The Tristán Narvaja street markets unfold across a few blocks every Sunday in the Cordón neighbourhood of Montevideo. Wrinkled women peddle pots and pans, along with books, handbags and belts. The mood is jovial and the streets are packed. Customers and curious onlookers step over small piles of goods spread over sheets on the ground. You hear sizzling and pass through wafts of smoke as you walk past groups huddled around portable grills. The area is a maze, so visitors tend to hit dead ends, but everyone in the market seems like a local.

A short walk away is what might be the best small club in the world. It's a basement venue called Phonotheque, and it has space for about 300 people. Another familiar scene takes place outside its doors every Sunday morning between March and December. From around 10 AM, teenagers and 20-somethings spill onto the street, dazed from the previous night. Pulling sunglasses from their pockets, they break off into small groups and talk softly. Some trade thoughts about the music they heard and the people they met; many discuss where they are going for the afterparty.

They spent the night listening to obscure techno, minimal, tech house and electro spun by local DJs who, like Phonotheque, are largely unknown outside Uruguay but are more skilled than many of their peers abroad. They have names like Z@p, Kino, Emilio and Fabricio, and their lives revolve around music—their life is music. Looking more like skaters than DJs, they dress casually in baggy t-shirts and shorts. They order second-hand records from Europe and the US and play them with the skill of seasoned professionals. These DJs are part of the small but thriving scene connected to Phonotheque (which locals call "phono"), a club that is shaping the hypnotic underground sound of Montevideo.

The scene's leader is Edu Koolt, known to most as DJ Koolt. In Uruguay, he's more than a DJ—he's a god. Many say he changed their lives, and more than a few have his name tattooed on their bodies. Koolt is a veteran selector who has been to Europe a handful of times, but he also remains mostly unknown there. Alongside DJ Detected and his old friend and fellow DJ Christian Bonanata, he was instrumental in founding Phonotheque, which is now run by Bonanata alone. Bonanata and Koolt, who met in 2004, are lifelong vinyl obsessives, so the club is geared towards vinyl DJs. Its booth is uncluttered, with built-in record crates, desktop fans and portable lights. The sound, delivered by a system that covers the space evenly, is crisp and packs a punch in the low-end. You get clarity no matter where you stand in the long and narrow space. It's the perfect small club.

Going to Phonotheque, which opened in 2013, feels more like a ritual than a fun night out. People on the dance floor rarely talk or use their phones. Instead, they get lost in the rolling grooves, as the DJs' long blends and expert pacing creates a trance-inducing atmosphere. You won't hear much classic house or disco. The sounds oozing from the speakers blend stripped-back techno and electro with early tech house and the occasional broken beat. It's a trippy experience. Dancers get lost in their own heads for hours at a time.

This atmosphere is uncommon in clubs elsewhere in the world, where constant chatter, cheers and the glow of smartphones detract from the immersive experience of electronic music. Not so at Phonotheque, where snaking DJ sets and steady grooves bewitch dancers.

"When you go to other places, other countries, you see the dance floor is mainly people talking," Kino, one of the club's residents, told me. "People using their cell phones, taking pictures of the DJ—stuff like that. But if you do that at Phonotheque, you're not really there."

The club was almost empty when I arrived with Melina Serser, a curly-haired DJ who designed Phonotheque's logo and specialises in downtempo beats, for the season opening in March. It was a little after midnight. The party had been brought forward one day after organisers learnt of an event with Carl Craig happening on the original date—two events with international DJs on the same night is not possible in Montevideo, a city with a population of 1.3 million. As Serser excitedly bounced around the room hugging friends like it was the first day back at school, Bonanata, who was tasked with the warm-up, spun icy broken beats and ambient.

-Melina Serser

"How good is the soundsytem?" said Junki Inoue, the night's headliner. Visiting from London, he was due to play at 4 AM. It would be his second gig at Phonotheque, and, like most visiting DJs, he was nervous. Only a handful of outside guests play at the club each season, so an invitation comes with high expectations. When international guests do play, they are often outdone by the local DJs. One hotly tipped DJ from the UK played at Phonotheque for the first time a few days after I left, but all anyone talked about afterwards was the resident Emilio's closing set.

