Maya Bouldry-Morrison radiates an almost disarming sense of authenticity. More than many other dance music artists, her mixes and productions are reflections of messages that have buoyed her throughout her personal life. Her tracks are accompanied by declarations of self-empowerment, while her DJ sets are full of optimistic, party-rocking vocal refrains. After coming out as trans halfway through her career—and building a life and back-to-back act with fellow trans partner, Eris Drew, whom she lives with in New Hampshire—these narratives have served as powerful forces for both growth and recovery.

"Music is a healing technology," she told me. "And when I get behind the decks, I want to help the crowd experience the same healing effects from the music that it's had for me."

Listen to any of Bouldry-Morrison's sets and you'll hear an eclectic pastiche of retro house, wild breakbeat and psychedelic trance, with a through line of big build-ups and euphoric climaxes. Far from cloying or cheesy, this blend of sounds creates a cohesive sonic palette. And, on the dance floor, an explosion of communion and raucous positivity. This was clear when I saw her go back-to-back with Drew at New York festival Sustain-Release in 2019. During their mind-melding collage of acid and breaks, five people engaged in an intimate hugging circle beside me, passing a single friend between them whom they took turns to lovingly embrace.

While she's been a touring DJ and producer for more than 20 years, Bouldry-Morrison has been riding the crest of a recent surge in demand. It began five years ago with the inauguration of T4T LUV NRG (the label she runs with Drew), and a turn towards an aesthetic that is more self-reflective, and more undeniably queer. Before her appearance at Dekmantel Festival last August, she joined me for an interview in front of a live audience, where she gave demonstrations of specific skills she's cultivated in the DJ booth. We caught up again in Berlin a few months later to expand on that first conversation, touching on the ethos that surrounds collecting vinyl, as well as how she threads personal narratives through her work. Now in the process of creating a series of free online guides, workshops and sample packs, Bouldry-Morrison's mission remains to democratise and demystify everything surrounding production, DJing and the dance music industry.

Bouldry-Morrison and RA staffer Chloe Lula at Dekmantel Conference in August 2022.

Since our original interview at Dekmantel in August, you and Eris [Drew] wrote a love letter to Panorama Bar for our birthday book, Sacred Spaces. You evoke such a beautiful description of playing back-to-back there in 2020. Could you talk a little bit more about that experience?

It was right before lockdown. I think [Eris and I] played the second-to-last set right before closing. It's just a room that can translate what we love about dance music. It's also a space that I buy records for all year. I know what works in that room that won't necessarily work on every single dance floor. That night we took a very functional dose of mushrooms. It can be a gamble taking mushrooms when you're going to DJ. I haven't been doing it as much recently as I have in the past, but it's something I like to do with her when we feel that the time is right for it—when there are people around us that we care about and we feel like we have our own space to explore. It was one of my favourite sets I've ever played, and my favourite since we've played together. Just because it all worked. We knew what we wanted to start the set with. We played this Romanthony track and just went from there.

We play vinyl, and we bring out bags of a lot of the same records throughout the year, slowly swapping things out. We were touring a lot then, so by the time we played that set, those record bags were an accumulation of what we had been working towards. It all flowed easily. It was also just nice to be tripping and see everyone move in sync with each other. And the sounds were all slightly different because of the mushrooms. They can give you ideas of things to mix that you wouldn't necessarily choose, certain connections that come to light in the moment. It was an incredible high to be in my favourite space, with the person I love, playing this set that meant the world to me.

You and Eris have such a synergistic relationship behind the decks. You mentioned in your letter that you always alternate every three tracks. Why?

We made this decision a long time ago when we did our very first back-to-back. The idea of doing one-to-one can leave moments where you're mixing too quickly into the person's track, where you don't let it develop long enough. You get nervous, so you do something that you didn't mean to do. You might also take a left turn in that moment that the other person wasn't expecting. The three-for-three means that it's like each of us gets like a little mini-set, essentially. I get to play the thing that's connected to what she played before. If I want to continue that theme with the track after that, I can, or I can introduce something different. And then by the third track, either round that out or do something else. If I want to do something radically different at the end, I would give her a heads-up.

I also want to make sure there's space so I don't step on her records. We'll usually hand over the headphones when we're ready to go. But sometimes that's not until the very end of a track, because one of us will want to do some scratches or do some drops, put an a capella over it or something like that. It's much more about physical cues than discussing everything ahead of time. I've also been with her nearly five years—we've been doing this for a while. There's a lot we don't need to speak about as much after such a long time.

In the Sacred Spaces essay, you also write about how you were both prompted to bring out a record that sat dormant on Eris's shelf for years. How can you anticipate when it's the right time and context to play something?

Well, for Panorama Bar specifically, we know what works. But when it comes to knowing in general, there are certain spaces that I can guess, but for the most part I don't really know. I'm a cross-genre artist, essentially. I play a lot of old records, and I just play whatever I have in my bag: breaks and trance, lots of house, hard house records, hip-hop records. I'm at the point where I feel like when someone's booking me, it's because they want me to come play. So that means they want me to do the thing I want to do.

