Hunter in the Woods

Probably the 50 greatest DJ mixes of all time.

A packed club crowd under mirror balls and blue laser beams

I’ve been DJing for the best part of two decades, and I’ve spent more hours listening to other people’s mixes than I have working - in the car, at my desk, waiting in airports, on my (sweet) yellow walkman on the way to school. And as I was looking for inspiration, I figured I’d fire up an AI swarm, query the internet and share the results.

The rules I set:

  • Any genre. Disco, house, techno, hip hop, drum and bass, trance, dubstep, mashups, amapiano-adjacent. If it was mixed by a DJ and it mattered, it was in the running.
  • It had to matter. Not just “a great mix” - there are thousands of those. Each one here either changed what a DJ mix could be, broke a sound to the world, or became one of those recordings people pass around like scripture.
  • Not my favourite mixes or artists. Mixes that moved the world, which meant ranking by play counts and what’s been written about them, without my own bias.
  • One per DJ. Laughably, my AI agent fought me on this and I totally conceded. Sasha & Digweed and Paul Oakenfold get two each, because, honestly, they earned it, and Strictly Kev sneaks in twice through Coldcut and DJ Food.
  • You have to be able to hear it. Every one I could find is embedded below. Where the original isn’t online in full I’ve used the next best thing I could find.

They’re in chronological order, because ranking Larry Levan against Fred again.. would be silly. I purposely didn’t want a “this beats that” list - but a way to see (and be inspired by) the evolution of the craft. And read in order they tell that story: the DJ mix going from a trick to fill a dancefloor, to a cassette you bought in a car park, to a CD with your face on it, to a radio show, to a livestream with fifty million views. A journey through our past which is the reason we are where we are today.

1. Tom Moulton - side A of Gloria Gaynor’s Never Can Say Goodbye (1974)

Before there were mix CDs, there was this: one side of a record with three songs - “Honey Bee”, “Never Can Say Goodbye” and “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” - running into each other with no gaps, about eighteen minutes non-stop. Tom Moulton, the man who also invented the 12" single and the remix as we know it, built it out of his habit of making party tapes for Fire Island. Why eighteen minutes? In his own words, so the DJ could go to the bathroom. Gaynor’s reaction on first hearing it, according to Moulton, was “I don’t sing much.” He isn’t even credited on the sleeve. It’s the first continuous mix committed to a commercial album, and everything else on this list descends from it.



2. Larry Levan - Live at the Paradise Garage (recorded 1979)

The Paradise Garage was a former truck depot on King Street in New York with a sound system that Richard Long re-tuned twice a week, and Larry Levan’s Saturday nights there were known simply as “Saturday Mass”. He didn’t blend things seamlessly - he jumped tempos and textures with abandon, stopped the party to climb a ladder and clean the mirror ball, and once played Colonel Abrams’ “Music Is the Answer” for an hour. This recording, taken straight off the board in 1979 and finally released by Strut in 2000, is the closest any of us will get to being in the room. Levan died in 1992, aged 38. Every DJ who talks about “taking people on a journey” is quoting him whether they know it or not.



3. Frankie Knuckles - Live at the Warehouse, Chicago (1981)

The club that gave house music its name. Frankie Knuckles was resident at the Warehouse from 1977 to 1982, playing to up to 2,000 mostly Black and gay dancers, stretching disco records with reel-to-reel edits until they turned into something new. There’s no single canonical Knuckles tape - this one, dated August 1981 (the date’s a little shaky, as tapes from then always are), is the one Red Bull Music Academy’s guide to his mixes spends the most time on. Steady, patient, and building a sense of drama you can hear him growing into. He won a Grammy, got a street named after him in Chicago, and died in 2014. The godfather, no exaggeration.



4. Grandmaster Flash - The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel (1981)

Seven minutes, three turntables, and the first time anyone captured on record what a hip hop DJ actually did. Flash cuts, rubs and backspins through Chic’s “Good Times”, Blondie’s “Rapture”, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”, “Apache” and a bit of a Flash Gordon record, and the accounts disagree on whether it took a few takes or one unbroken pass - Flash himself has said that if he couldn’t do it in the studio, he couldn’t do it on stage. NME had it as the second-best track of 1981, and The Wire later called it one of the hundred most important records ever made. Turntablism starts here.



