It is. I also have an aversion to getting into how things work. I grew up in a conservative environment, and I never learned about technical things. Now I have a fear of getting into all that stuff, and I always think I'm wrong—even when I turn out to be right. I've had gigs where the technician told me everything was working perfectly when it clearly wasn't, and I didn't trust myself enough to second guess him. I figured out that he had plugged the CDJs into the phono input instead of the line input. I know I should trust myself more.There's a lot of knowledge about sound and about producing that I would love to have in order to become a better DJ. I work with sound, and yet there are so many things that I don't know. I want to be able to talk about things more specifically. You don'tto know that stuff in order to be a good DJ—but you don't even need to know how to beat-match to start DJing now.For me it's more about how I see myself evolving and what I want to learn in order to become better at what I do. That's what pushes me. When I make a mix, I want people to save it and listen to it over the next five years.When I'm DJing live I don't feel like I have to do everything perfectly. Because in the end it's a party, you know? I'm not doing surgery. Last weekend I accidentally turned off the track that was playing, so for a second there was no music. But like, so what? It's a party. I'm a person. It's the middle of the night. In that situation I couldn't care less if I make a mistake.For me, DJing is more about the energy and flow and not so much about technical perfection. That's why I sort my record bag according to energy rather than genre, from softer and melodic to harder stuff. When I pack I make eight different piles of records according to intensity, with really crazy stuff at the back. And anyway, I've noticed that in the DJ booth you notice mistakes so much more because you're concentrating so hard on mixing, and you hear everything so precisely in the headphones. On the dance floor it's just a wall of sound, and the dancers don't really notice all those small mistakes. They're not analyzing if I mixed in on the first or third bar. Just like, whatever. I play for ravers, always.I do love to party.The first time I went out was in Tel Aviv, 12 years ago maybe. I can't even remember who was playing. I was just like, "I want to be like this forever. I want my life to be this: this moment on the dance floor." It was like a parallel world or parallel reality—an escape from everything. Just dancing and feeling the music and living in this moment.I had probably heard it, but I'm not sure. I had a friend in Israel who was a DJ, and we would go to his place and smoke joints and listen to music. He'd be like, "I downloaded this new album, let's listen to it."About ten years ago I got in a really bad car crash, and I had to spend a month in bed. That changed a lot for me. I wasn't able to keep my job at a bar, I hadn't saved money and my sublet was ending. I had no idea what to do with my life—it was my lowest point. I couldn't walk, so I had to lie in bed, and I wanted to do something more productive than just watching TV. That's actually when I started digging for music. Before that I was always asking my friend, "Give me some new music!"I had been following lots of mix series, but I got way deeper into it after the crash. I studied tracklists and scavenged blogs to download tracks and figure out which artists I liked, then I went through their discographies. I couldn't have imagined that it would become my actuallater on. I remember the feeling of finding something really cool—it made me feel proud. It felt like I was doing something important and my life wasn't meaningless anymore.People would still ask me what I actually wanted to do with my life, and I still had no idea how to answer that. But getting to know music and shaping my taste seemed like a good enough start to figuring it out. I've always made decisions this way—not according to what's logical or what others tell me, but to what actually feels right. Searching for new music instead of searching for a place to live seemed like a legit choice.Never. I'm not a person who thinks things through like that. I mean, in some ways I think things through. But I didn't consciously develop a sound or style. I never think about what kind of sound I should play beyond how I might adjust depending on the situation I'm in.This is the only criteria for how I choose tracks: they make me dance. Part of my process is to play records at home. If I have to get up and dance while I'm doing it, then it makes it into my record bag. I'm not trying to do anything like, experimental. I just want everyone to have fun. I want everyone to be carried away. I want everyone to havemuch fun, the most fun. I want people to dance and I want to turn this party into a rave. This is my mission. That's the only purpose of what I'm doing. I just want everyone to dance.I always try to sense what's too hard for people. I try to push it slowly and play a bit harder. I'm a sensitive person, so I can feel it when it