Bonanata's selections straightened as the dance floor filled. New tracks from Spacetravel, Etienne and Z@p, Uruguay's top producer, were mixed with vintage electro and techno as dancers in shorts and shirts swayed from side to side beneath the low ceiling and archways. A former rock venue, Phonotheque's dance floor is rectangular, extending past a small bar to a seating area at the rear. You could be dancing at the foot of the raised DJ booth or at the bar ten metres back—the feeling in both spots will be similar. This creates a relaxed mood. Rather than jostle for space in the middle of the dance floor, people don't mind hanging back.

The club was busy by the time Inoue dropped Jus-Ed's "Jusnotic" in the opening minutes of his set. Playing housier than Bonanata, his mixing was smooth and unhurried, with subtle licks of melody and interesting sounds. Inoue played for three hours, the minimum set length at Phonotheque. There are usually only three DJs per night, giving each ample time to spin, as most parties begin at midnight and finish sometime after 10 AM.

Kino, an easygoing full-time chef, handled the closing slot. Moving between electro and techno, his set was the night's toughest, stacked with slamming broken beats and crashing hi-hats, all strung together with precision beatmatching. But Kino seemed distracted and distant, which didn't match his laidback personality. As it turns out, he just takes DJing very seriously.

"I had something in mind and it went another way," he told me outside a bar called K Fe on a windy Friday evening the following week. "I always like to get to the experimental stuff, but sometimes the people want something more cheerful. You need to plan so that it's a little bit laidback first, then move onto something more experimental after you get the crowd going. But the good thing about Phonotheque is that you can do whatever you want. We have Christian's trust."

For Phonotheque's DJs, a set must flow well. It's never just about playing tracks—they want to tell a story. You hear this in the way their selections ease through styles and sounds, blending tunes new and old with well-timed transitions and a steady pace. The mood and sound changes often, but there are rarely disruptions in the groove. The DJs know what Phonotheque's dance floor needs.

"Some DJs who come here have easy tricks to get the crowd going," Kino said. "For example, they mix in a new record after they've turned the bass off. Of course they get big 'boom!' when they bring it back. We don't care about doing that."

Less than an hour after saying goodbye to Kino, I climbed into a cramped bus heading east towards Playa Hermosa, a coastal spot about 100 KM from Montevideo. I was on my way to the beachside club Saturno with Fabricio and Nico Etorena, young DJs who were due to play back-to-back for its season closing. While Fabricio dozed in a seat nearby, Nico and I discussed DJ fees. He couldn't hide his disbelief when I told him some house and techno DJs in Europe could charge thousands of euros for an appearance. In Uruguay, DJs get between nothing and a few hundred.

A large, wooden space with minimal seating and a panoramic view of the South Atlantic Ocean, Saturno is a summer venue that hosts DJs from Montevideo most weekends between December and March. Entrance is free. If it was in London, Berlin, or any other European house and techno capital, it would be among the city's top clubs. The venue is on the other side of a 90-minute midnight coach ride for some attendees. To an outsider arriving long after sundown, it feels like the middle of nowhere.

Fabricio and Nico played from midnight to 4 AM. After applying mosquito repellent handed out by club staff when we arrived, the pair, both in their mid-20s, ran through deep house and minimal with the same smooth and considered transitions I'd seen at Phonotheque six nights earlier. Most of their tunes were unrecognisable, sourced from Discogs or, in Fabricio's case, during a recent trip to Europe. Many Uruguayan DJs travel to Europe just to buy records. Emilio, the burly Phonotheque resident I had initially met at a Slow Life party during Amsterdam Dance Event, spent three months in 2016 doing just that.

Saturno's dance floor, which went from empty to full in three hours, was cloaked in smooth washes of green, blue and purple. A small bar sat in a corner at the back of the room. From there, visitors ordered local beers and headed to the dance floor or one of the sofas around the perimeter. Once it got light, many moved outside to watch the sunrise. The logo of a Montevideo skate shop, Planeta, was dotted on T-shirts among the crowd. Its shaggy-haired founder, Kike Machado, is an old friend of the DJs' and a regular guest at their events. He was at Saturno, too.