How have you built your collection?

When I moved to New York, I finally had access to record stores. Because I play lots of older music I was going through the dollar bins, buying whatever. For a long time, I wouldn't like to spend more than $5 on a record because I was broke. But doing that started giving me a lot of knowledge. I might only have $20 in my pocket to spend on records for that week—I might not be able to buy the $50 record that I found, but I can listen to it and notice what label it's on, who the producer is, who did that remix that I like. I started storing away that information. I was listening to a ton of stuff and learning more about what my taste was. When it comes to building a record collection, spending all that time for me is really worth it. I'm also a total dork who's collected everything my entire life, from rocks to bottle caps to video games, all sorts of stuff.

My collection has ended up very personal because I've never been buying a lot. I've slowly been building up over time. It's all cumulative. Now I look at my room and I have "too many records." But when I was first in New York, I had a little IKEA shelf that had maybe one-and-a-half bins full of albums. By the time I left that city, I had multiple shelves worth of stuff filled up on a pretty modest budget.

In the past you've mentioned that your organisational methodology has changed over the years. You once organised by genre, but now you organise by BPM.

That changed a lot. I used to organise by genre because when I was first DJing that's how I looked at everything. All my house records go well together because they're all house records. My breaks records go together because they're breaks, because the hardcore works together, because the jungle works together, etc. I found that while I was doing that, I would step through a set. I would start with this genre, and then play the next kind of thing. And I remember finishing a gig once, and this guy came up to me and said, "I really liked your set, you did this, then you did this, then you did this." That's absolutely not what I'm trying to do.

Now I think all these things work together, there's a thread that goes through that entire bag. I can hear it, I understand that. All these things work together. Eris has taught me so much about DJing. She was always organising by just BPM, and when I looked at it that way, I was like, "Oh, the cross-pollination is just there across the entire bag, for the most part." Looking at it from her perspective let me follow the thread through all of the records while not sticking so closely to genre. Because at the end of the day, for me, it's all house music, in a way. I can hear all the same things through all of these records. I think many other people do as well. I needed to break out of that structure. I didn't want to be stuck in it anymore.

Bouldry-Morrison speaking to the audience at the RA conference Dekmantel 2022: ”I used to organise by genre … Now I think all these things work together, there's a thread that goes through that entire bag. I can hear it, I understand that.”

How do you build energy while mixing across genres?

Building energy also depends on who's playing before me and who's playing after me. I don't like doing a left turn from the person who's playing before me, or to really abstract from what I think the DJ after me is going to do. I understand the point of presenting music in a way that everyone has their set, but you want a lineup to kind of have some cohesion to a degree, or go from one place to another. So when it comes to building energy, it's about trying to follow through from the person before me and thinking through to the end.

There's also just the simplest "building energy" technique for me: I start with slower records and end with faster records. But I also like doing the reverse. If the person before me is playing really fast, I'll start way faster, and then slowly, slowly, slowly slow it down over like ten or 20 tracks.

What are some of the opportunities and constraints of touring with a limited collection of records?

I'm in Europe a lot to play, but I don't live here. I live in the US. I hold collections in the US. When I go out on tour, economically it makes more sense for me to be out here for a couple of weeks at a time before going home. That means when I pack a record bag, it has to get me through that entire time. I like that constraint a lot. It lets me learn the records I'm about to play. And what happens during that time, as I'm playing these tracks over and over again, I'm also mixing them with other records and finding out how they work with other things, how phrases will play off one another or work together. Now I've built this thing that works really well.

I know lots of DJs like to build brand new playlists when they're going to play gigs because there's so much music out there. There's so much to listen to, there's so much to present. It can be boring to play the same set over and over again. But I find bringing, like, 80 records to be enough of a flux so each set isn't exactly the same. Even though I've played a number of those records over a number of sets that entire time, I'm learning them really deeply. I find it so weird to go home and look at a collection of 4000 records, and pull one out and remember all the parts of it. I remember how long the intro is, I remember that breakdown, I remember the melody that comes halfway through.

How do you prepare a record bag for a tour, especially when you're going to be playing multiple gigs?

I never totally empty out my record bag from gig to gig. It evolves over time. I shuffle things around and then I fill the bag with like 50 percent new records (meaning that I haven't gotten a chance to DJ them out yet).

Sometimes I'll curate them around an idea that seems exciting, or what the songs are about. Eris and I both have record bags that we built with messages and ideas about being out on the road again. Which always comes with songs about empowerment. There are records about death energy in there, there are ideas about coming together. There are lots of songs about the feeling of being on the dance floor. I like to think about the messages I want to tell people on the floor with these songs. There's lots of information packed in those records, from song titles to lyrics.

How do you create and sustain a narrative throughout an entire set?