5. Double Dee & Steinski - Lesson 1: The Payoff Mix (1983)

Two guys entered a Tommy Boy remix contest for a G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid track and cut together twelve to fourteen hours of tape edits across a weekend: breakbeats, Little Richard, the Supremes, tap-dancing instruction records, Humphrey Bogart. It won. It couldn’t be released, because none of the samples could ever be cleared, so it lived on promos and radio for twenty-five years before finally getting an official release in 2008. Coldcut, DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, the Avalanches and Girl Talk all owe it something. It’s five minutes long and it’s basically the blueprint for the next forty years of sample culture.



6. Ron Hardy - Live at the Muzic Box, Chicago (1986)

If Frankie Knuckles was the church, Ron Hardy was the riot. At the Muzic Box he pitched records up as far as they’d go, played them backwards, cut them up on reel-to-reel, and layered train sounds and reverb over the top. Local producers - Marshall Jefferson, Adonis, Larry Heard - brought him their tapes to test on his floor, and he famously broke Phuture’s “Acid Tracks” by playing it four times in a row on its first night. There are forty-odd Hardy tapes floating around and no one agrees on the best, so take this one as representative rather than definitive. Hardy died in 1992, aged 34. Acid house started on his dancefloor.



7. Mark Farina - Mushroom Jazz (1992 onwards)

Not every great mix is for the peak of the night. Mark Farina started Mushroom Jazz in a side room in Chicago - hip hop, acid jazz, MC Solaar, head-nod funk - and took it to San Francisco in 1992, where the weekly night grew from a hundred people to the better part of seven hundred. The cassettes were sold in runs of fifty, then five hundred, and as he put it, they became “the cassette tape you’d put in the car.” The first official CD came out on Om Records in 1996 and the series ran to eight volumes. It basically wrote the West Coast downtempo rulebook. (This upload is the later Volume 1 tracklist, not the original 1996 pressing.)



8. Slipmatt - Fantazia NYE, Littlecote House (1992)

The UK rave tape pack deserves a spot all of its own. You went to the party, then you bought the tape - £15 to £20 for a pack of sets - and you played it until it stretched. Fantazia was the defining promoter of the hardcore era, and their New Year’s Eve 1992 party at Littlecote House drew around 16,000 people. Slipmatt’s set, released as “Fantazia Takes You Into ‘93”, is a perfect snapshot of peak hardcore: SL2’s “On a Ragga Tip”, Baby D, 2 Bad Mice’s “Bombscare”, breakbeats sped up and piano stabs everywhere. It’s the most-played rave tape on YouTube by a distance, and you can hear why in about thirty seconds.



9. Andrew Weatherall - BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix (1993)

Only the third Essential Mix ever broadcast, and recorded by the man they called the Guv’nor at the height of his Sabresonic years. Weatherall had already produced Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, and here he runs through Plastikman, LFO, Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia and his own Sabres of Paradise, two hours of dark, dubby, slightly menacing techno that sounds about ten years ahead of what everyone around him was doing. Mixmag called him “a legitimate contender as both best DJ and best remixer of all time.” He died suddenly in February 2020 at 56, and the outpouring told you how many DJs he’d quietly shaped. If you want a proper mix CD instead, his Fabric 19 (2004) is the other one to hunt down.



10. Sasha & John Digweed - Renaissance: The Mix Collection (1994)

Three CDs, nearly four hours, colour-coded blue, orange and green and structured like a whole night at the Renaissance club in the Midlands, where both were residents. No computers involved - just two DJs at their peak. The packaging was so fancy no UK supplier could make it, so they had to get it from Japan. It went silver, made the UK top 10 compilations, and is widely called the moment the mix CD became a proper product rather than a promo. Resident Advisor called it “the great Daddy of all DJ mix compilations.” All three CDs are in the video below, back to back - settle in.



11. Paul Oakenfold - “The Goa Mix”, BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix (1994)

Voted the greatest Essential Mix of all time by Radio 1 listeners in 2000, and it’s still the one people bring up first. Oakenfold had been playing in Goa and came back with a head full of psychedelic trance, then built two hours around it like a film - literally, there’s Vangelis’s Blade Runner score in it, alongside Hallucinogen’s “LSD” and Man With No Name. It aired a week before Christmas 1994 and Cream sold it on CD at the club shop, unlicensed, which meant the bootlegs were everywhere for years. This is the mix that took Goa trance from a beach in India to every car stereo in Britain.