Behind the bar was Federico Uribe, one of Saturno's founders. Well over six-feet tall and in his early 20s, he stood a head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. He grew up in the resort town of Piriápolis, close to Saturno, and now lives in Montevideo for most of the year.

"The scene in Montevideo is on standby during summer," Uribe said. "We have a lot of local people from Piriápolis here each weekend. That makes us happy. The free entry was an important part of this, as it meant people who didn't know about this kind of music discovered it at Saturno. This was a good thing—expanding this quality music to a place it hadn't been before."

The music was slick at the closing party. Each pair of DJs quickly settled into a groove, spinning tunes for a crowd more interested in '90s tech house than the big house tracks of today. There were oddball basslines and weird bleeps and the occasional acid line—the kind of sounds you might hear at Club Der Visionaere in Berlin or Closer in Kiev. Before dawn, Fefio, a grinning Saturno resident with shoulder-length hair, dropped Martyné & Jacob's "Frischfisch" as people up the front danced with heads down and smiles on their faces. The closing wrapped up sometime in the afternoon, after which many people moved to afterparties in the neighbourhoods nearby, where they passed around one-litre bottles of beer (an afterparty essential) and mixed records (even more essential).

Saturuno matches a coastal setting with a considered approach, something that's hard to find in Punta Del Este, a famous holiday area another 40 KM east along Uruguay's southern coast. Punta del Este is better known than Piriápolis and a popular party destination. Most Uruguayan DJs play there a few times each summer, but the parties are expensive and accommodate a cashed-up clientele. It's a far cry from meditative beats and purist approach found at Saturno.

"We saw an opportunity to provide an alternative to Punta Del Este," Uribe said. "There's no real club there and most of the parties are like big events or festivals. Events there also mix DJs who have nothing in common. We always try to have coherence in our lineups."

Montevideo reawakens as Saturno's season wraps up. The city is less active in the winter months, as workers and holiday makers relocate to Punta Del Este. "It can be like 20 euros for a whisky there," said Martin Craciun, an academic who has thrown events with Alva Noto and Marcel Dettmann in Uruguay. "Punta has this Balearic thing. People have always tried to make it like Ibiza, with exclusivity and wealthy Argentinians. The scene in Montevideo was never about wealthy people."

Craciun has a front-row seat to the dance music scene in Uruguay. He prefers the experimental side of things—he's an ambassador for CTM, an international organisation for avant-garde electronic music known for its annual festival in Berlin—but follows the scene around Phonotheque. He visits Europe annually and understands the difficulties young people face in Montevideo, where the cost of living can be as much as a European capital, but with substantially lower wages. The International Monetary Fund deems Uruguay a developing country, but each time I went out to dinner in Montevideo, I paid more than I would have for the same thing in Berlin.

"What we earn in relation to what we spend is a bit unfair," Craciun said. "I was in Paris a few weeks ago. We went to the supermarket—the goods there are cheaper."

"I work with people who earn 500 US dollars a month," Kino had told me. "They work six days a week and it doesn't even cover their rent. It's hard to be here."

The hypnotic brand of music favoured by the DJs and crowds at Phonotheque feels at odds with a country famous for pristine beaches and sunshine. But there's a greyness to Montevideo, too. Bleak tower blocks dot the skyline. Armed guards are stationed in every bank, as though they are expecting trouble. The streets are safe and the people are friendly, but the struggles Craciun and Kino mention hang in the air. "The electronic music scene is giving people a chance to forget everything," Craciun said. "We don't need lyrics, we just like to dance."

