Dekmantel 2025 doesn’t just glance back—it mutates forward. This year’s edition refuses comfort, dragging club culture into the fever dream of now. Enter evilgiane, distorting the Drain Gang cosmos into something rougher, club-ready and unclassifiable. Sega Bodega unravels the boundaries between cinematic anxiety, industrial sensuality, and fractured R&B, dissolving genre into texture. The arrival of British Murder Boys—Regis and Surgeon’s iconic collision—is a feral reminder that techno, when untamed, can still bruise, provoke, and incite. And Jlin, ever the architect of impossible rhythm, crafts polyrhythms that don’t just move the body—they rewire it.

Across the weekend, the decks become battlegrounds of sonic identity. DJ K slashes through borders with his baile funk barrage—a raw, unfiltered frequency direct from Brazil’s favelas. Philippa Pacho turns restraint into tension, her techno selections pulsing with slow-burn authority. mad miran stays mercurial, skipping across genres like broken glass on concrete, while Kia offers something rare: softness with a spine, deep blends that ache and swell. Then come the pairings—carefully unhinged. Djrum & Objekt promise cerebral detonation. Young Marco x Sasha is pure dream logic: two generations of diggers threading chaos with charm.

Dekmantel’s Aan het IJ conference unspools beside Amsterdam’s industrial waterfront—two days of sonic thoughtwork, sweat-streaked philosophy, and ambient confrontation. Here, Moritz von Oswald dissects spatial sound as architecture; Jlin speaks of memory, movement, and the intimacy of percussion. It’s not just a festival—it’s an ecosystem of culture, confrontation, and recalibration.

Dekmantel is no longer content with moving bodies. It’s shifting consciousness.