12. Laurent Garnier - Mixmag Live! Volume 19 (1995)

A single CD that starts with St Germain’s “Deep In It”, moves through Detroit techno, and ends on Drexciya’s “Black Sea”. The great detail here is that Garnier insisted the CD have no track markers at all - one track, sixty minutes - because, as the case put it, he felt the mix told a story as a whole and should be listened to that way. That’s the whole Garnier philosophy in one decision. Mixmag reissued it in 2020 as a classic. (His double Laboratoire Mix from 1996 is the other contender if you want more.)



13. Jeff Mills - Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo (1995)

This is the one. If you ask techno DJs to name the greatest mix ever recorded, most of them will say this before you’ve finished the question. Recorded at the Liquidroom in Shinjuku in October 1995 on two turntables plus two reel-to-reel machines carrying his own pre-mastered tracks (sitting on cinder blocks, if the footage is anything to go by), it’s 36 tracks in 67 minutes, and Mills mixes like he’s trying to break the turntables. Pitchfork gave it 10/10 and described it as “a mix of such molten intensity that it warped the idea of what DJing could be.” It turned thirty last year and Mills has been touring it around the world on vinyl and reel-to-reel. Still undefeated.



14. Coldcut - Journeys by DJ: 70 Minutes of Madness (1995)

Coldcut took everything they’d been doing on their Kiss FM show Solid Steel - hip hop, funk, breakbeat, jazz, spoken word, film dialogue - and stacked it on an ADAT multitrack into seventy-odd minutes of absolute nonsense that somehow makes perfect sense. Sony refused to clear Coldcut’s own track. The licences expired in 1998 and it went out of print for four years. PopMatters called it “probably the greatest mix disc ever”, and Mojo called it “the great album Grandmaster Flash and Double D and Steinski never made.” Big beat, mashups and every “anything goes” DJ since owe it rent.



15. DJ Screw - 3 ’n the Mornin’ (Part Two) (1995)

Houston’s DJ Screw slowed records down until they crawled, then chopped and repeated phrases until they turned into something hypnotic and syrupy. He invented a sound, chopped and screwed, and a city’s whole identity grew up around it. Hundreds of people would queue in his driveway to buy his hand-dubbed grey tapes. 3 ’n the Mornin’ (Part Two) is his most canonical proper release, with Lil’ Keke’s “Pimp Tha Pen” and E.S.G. on the opening track, and it actually charted. (If you know your Screw, you’ll argue for June 27th - the 35-minute freestyle tape that became an unofficial Houston holiday - and you’d have a point.) He died in 2000, aged 29. His slowed-down fingerprints are all over modern rap and a fair bit of experimental electronic music too.



16. Kruder & Dorfmeister - DJ-Kicks (1996)

Two Viennese producers made a mix that defined a decade of chill-out rooms, dinner parties and boutique hotel lobbies. Downtempo, trip hop and boom bap, sliding into Aquasky’s drum and bass and Hardfloor’s acid towards the end - it’s still the most famous entry in the long-running DJ-Kicks series, and it sold over 250,000 copies in Europe alone, absurd for a mix CD. !K7 put out a 30th-anniversary box set this year, with the mix on vinyl as one continuous piece for the first time. Some mixes you dance to. This one, you have a very nice evening to.



17. LTJ Bukem - Logical Progression (1996)

Jungle in 1996 was mostly about violence in the low end. LTJ Bukem went the other way: rolling breaks, warm pads, jazz chords, and a sense of space you didn’t think drum and bass could have. Logical Progression collected five years of his Good Looking label - Peshay, Photek, Blu Mar Ten - and the mixed disc became the blueprint for “intelligent” drum and bass, for better and worse. The Rolling Stone Album Guide called it perhaps one of the two most important drum and bass releases of the decade, the other being Goldie’s Timeless.



18. Sasha & John Digweed - Northern Exposure (1996)

Two years after Renaissance, they did it again and arguably did it better. Two discs, “North” and “South”, each a full journey from ambient through progressive house and trance into breaks and back out to sunrise, ending on Underworld’s “Dark & Long (Dark Train)”. Fans have argued for thirty years about who mixed which disc; they both insist it was a team effort. Pitchfork gave it 8.7, In The Mix ranked it the fifth-best mix album ever, and it made the pair genuine superstars. It got a 30th-anniversary Redux treatment last week, though purists are not thrilled about the Underworld closer being swapped out. Both discs are below - North first, then South.