Montevideo

The mood was upbeat when I visited Agustin Garcia Becoña and his friends, who run Phonotheque's No Way Back party. I arrived at Agustin's flat one Wednesday night as they were a few hours into a back-to-back-to-back living room session. It was the second time I'd seen the group that week. I had bumped into them a few nights before at another apartment, where they grilled chorizo and cheese-stuffed capsicum and swapped test pressings at a goodbye dinner for Junki Inoue. That Wednesday, Agustin and his friends took turns mixing records while pouring beers and rolling cigarettes. "Electric Day" by Trike played while they discussed where to order pizza from. It's the same scene that happens in living rooms and student dorms from Leeds to Berlin and Sydney. The difference here was the lengths the guys had gone to get the tunes they were spinning.

Shipping a single record from Europe or the US can cost up to US$25. (Most European buyers are charged a fraction of that to send a record within Europe.) It takes a few weeks for a parcel to reach Montevideo once it's shipped, which means a lot of anxious waiting for the city's DJs. They usually have a few packages on the way at any given time, and spend unbelievable amounts of time on sites like Discogs and Juno, searching for under-the-radar bombs on labels most dance music fans have never heard of. But with shipping costs so high, they need to be careful about what they order. The bulk "blind buying" method (purchasing records you can't preview online) favoured by diggers in Europe is tough to justify in Montevideo, yet its DJs still find a way to stack their bags with obscure weapons.

"The money we spend on shipping is more than what we pay for records," Kino said. "It's crazy to buy a record for $4 or $5 and pay $25 for shipping. But that's the sacrifice here. Because of the shipping, we try to buy cheap records that nobody knows."

Whenever discussing music with Montevideo's DJs, you will eventually land on a key topic: Edu Koolt. His influence looms large over every DJ I met in Montevideo, at least two of whom have tattoos of his name. They have all seen him play dozens, if not hundreds, of sets. Almost all consider him their favourite DJ. He even taught many of them to mix at DJ classes he gives from the first-floor apartment he shares with five Persian cats. For some students, visiting Koolt's apartment was about learning how to mix records. For others, it was a life-changing experience. That's where I met him, with Melina Serser acting as translator, one warm Thursday afternoon. He'd spent a long day teaching but was eager to talk. Heavily tattooed and almost always smiling, he exudes the kind of positivity you often find in people who have dedicated their life to a passion.

Koolt, who grew up working in his family's fruit shop, might be the best house and techno DJ you've never heard. He's the only person in the scene who earns a living from DJing alone, having quit the fruit business at 28. He plays up to five times per weekend during summer. ("You can listen to Koolt play at a wedding, a party, a house—it's always good," Kino said.) His style, which is rooted in lean tribal and tech house, is energetic and smooth, with bold basslines and Latin-flavoured percussion. A master of groove, with a steady mixing technique that manages to inject energy into every transition, he plays loopier music than Phonotheque's younger DJs. There are often three tracks playing at once, but he still finds time to hug friends as he bobs around the booth. Koolt's beatmatching is flawless, recalling the peak-time style of DJs like Craig Richards and Circoloco-era Raresh, Rhadoo and Petre Inspirescu. The tracks are stripped-down and drum-focused, but Koolt uses them as building blocks to create a full, vibrant sound

This sound has a psychedelic touch, honed through a series of residencies dating back to the early '00s. But where long-time friend and fellow Uruguayan Nicolas Lutz gained an international following after moving to Europe in the late '00s, DJ Koolt remains a local secret.

"I never imagined a DJ career outside of Uruguay," he said. "I like to travel but wouldn't live abroad. My parents were already old when I was born, so I always wanted to look after them. Even though I had four brothers, I always felt that need."

House and techno in Uruguay is better off for Koolt's decision to stay. It's impossible to imagine the scene without him. By staying in Montevideo, a city whose name is tattooed, graffiti-style, on his leg, Koolt has helped foster the thriving collective of DJs raised on his legendary sets in Phonotheque and, before that, a club called Milenio. (Between Mileno closing in 2007 and Phonotheque opening in 2013, there was no club for this group's sound.) His presence and dedication set the bar at an uncommonly high level. When your local DJ is as good as any in the world, you gain a unique perspective on what it means to play records in a club.

