From: Bosnia/Germany

DJ style: Melodic techno / house.

Best known for: Pacha Ibiza +1 residency.

If you’re a person whose job is basically to get people to dance around on a darkened dancefloor or at a sun-drenched festival, you know you’ve acquired a certain level of cultural cachet when the mainstream press takes notice — especially when that attention comes in the the none-more-staid, none-less-clubbing-oriented publication like the New Yorker. The mag recently ran a lengthy profile of Mladen Solomun, which described the Bosnian-born, Germany-based DJ, producer, and co-founder of the Diynamic label as “the master key to the pleasure of thousands”, and “the priest, or the shaman.”

That might sound a bit pretentious — okay, a lot pretentious — but they do hint at the powerful relationship that Solomun has with his fans. It’s taken years of hard work to build that connection, through hundreds of productions and remixes and thousands of DJ gigs; he sealed the deal with last year’s release of his first LP in over a decade, ‘Nobody Is Not Loved’. Through perfecting his near-Platonic form of emotive, melodic tech-house, and via years of gigging — starting with spinning ’80s R&B at teenage parties in Hamburg to his long-running Solomun +1 residency at Pacha in Ibiza — he’s earned all the over-the-top descriptions he can get.