19. Daft Punk - BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix (1997)

Six weeks after Homework came out, two French kids without robot helmets came on Pete Tong’s show and played two hours of Chicago ghetto house, Detroit and their own stuff - “Teachers”, “Rock’n Roll”, the Motorbass remix of “Around the World”, Thomas Bangalter’s “Spinal Scratch”. Tong introduced them as “the most brilliant thing since sliced bread.” It’s a raw, jacking, brilliantly un-polished set that shows exactly where the French touch came from, and it’s one of the most-uploaded Essential Mixes ever. A time capsule of the moment just before they got huge.



20. The Chemical Brothers - Brothers Gonna Work It Out (1998)

Let’s be honest: the critics were lukewarm on this one, and Pitchfork gave it a 5.4. But for a lot of people - especially in the US, where it sold 165,000 copies - this was the first DJ mix they ever owned and the moment they understood what a DJ could do with a pile of records. It opens with Willie Hutch’s “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out” (where the title comes from) and charges through big beat, funk, hip hop and acid with all the subtlety of a forklift, which is exactly the point. Their residency at the Heavenly Sunday Social, bottled.



21. Paul Oakenfold - Tranceport (1998)

Yes, Oakenfold gets two. Tranceport was aimed squarely at an American market that was still a few years behind on electronic music, and it worked: Three Drives’ “Greece 2000”, Binary Finary’s “1998”, Energy 52’s “Café Del Mar” - a run of tracks that defined late-90s trance. It sold around 100,000 copies, which Rolling Stone called “a startling sales figure for a DJ mix” when it ranked it among the greatest EDM albums of all time, adding: “Sometimes syrup tastes really good.” This is ground zero for American trance and, by extension, a big chunk of what became EDM.



22. Kemistry & Storm - DJ-Kicks (1999)

Kemistry and Storm co-founded Metalheadz with Goldie, and their DJ-Kicks was the first in the series by a female duo and the first pure drum and bass entry - a dark, rolling, masterful hour that’s still held up as one of the genre’s best mixes. Three months after it came out, Kemistry was killed in a freak accident on the M3 on the way home from a gig, when a cat’s-eye reflector kicked up by a van came through the windscreen. She was 35. Storm has said losing her was like losing half of herself. The mix stands as their monument, and it opened doors for a generation of women behind the decks in a scene that badly needed it.



23. DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist - Brainfreeze (1999)

Two crate-digging obsessives, 45s only, live, no edits. Brainfreeze started as practice for a show in San Francisco and was pressed as 1,000 CDs to sell at the gigs, themed around a 7-Eleven Slurpee promo record - they even dressed as convenience store clerks. 7-Eleven sent a cease and desist, the pressing stopped, and then the bootlegs took over the internet. It changed record collecting: sellers started labelling funk 45s “as featured on Brainfreeze” to bump the price. AllMusic called it “a dizzyingly brilliant, virtuoso work of two exceedingly fecund imaginations.” Pure joy.



24. Carl Cox - The Millennium Essential Mix, Sydney and Honolulu (1999)

The most ambitious New Year’s Eve any DJ has ever pulled off. On 31 December 1999, Carl Cox played midnight in Sydney (Bondi Beach), got on a plane, flew back across the International Date Line, and played midnight again in Honolulu, both as part of Radio 1’s global millennium broadcast. He has said he played Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” at both. Carl Cox has done more Essential Mixes than anyone, but this was the night that summed up his whole reputation: the three-deck wizard of rave, the hardest-working man in dance music, seeing in the new millennium twice. Sydney first, then Honolulu.





25. The Avalanches - Gimix (2000)

A bit of a selfish pick from this side of the Tasman, but it earns its place. While Since I Left You was stuck in sample-clearance hell, Robbie Chater put together a promo cassette - two sides, 23 minutes each, a few hundred copies (sources say 500 or 800) - mixing previews of the album with the band’s favourite records. It was sold at shows and in independent shops and became one of the great cult artefacts of Australian music. A box of leftover copies turned up in 2020 and was sold off to fans, some signed. It’s the clearest window into how the Avalanches’ brains work: the album is the polished version; this is the kitchen-table, crate-digging, joyous mess it came from.