"I'm listening to the percussion and bass when selecting tracks," Koolt said. "Not the melody. I was actually never characterised as a hypnotic kind of DJ, I just liked to make people dance. I like the groove, the rhythm. Dancing is the most important thing. The other stuff came later with experience."

Throughout our conversation, Koolt stressed that Uruguay has always had a strong house scene. Electronic music gained a foothold there in the early '90s, heard in venues like X, La Factoría and Locomotiv. There were also two gay clubs, Spok and Metropolis. These venues closed in the '90s, but they were instrumental in laying the foundation for today's scene.

"The best music was played in the gay clubs," Koolt said. "That was the boom for the electronic music movement here. Metropolis was the first club that had a big impact on me. It opened in '93 and it was built all in stone. It was very open and gay friendly."

Fernando Picón and Marcelo Castelli were two popular DJs from that time. Another, though, would have the most lasting impact on Koolt, and in turn, the wider scene. His name was Bruno Gervais, a DJ from Paris who lived in Uruguay between 1993 and 2002.

"Bruno was the first to play another kind of sound," Koolt said. "It was different to what we knew at the time. He played with slower BPMs, and was the first to really tell a story with music and make us travel. He was also the first DJ to have his own fans. I would go to see him every time he played."

Nicolas Lutz calls Gervais a life-changer. "If it wasn't for Bruno, I'd be on the corner selling hotdogs," he's been known to say. Over lunch one afternoon, Bonanata, Phonotheque's owner, handed me his smartphone, which displayed a Google Translate page with a simple message: "Without Bruno there would be no Phonotheque."

"At that time the electronic scene was very small and mostly oriented to the Ibiza house music vibe," Gervais told me over email. "I left in 2002 for New York, but I started coming back to Uruguay a few years later and rediscovered a very mature scene. Many of the kids who used to dance when I was playing had started to DJ. I always found it very impressive that the people in this small country were so up-to-date with music. There is something there that I have never found anywhere else—something about the way people listen to the music and really enjoy themselves."

Koolt also points out Uruguay's up-to-date listening habits, drawing comparisons between Uruguay and Belgium. He saw the similarities after watching The Sound Of Belgium, a documentary about the European country's early EBM and New Beat scenes. "Around '87 and '88, without internet, there were DJs in Uruguay playing the same music that was being played in Europe," Koolt told me. "What's happening now isn't new. We have a big background in Uruguay."

Christian Bonanata

But Gervais planted the seed from which the scene around Phonotheque grew. The style of its DJs can be traced back directly to him. After Koolt and Lutz came DJs like Z@p, Omar, Fede Lijt and Emilio, followed by the likes of Fabricio and Nico Etorena. All consider the previous generation an influence on their style, and can list their favourite sets from most of the older DJs. Many still talk about a legendary all-night set at Phonotheque from Lutz, who plays there a few times per year to a hero's welcome.

"Nico has always been quite freaky with his style and taste," Fabricio, one of the scene's youngest DJs told me. "He always mixed minimal with techno and electro, but during the time he lived here, minimal was at its commercial peak. This made everything confusing. Techno was not always common—only a few DJs played it."

Fabricio is the archetypal Montevideo DJ. He's not a resident at Phonotheque but he plays there a few times a year. He speaks good English, but apologises for what he thinks is a limited vocabulary every few minutes. He spends all his spare money on records, some of which appeared on his mix for My Own Jupiter last year.

"The techno Koolt plays has always been a bit more tribal and soulful, with a touch of tech house," Fabricio said. "Along with Nico, he is one of the most important DJs in Uruguay. Nico was too innovative for the time he lived here, but he changed everything when he returned. Most of the DJs began to play more techno and the scene became more purist with that style. Before this, house is what you would hear the most. Things like Derrick Carter, Spencer Kincy and the good stuff from Chicago."

Uruguay's DJs are slowly becoming better known internationally. Z@p, who plans to move to Europe, has put out records on the German labels Melliflow and Traffic, and played dates in Kiev, Seoul and Ibiza in 2016. Melina Serser, the downtempo DJ who acted as translator between DJ Koolt and I, also has a string of European dates and an XLR8R podcast under her belt. Omar, based in Berlin, plays often in Germany, Spain and the UK.