Music is, for me, a healing technology. Every week of going and playing is healing from the week before. That's why I like playing music that has these messages. It's not because I'm the most happy-go-lucky girl in the room all the time—I deal with depression and anxiety, I deal with all the things that so many of us do. But when I get out on the decks, I want to translate to the crowd why music is a healing technology. I'm not always successful, but I do it because I need to hear it first. Second, I hope that it also touches other people that are there as well. I do this through collaging—I have a number of a capella records that I put on top of music all the time. Part of the fun of DJing is presenting music in ways that weren't originally intended.

Do all of your sets follow a pre-set narrative structure, or are some more ad-libbed?

The bag is packed with intention in general, but I don't play every single one of those records in a set. I normally get two hours for a time slot. I love playing long, extended sets because then I can bring a lot of stuff and be intentional with what I'm going to try to say. But sometimes I don't have that. Sometimes I'll arrive at the gig and I want to do the same thing that I built the bag for. There's other times I show up and just had a bad day, and there's some aggression that needs to be pushed through me to express what I've been dealing with.

You and Eris have been active in democratising information about the craft of DJing, and sharing tips about a culture that seems to still privilege exclusivity. Can you tell me about some of the guides you've published online?

The first thing we put out on T4T was a guide I was working on about setting up a home studio. I've helped a number of people with questions about gear and things like that over the years. I'm a self-taught musician, and I've always had to cobble together knowledge to figure out how to do anything—but now I've been doing this for 20 years. So I did that first, and it felt really good to do. It's something that I thought about when people would ask me questions. This way, I could answer a question and say, "And by the way, here's a 25-page document." After that, Eris wanted to do it as well, and we decided to do one about DJing.

We're both vinyl DJs because we grew up as vinyl DJs. We wanted to put together a guide that included a lot of the information we've learned over the years. That comes with all sorts of stuff, like packing a record bag to bringing slipmats, bringing needles and bringing Isonoe feet to isolate the turntables. They're simple little tips. Have backups of your music, have extra things ready to go, try to bring headphones. We also try to be budget-conscious and give tips on things to think about that don't cost a ton of money.

In your Hot n' Ready DJ Tips, you present some unspoken etiquette, skills and suggestions for novice DJs. But when is it important to break rules rather than follow them?

Well, yeah, it's an entire commentary on the idea of the dogma that surrounds DJing. When you look online, you see Twitter arguments about what an opener should do, or how people shouldn't use a sync button. A lot of people have ideas of how you're supposed to DJ. As soon as you start falling into those spaces—these rigid ways of thinking about what someone's supposed to do—you start taking away from it as an art form. DJing is an art form, it should still be presented that way. I think most DJs would agree with me that it's an opportunity to say something and do something. We're giving ideas and tips about what's worked for us, having been doing this for a long time.

But I think it's important to acknowledge that it doesn't work for everyone. If it's not working for you, that's okay. You should try to embrace the freedom of what this can be, and not be so nervous about the rigidity that people try to place on top of it. In our guides, we try to be explicit about following things that are working for you even if they don't seem like the "traditional" thing to do. As a self-taught musician, I had to fight a lot against my own internal ideas about what I was possibly doing wrong. Like, "I see other people doing it this other way, and they seem more professional than me." It's good to be learning your way through something.

I think that's such a great attitude. When I was starting out as a DJ and producer, I was told to do things a certain way, and I think it really inhibited me because I felt I had to conform to a certain production style or technique.

Exactly. And especially if you have someone around you and you're so happy this person is going to help you with something, and then they say, "Well, this is not how you do it," you're like, "Okay, well, it definitely makes me feel like an amateur."

What else do you have coming up on the horizon?

I used to be a really fast producer, meaning I got a lot of tracks done in a short amount of time. Over the years that has slowed down more and more—not because I don't have the creativity to do these things, but because I started spending more time engineering and tweaking things. Less time making the thing I wanted to make. This year, I'll have my next EP come out, and one of the tracks took me two and a half years to finish!

Right now I'm working on tracks that are just recordings of my hardware, but I'm getting into the computer to sequence them. I want to make them all into sample packs. My hope is at some point this year, I'll put out a large set of songs and then release the samples for free. Anyone can use any part of it for whatever. It's all original content. None of it is copyrighted. I don't need credit for any of it—I just want to give that stuff away.

I have also slowly been working on another guide for using MIDI over the last year and a half. I did a week-long workshop on home studio stuff, and that was the hardest thing to explain to people. For a long time, even though I was using MIDI, I didn't really understand what was going on. And it's very simple, meaning that each individual part is easy to understand. But when you start putting it all together, it feels like too much. I've put so much work into that guide and rewritten it so many times. It'll eventually happen. Then I'm going to be doing another production workshop and hopefully getting that recording put up online. I really like sharing information, also in (hopefully) simpler terms that aren't so dogmatic. I just want everyone to be able to make the things they want to make.

Alongside touring and producing, Bouldry-Morrison has also created a series of free online guides, workshops and sample packs, aiming to democratise and demystify DJing.