26. Z-Trip & DJ P - Uneasy Listening Vol. 1 (c. 2001)

Before mashups were a thing you made on a laptop, Z-Trip and DJ P did it live on four turntables. Phil Collins under Del the Funky Homosapien, Kansas, Metallica, ’80s rock blended with hip hop acapellas - Z-Trip hated the word “mashup” and called them blends. It was a limited run of 1,000 promo CDs (the date floats somewhere between 1999 and 2001 depending on who you ask), spread across the internet as MP3s, and got bootlegged on vinyl in the UK so hard that they ended up paying import prices for copies of their own record. It made year-end lists in Rolling Stone and Spin and set up the whole mashup boom.



27. DJ Harvey - Sarcastic Study Masters Vol. 2 (2001)

DJ Harvey is a cult figure in a way that almost no one else on this list is - an English ex-punk drummer who moved to America and became a disco shaman, famous for sets that run eight hours or more. Sarcastic Study Masters Vol. 2 was a promo CD given away free to plug a run of Japanese gigs for an LA clothing brand, and by Harvey’s own account it introduced a generation to “sleaze, balearic, afro, and ultimately cosmic disco.” Original copies change hands for hundreds of dollars. Its pacing is deliberately wonky; as VICE put it, it sounds wrong in the best possible way. The catch: SSM Vol. 2 isn’t online in full anywhere I could find. So instead, here’s Harvey’s Boxing Day 1999 Essential Mix, which will give you the general idea and then some.



28. Richie Hawtin - DE9: Closer to the Edit (2001)

Hawtin took over a hundred tracks, chopped them into more than 300 loops - some a single note long - and rebuilt them into 53 minutes and 31 “ID points” of minimal techno that was less a DJ mix than a new piece of music made out of other people’s. He built it while beta-testing Final Scratch, one of the first systems that let you control digital files with a turntable, and told Exclaim at the time that “the idea of just playing records back is dated.” That was a controversial thing to say in 2001. Twenty-five years later every DJ with a laptop is living in the world this mix predicted.



29. Michael Mayer - Immer (2002)

Resident Advisor ranked this the best mix CD of the 2000s, and it’s the quietest record on this list. Michael Mayer, co-founder of Kompakt in Cologne, built Immer (“always” in German) around how he’d play the later part of a warm-up at their parties: Carsten Jost, Akufen, Superpitcher, all melancholy minimal techno and long, patient builds. Mayer’s whole approach is about serving the tracks rather than showing off - “a beautiful format to tell a beautiful little story… something that should be forever. Immer.” Pitchfork put it in its 200 best albums of the decade. A masterclass in restraint.



30. 2manydjs - As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 (2002)

The Dewaele brothers from Soulwax took dozens of tracks - Destiny’s Child over 10cc, Dolly Parton over Röyksopp, the Stooges over Salt-N-Pepa - and smashed them together into an hour that made it OK for indie kids to love dance music and dance kids to love rock. Clearing it took nearly three years: 865 emails, 160 faxes, 187 tracks requested, 114 approved, 62 refused. It’s widely called the first official mashup album, sold more than half a million copies, and the New York Times called it the best pop album of 2002. There is no Pt. 1. There never was. Proper legends.



31. Fatboy Slim - Big Beach Boutique II (2002)

On 13 July 2002, Norman Cook threw a free party on Brighton beach expecting maybe 60,000 people. Around 250,000 showed up - roughly double Brighton’s population - and the town came to a standstill. Ambulances couldn’t get through, people slept under the pier, and police asked him to finish half an hour early. It wasn’t all joy: two people died and over 170 were hurt, and it changed how the UK runs big events. Cook later said he’d “created a monster,” and still talks about the mix of elation and fear that night. As a moment for dance music, it was the high point of the superstar DJ era, and a hard lesson about what happens when a party outgrows its venue.



32. John Peel - FabricLive.07 (2002)

The great radio DJ wasn’t a beatmatcher, and he didn’t pretend to be. When Fabric asked him to do a mix CD, he gave them blues, rockabilly, Iggy Pop, Joy Division, the Liverpool Kop singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, and closed, of course, with the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks”, his favourite record ever. His sleeve note: “This CD isn’t supposed to be mood-establishing. If anything, it’s mood-demolishing.” At his first Fabric night, by his own account, the crowd chanted his name for fifteen minutes after he finished. He died two years later, and this is the only mix album he ever made. It’s here because selection is the whole job, and nobody did it better.