starts to be too much for people. I've heard so many times from people who were on the dance floor, "You played so hard, and the moment I thought it'd be nice to hear something softer, you did it!" Somehow I can feel it.No. I don't know how to explain it. I just feel it. There's this certain feeling, and I don't know where it comes from and how it works. Of course, it doesn't always happen. I'm not a wizard or something. Well, a witch, maybe—a little bit.I want every track to sound more intense than the last, and I use certain elements to escalate the intensity. For example, I'll go from a track that has a simple hi-hat pattern to one with more intense top-end percussion, like maybe a snare roll. I really love drum rolls and play a lot of tracks that have them—all that '90s stuff.And, of course, there's acid. In my opinion, acid is the ultimate rave sound. You either absolutely love it and lose yourself in dancing to it, or you hate it and leave the dance floor. It's definitely not a background sound, and it really separates the ravers from people who came to socialize.The sound of the 303 is my favorite element, and you can hear it in my sets. I love to exaggerate and to play too much acid, to make it sound too intense. I'll mix tracks with an acid line—or a few of them—one into another. In my head it sounds like they're talking to each other, like it's an acid dialogue. Many times when I mix out a track, I push the mids all the way up and cut the lows and highs to let the acid line of a previous track run together with the next.

EQing for me is just a tool to shape or correct the sound. For instance, I sometimes boost the high frequencies because it makes the track sound a little faster and more energetic and jumpy. It's definitely not a creative element of my style of mixing though. I simply mix the tracks in and out.I'm more into phrasing a transition and developing a story rather than using filters and turning knobs. The main thing I'm working on while DJing is connecting very different tracks into one storyline, and so I think mostly about how to pivot into different directions and styles. I love when tracks have surprises in them, like elements you weren't expecting.It really depends on a crowd. In some places when I start playing breaky tracks, the dance floor gets half empty. In other places, however, that's when the rave starts. It's too boring to play the same kind of simple, four-to-the-floor techno track over and over again, even if they sometimes work best because they're kinda easy to digest.I really don't like the sound of filters. To me it just sounds cheap—especially in the middle of a track just for the sake of it. I still try to spend as much time as I can on dance floors so that I really know how things sound and feel on the other side of the decks. Using a filter to take away most of the track totally breaks the immersion. It takes the attention away from the music and focuses it on the DJ. That's the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do. I let music speak for itself and make it do its job without using cheap tricks. If I play a track, it means I believe in each and every second of it, and besides some slight EQing it needs no further adjustments. I want people to hear all of it, not just the highs.Do you know what I really hate? When I play the last track and the DJ after me—always a guy—comes into the booth, plugs in his USB stick and instantly starts turning the filter knob. It changes the sound of my last track, and that's always a very special one. I think carefully about "goodbye tracks." That makes my eyes roll three full circles before telling them toIt depends on how people approach me. If you write a little note to me on your phone and show it to me while I'm playing, that's a nice interaction. But if you keep trying to get my attention and eventually ask if I have a boyfriend—that can be disturbing to me and have a negative impact on the whole vibe. Sometimes people don't know where the boundary is.I will shush people if they yell—not when they cheer the music. But you know, sometimes there's a group of straight guys who're drunk or whatever, and they yell louder than the music. They're ruining it for everyone in the front. I do something from the booth like "" And they look at me. I'm like, "Listen to the music!" And everyone else starts laughing.No, I don’t take drinks or cigarettes from the crowd—only notes or small gifts.I guess the first thing I would recommend is something I do myself. Or at least, I try to do it every time I DJ. When I enter the DJ booth, I leave my ego outside. It's easy to get wrapped up in trying to show people what you've got or to look cool or to be admired or praised. I try to remember that I'm there to serve the party along with the people on the dance floor and the people who work in the club. The moment you really make it about not yourself, but about the party in general, and when youto make it happen together with others, I guess that's how you start to connect with the crowd. I realized recently that I had been thinking this way implicitly before I play.