his records on. And I listened to them over, and over, and over again.

I listened as the depth and complexity of his music grew, without ever losing its way. I listened as his melodies transitioned from the bass-driven grooves of his earlier releases like Crate Diggin and Politics of Dancing, to the brave, warm embrace of synth-driven dance music, and a carefully-curated call-and-response syncopation between labyrinthine, interlocking synth melodies, in releases like Midtown Playground, and All Night Long.

In 2021, finally able to get together with some friends as Covid rules in the UK relaxed somewhat, we sat in awe in my friend’s living room listening to Chris Stussy’s recent two-hour Awakenings podcast. I annoyed the hell out of everybody that night, by insisting on listening and re-listening to the delicate, haunting moment where Stussy and S.A.M’s Sonic Mana arrives in the mix. Something incredible was happening. Chris Stussy’s sound was becoming straight up beautiful. To put it in simple terms: while I was waiting impatiently for a chance to see him play, Chris Stussy was busy getting better and better.

In 2024, Chris Stussy recorded his BBC Radio 1 Essentials Mix. Contained within this utterly magnificent track selection, is an explanation of the musical history that underpins Stussy’s musical influence. The Essentials Mix also clarifies and sets out Stussy’s truly pivotal contribution to the evolution of house music, as well as opening a discussion on the power of electronic music existing in response to the politics we are all currently surviving through.

Listening to that mix, I was struck by the fact that Stussy’s signature sound – both his own releases and those of the artists he supports – sit effortlessly beside MK’s Dub of Jam & Spoon’s 1994 Right in the Night, and one of my all-time favourite tracks, Nail’s gorgeous 1997 Lost Trax release Lemon Gus. Stussy’s sound emulates the joyful confidence of that anarchic 90s resonance: tracks that begin with melody, that start with synth, that unleash themselves euphorically on your ears from the very first bar.

This mid-nineties era in house music represents powerful political kickback. In Germany, at the time of that superb Jam & Spoon release, the first all-Germany federal election was underway following reunification. In the UK, a society was gasping for air in the Thatcher aftermath, riding the wave of New Labour and the collective discovery of Ecstasy. In Amsterdam, a seismic shift away from traditional CDA support to a reshaped, more Liberal political landscape. In Detroit, a Michigan state shift to the right, forging a painful schism between this disenfranchised liberal community and the rest of its state.

The musical response? Seminal releases like MK’s Burning, Barbara Tucker’s Beautiful People, and Dominica’s Gotta Let You Go. House music that soared, that wasn’t afraid of a melody, that didn’t need to be dark because life had been dark enough thank you very much. House music that confidently reached for blue skies and urged people to move their bodies, to remember their agency, to recover their freedom, and to dance.

And now here we are. A people stretched thin. Lied to by our own leaders. Imprisoned through a pandemic likely of their making. Witness to a mass genocide, to the erosion of women’s bodily autonomy, to a gruelling rise in interest rates, and to a dispiriting return to the brittle and rigid politics of fascism. But it seems that the harder our politics become, the more beautiful electronic music grows – spearheaded, in my view, by Chris Stussy.

You can hear that same spirit of the nineties, not just in Stussy’s own releases, but in those on his label and of the artists he champions. Gaskin’s 2024 USS release Closer is one of the most important house tracks from the last decade. Its energy is so vast, airy, and uncontainable it is difficult to describe it as music – it truly is a feeling: diffuse, gorgeous, intense.

With Stussy’s remixes of Todd Terry’s 1994 classic Bounce to the Beat, and Underworld’s slightly later Jumbo, he has made this inspiration, and this conversation with bold, era-defining house music, more explicit. And with his Across Boundaries collaboration with Locklead, he has taken this sound to dizzying, elegant perfection, in Sakura, a track that is the utopian, paradisiacal healing of our world contained in musical form. A track that followed me for a year and a half before its release, existing only in snatched phone videos from the dancefloor as I urgently hunted for its ID and coincidentally, cosmically, serendipitously had my left arm tattooed with a sprinkling of delicate pink Sakura. A track that changed my life.

I don’t have TikTok, and I am only a few years away from turning 40. I have absolutely no concept of judging house music by the quality of a TikTok following, and I have absolutely zero interest in adjusting my opinion of an artist based on their popularity or lack thereof. I am only ever interested in the music. I have noticed, from my once or twice removed vantage point, an assumption that Chris Stussy is now somehow ‘too big’ an artist for me to earnestly, sensitively adore. This makes me joyously happy: that a producer I have been obsessed with for over eight years is now so successful that he is apparently ‘too obvious’ for me to like. Fucking well done Chris Stussy, is what I say to that!

And what about the moment where I finally saw him play for the first time? Absolute luminous perfection of course. 2023. DC10. A night I will remember for the rest of my life. Roll on Pacha Ibiza!