33. James Holden - Balance 005 (2003)

James Holden was a twenty-something production prodigy when he was handed the fifth volume of Australia’s Balance series, and he used it to blow up progressive house from the inside: hypnotic, wobbly, shoegazey trance with unknown names from his own Border Community label like Nathan Fake (whose “Outhouse” appears here before it was even released). At first, techno people thought it was too proggy and prog people thought it was too techno. Then its reputation quietly grew into legend, and Resident Advisor later named it one of the best mixes of the century. A whole strand of 2000s electronica came out of this. Both discs are below - disc one first, then disc two.





34. DJ Food - Raiding the 20th Century (2004/2005)

Strictly Kev (who also worked on the Coldcut mix above) set out to make a history of cut-up music - avant-garde tape loops through turntable megamixes to bastard-pop mashups - made out of cut-up music. It premiered on XFM in January 2004 and crashed the servers when people tried to download it. Then Kev read Paul Morley’s book Words and Music and found it tracing the same history - Morley had even used the title “Raiding the 20th Century” for an Art of Noise project years earlier. So Kev got Morley to narrate, and released the expanded “Words & Music Expansion” in 2005 as a free download. Universal sent a cease and desist about a year later, long after the horse had bolted. A history lesson and a party at the same time.



35. Tiësto - Parade of the Athletes, Athens Olympics (2004)

The first DJ ever to play an Olympic opening ceremony. Tiësto played the 90-minute parade of more than 10,000 athletes in Athens to a TV audience in the billions, with eight tracks written especially for it alongside “Traffic”, “Lethal Industry” and his version of “Adagio for Strings”. Whatever you think of big-room trance, this was the moment DJ culture walked onto the biggest stage on Earth, and it went gold in New Zealand among other places. The album is a studio recreation of the set rather than the live recording, but it’s the version everyone had.



36. Optimo - How to Kill the DJ (Part Two) (2004)

Every Sunday night from 1997 to 2010, JD Twitch and JG Wilkes ran Optimo at Glasgow’s Sub Club and played absolutely whatever they wanted: Soft Cell, Gang of Four, the Cramps, Berlin microhouse, DC go-go, disco gospel, Laibach, John Carpenter. How to Kill the DJ (Part Two) bottled that - at one point they slam Nurse With Wound straight into Blondie’s “Atomic” - and launched them around the world. It’s the defining genre-blind mix of the 2000s, and if you’ve ever heard a DJ play a post-punk record in the middle of a house set and get away with it, you’re hearing Optimo’s influence. JD Twitch (Keith McIvor) died in September 2025 of a brain tumour, aged 57. Rest easy.



37. Erol Alkan - A Bugged Out Mix (2005)

Erol Alkan ran Trash, London’s best indie club, and the Bugged Out! residency at the same time, and this two-disc set is where the two worlds collided: Alter Ego’s “Rocker”, Roman Flügel, Simian’s “Never Be Alone”, Wink’s “Higher State of Consciousness”, a ten-minute remix of Spacemen 3, plus a downtempo disc for lying on the floor as the sun comes up. It’s the definitive document of the indie-electro crossover moment, and it made Alkan Mixmag DJ of the Year in 2006. If you were in a sweaty club in skinny jeans in 2005, this is your nostalgia.



38. Mary Anne Hobbs - “Dubstep Warz”, BBC Radio 1 (2006)

One radio show that took a genre from a few hundred people in south London to the world. Mary Anne Hobbs gave two hours of her Radio 1 show in January 2006 to the dubstep scene - Mala, Skream, Kode9 & The Spaceape, Loefah, Vex’d, Hatcha - and told them to play whatever they wanted. Coki of Digital Mystikz said their DMZ parties doubled and tripled in size afterwards. Hobbs herself calls it “the global tipping point for the dubstep sound,” and it’s not an overstatement: without this show, there’s arguably no Skrillex further down this list. It’s a show, not strictly a single DJ mix, but nothing else captures that moment like it. This is her own upload.