Europe's allure is strong. Many of the people I met were second- or third-generation Uruguayans, which makes it easy for them to get ancestry passports from Italy or Spain, the countries their families migrated from. But while many visit Europe, few stay. Fede Lijt, a DJ and producer who played Phonotheque's first-ever party, in 2013, spent two years in Berlin before returning to Montevideo in 2014. He runs El Milagro Records, a label that has released two records since launching in 2013. A low-key operation with distribution through EFD (the distributor behind labels like Time Passages and Cabaret Recordings), El Milagro's hit-rate has been impressive. Its first 12-inch, Lijt's Resina, feels ahead of its time—a sleeper hit that was an early version of the bass-heavy, cosmic minimal sound made popular by Spacetravel sometime later. Its follow-up release, by Uruguayans Luis Malon and Ovach, was just as good.

"I made those tracks in Berlin in 2013," Lijt told me at his house, which is spacious and located on a leafy street. "The label was in hibernation after that."

Before meeting Lijt, I'd sat in on an interview at a local radio station. While middle-aged technicians watched soccer on old TVs hanging from the wall outside the booth, Lijt fielded questions from the promoter of Montevideo's Warehouse parties about the production school he founded 2016. An outspoken character who doesn't mince words, Lijt had plenty to say about Berlin at his apartment afterwards.

"There are a lot of shitty DJs there," he told me. "The percentage of good DJs in Uruguay is much higher, and we mostly play with vinyl. When I went to Europe for the first time and saw people DJing with a computer, I was shocked. We buy records even though we don't have the money. If you really want something, you can do it."

It is, however, easier to bring vinyl into Uruguay than many other South American countries. Where some places, such as Brazil and Argentina, impose an import tax of up to 70%, Uruguayans pay no extra custom fees. "Things like books, records and CDs—that kind of stuff is considered 'culture,'" Kino said. "So they are tax-free."

Without this customs exemption for cultural goods, the DJ community around Phonotheque may not have flourished. It's just one of the factors that have contributed to what feels like a perfect storm. Take a few a freakishly talented DJs, put them in a country with an established party culture and a passion for vinyl, and watch things grow. With Phonotheque in the mix since 2013, things have exploded. "Phonotheque gave us a place to evolve," Kino said. "The sound we have is mainly because of the club and the crowd that goes there. They want that."

The scene around Phonotheque may be established, but it has room to develop. At the moment, the club is only open one night per week. There's also no real record store in Montevideo, a common complaint from DJs. And while the Phonotheque crowd is evenly split between men and women, only a handful of female DJs have played there.

"We need writers and photographers," Martin Craciun, the experimental music promoter, told me. "We need people to document what's happening. There's so much room to grow. We have Edu, the biggest and best DJ, on top. He should be super wealthy, but he's not making tonnes of money. If you compare him to a guy who started last weekend, it's quite narrow in terms of money and income."

Z@p, who could be the next Uruguayan DJ to break through internationally, seemed calm behind the Phonotheque decks at around midday on Sunday, March 11th. He was playing the closing slot after sets from Koolt and Manuel Jelen, who was icing his ankle, injured in a soccer match, by the bar. The crowd on the dance floor was thin but there was energy in the room. After hours of rolling tech house and techno, Z@p had turned to deeper and more atmospheric sounds. He dropped "Ni Cd Deluxe," a shuffling tech house track from 1998 by the UK artist Silverlining. Melodic and emotional, its long breakdown was met with a rare round of claps and whistles. Some people looked like they were about to cry.

Across two weekends, I'd racked up more than 50 hours of listening to the classiest dance music out there. Almost all of it was played by local DJs. When the music stopped, I found Emilio and Kino leaning against a wall backstage, working out where to go for the afterparty. Emilio had a bag of records at home he was excited to play, so an afternoon of killer tunes was guaranteed. When it comes to stripped-down dance music, there's nowhere better than Montevideo.