39. Girl Talk - Night Ripper (2006)

A biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh spent eight months stitching together over 300 uncleared samples from more than 100 artists into 42 minutes of continuous mashup: rap acapellas over classic rock, pop hooks over everything. His label, Illegal Art, didn’t clear a single sample and planned a fair-use defence. A CD plant refused to press it, iTunes pulled it, and a US congressman defended him on the floor of the House. Pitchfork called it the soundtrack of the summer. It’s technically an album rather than a DJ mix, but it’s the logical endpoint of everything from Steinski to 2manydjs - and it became a test case for whether sampling can ever be fair use.



40. Ricardo Villalobos - Fabric 36 (2007)

The Fabric mix that broke the rules: every single track is a Villalobos production, most of them brand new, so it’s effectively a studio album dressed up as a DJ mix. It’s minimal techno at its most hypnotic and strange - twelve-minute grooves, unsettling vocal samples, crowd noise, flangers - and it takes twenty minutes before anything you’d call a melody shows up. Pitchfork gave it 8.7. It’s the defining record of the mid-2000s minimal era, when Berlin afterparties ran for days and Villalobos was the high priest, and it made a lot of people ask what a DJ mix even is.



41. Flying Lotus - BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix (2008)

Pete Tong introduced it as “something a bit left from an experimental producer,” and then Flying Lotus opened with his great-aunt Alice Coltrane and spent two hours wandering through the LA beat scene, Glasgow’s Hudson Mohawke and Rustie, and out the other side into Björk, Broadcast and Portishead. Listeners voted it Essential Mix of the Year, and Rolling Stone later called it “perhaps the most time-honored and visionary” Essential Mix of all. It’s the template for the post-genre beat-maker’s mix, and probably the reason a lot of producers you love started making music in the first place.



42. Four Tet - FabricLive.59 (2011)

Kieran Hebden had been making beautiful eclectic mixes for years, but this was where he turned into a club DJ. It’s heavy on UK garage, with field recordings he made inside Fabric itself, new Four Tet originals and Burial’s “Street Halo”. Every outside track came from vinyl, stitched together on a computer, mastered without cleaning up the crackle. In his words: “This mix is not about my DJing. It’s about London and Fabric and nights out and my take on all that.” A love letter to a city’s nightlife from someone who’d go on to become one of the biggest DJs on Earth without ever really changing.



43. Ben UFO - FabricLive.67 (2013)

Ben UFO doesn’t produce. He just plays records, and he’s arguably the most influential pure DJ of his generation. FabricLive.67 is his manifesto: lesser-known house and techno from across decades and continents sitting right next to new tracks from his Hessle Audio crew, grouped in clusters and full of deliberately jarring jumps that somehow make total sense. FACT called it “articulate, incisive and practically book-length.” It made being a selector - not a producer who DJs, just a DJ - a respectable thing to aspire to again, and shaped how a whole generation of UK DJs think about mixing genres.



44. Skrillex - BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix (2013)

You can roll your eyes, but you can’t argue with the numbers or the selection. Skrillex’s second Essential Mix threw Disclosure, Blawan’s techno, Jeremih and A$AP Rocky into the same two hours as his own brostep, and the mix of UK club music and US rap and bass is what people were talking about. His label OWSLA claimed it was the single most played piece of content in Radio 1’s history across all media - that’s the label’s claim rather than a BBC figure, but it’s a good one either way. It’s the moment EDM’s biggest name showed he was listening to the underground, and that crossover is still shaping festivals today.



45. DJ EZ - Boiler Room London (2014)

The king of UK garage, live on Boiler Room for three and a half hours, using the CDJ cue buttons like an MPC - chopping vocals, firing off hits, never letting a track settle for long. Rolling Stone ranked it among the greatest internet mixes of all time, and it’s the purest showcase of garage DJing as a performance art. EZ is also famous for endurance: he did 24 hours non-stop for Cancer Research UK in 2016 (raising nearly £60k, timing his toilet breaks to the length of the tracks) and did it again on Boiler Room in 2020. The charity marathon wasn’t archived properly, so here’s the London set instead, which is where most people fell in love with him.



46. DJ Koze - DJ-Kicks (2015)

DJ Koze is a cheeky, sentimental genius and this is the most Koze thing imaginable: a mix that opens with an exclusive called “I Haven’t Been Everywhere But It’s On My List”, slips in his own re-edits of a couple of favourites, drops in a Madlib instrumental, a Boards of Canada remix of cLOUDDEAD and a William Shatner spoken-word piece, and somehow makes it all feel like one warm, slightly tipsy hug. KEXP said it “surprises, delights, and embraces you with reckless abandon.” The 50th DJ-Kicks, and one of the best in the whole series.



47. Moodymann - DJ-Kicks (2016)

Kenny Dixon Jr. had been DJing in Detroit for nearly thirty years before he did an official multi-artist mix, and when he finally did, he made it entirely his own: soul, hip hop, house, a detour into dystopian new wave, and eleven of his own re-edits including Jai Paul’s “BTSTU”. Resident Advisor put it best: “His style is completely inimitable… On paper, there’s no way things should all hang together coherently. It’s credit to Moodymann that they inarguably do.” Rolling Stone had it as the second-best electronic album of 2016. Detroit soul in its purest form.



48. The Black Madonna b2b Mike Servito - Boiler Room x Dekmantel (2016)

2016 was Marea Stamper’s year. She’d gone from resident at Chicago’s Smart Bar to its first-ever talent buyer, was named Mixmag’s DJ of the Year, and became one of the loudest voices for a dance scene that remembered its roots in Black, queer and outsider culture. This back-to-back with Mike Servito at Dekmantel - two hours of acid, jacking house and disco that Boiler Room itself calls “fun, boozy chaos” - is the set that captured it, and it’s still her most-watched. She now goes by The Blessed Madonna, having changed her name in 2020 after listening to criticism of the original. (If you want the pop-crossover side of her, she also mixed Dua Lipa’s Club Future Nostalgia.)



49. Black Coffee - Live at Salle Wagram, Paris, for Cercle (2018)

The most important story in dance music of the last decade might be South Africa: from deep house and gqom to amapiano, the country has had a bigger influence on the global sound than almost anywhere. Black Coffee is its flag-bearer. His set at Salle Wagram, billed by Cercle as the oldest ballroom in Paris, has over 64 million views, making it one of the most-watched DJ sets on YouTube, and it’s an hour of patient, soulful, rolling South African house that fills a room with ease. He’d already done what OkayAfrica billed as the first Essential Mix by an African DJ in 2015 (with Fat Freddy’s Drop in it, kia ora), and he went on to win a Grammy in 2022. If you want amapiano, go next to Uncle Waffles’ 2022 Boiler Room in Johannesburg.



50. Fred again.. - Boiler Room London (2022)

The most recent entry here, and the one that will probably age the most interestingly. Fred again.. rebuilt his tracks live on an MPC, chopping in his friends’ voice notes, dropping an unreleased Swedish House Mafia collaboration, and about 23 minutes in a fan accidentally pressed pause on his deck. Fred just said hello and brought it back in, and it became one of the most-loved moments of the whole set. It won Viral Moment of the Year at Radio 1’s dance awards, it was the set more of DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs said was the best they’d seen that year than any other, and it’s now past 55 million views. Whether you love him or not, this is what the DJ mix looks like in the 2020s: a live performance, a shared moment, and a video.



The ones that nearly made it

A list of fifty was super hard, there are just so many awesome mixes out there! Here are a few of the ones that hurt the most to cut, especially from the last few years:

  • Honey Dijon - Boiler Room x Sugar Mountain, Melbourne (2018). Twelve million views and one of the defining sets of house music’s return to its Black and queer roots.
  • SHERELLE - Boiler Room London (2019). The 160bpm jungle and footwork set that broke her and kicked off the UK’s fast-tempo wave. She won Essential Mix of the Year the following year.
  • Josey Rebelle - BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix (2019). Essential Mix of the Year, and often called the best one of its decade.
  • KH (Four Tet) - Essential Mix (2022). Also Essential Mix of the Year.
  • Andrew Weatherall - Fabric 19 (2004) and Laurent Garnier - Laboratoire Mix (1996), both of which could easily have taken their artists’ slots.
  • Uncle Waffles - Boiler Room Johannesburg (2022), for amapiano’s breakout moment.

A note on the embeds: most of these are fan uploads, because a lot of classic mix CDs were never officially put online. If one disappears, search the title on YouTube or Mixcloud and there’s almost always another copy. And if you love one of these, buy it - plenty are still in print, and several have just been reissued.

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