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Apple Music celebrates Pride with new always on page

02 June 2021 - Press release

Apple Music has just launched a new always-on Pride page. The space will shine a light on the LGBTQ+ community all year-round. Every Sunday in June, Apple Music will also spotlight new Pride content focusing on the themes of Equality, Resilience and Community. 

  • Find all the videos, playlists, and interviews celebrating Pride on Apple Music’s new and always-on Pride page only at apple.co/Pride
  • Apple Music celebrates Pride and will launch a new always-on space that will shine a light on the LGBTQ+ community in June and all year-round.
  • Pride Month is an important time to recognise, embrace and elevate the LGBTQ+ community’s contributions — musically, culturally, and beyond. Every Sunday in June, Apple Music will spotlight new Pride content focusing on the themes of Equality, Resilience and Community. Featured content will include:
 
DJ Mixes detailed below:
 

The LA teen juggles high school with cathartic, future-forward beats. 
If Moore Kismet’s Pride mix sounds particularly urgent, that’s because of how and when it was recorded—during the last two weeks of the Los Angeles DJ/producer/songwriter’s junior year of high school, when they juggled final exams with beat-matched transitions. That intensity plays out in their selections, like the heart-racing trance/dubstep fusion of Barely Alive & Voltra’s “Fusion Core” and the gabber-tempo video-game rush of Circuit Hour’s “GROW.” “I definitely wanted to be a lot weirder in this mix than I typically am,” Kismet tells Apple Music. “Weirder sounds, weirder rhythms, weirder structures. I just wanted to push the envelope with this one and include some of the most unique and badass music out there right now.” Nowhere is that more evident than in their own picks, like the futuristic emo-R&B of “Autonomy” or the bass-driven “Rumor,” which shelters a ticking clock inside its industrial crunch.
serpentwithfeet
A summer mix infused with joy and nostalgia.

Where serpentwithfeet’s 2021 album, DEACON, is a love letter to the men in his life—lovers, friends, and elders alike—the Baltimore musician’s Pride mix is an expression of the affection he feels for dance music itself. Recording in Los Angeles, he was guided by the anticipation of better days to come after 2020’s hardships. “I was thinking about all the laughs I plan to share this summer,” he tells Apple Music, and he picked songs to zero in on that seasonal vibe, infused with both joy and nostalgia. “Miss Tony’s ‘Scream & Shout’ reminds me of summers in Baltimore when I was growing up,” he says. “Every time I play this song, I think of my lips turning purple from all the blue freeze pops I ate on those 95-degree days. Clearly, blue is the best flavor.”


Qrion
The Sapporo DJ looks back on her formative clubbing experiences.

The first time Qrion ever went clubbing in the United States, the Sapporo-born DJ found herself at an underground party in Los Angeles, where the Night Slugs and Fade to Mind crew were throwing down cutting-edge club music and ballroom house. She pays tribute to that eye-opening experience in her Pride mix, dropping Jam City’s pivotal 2011 track “Waterfalls” alongside more recent fare from Forest Drive West, Call Super & Parris, and Xyla, not to mention her own “Monolith.” That range is intentional, she tells Apple Music: At home, browsing through her music library as she prepared the mix, she thought back to all the good times she had clubbing in the US before the pandemic. “I like playing many genres and a wide variety of music in one mix,” she says. “So, in this mix, I picked my favorites over the past five or six years that I normally don’t get to play in the nightclub.”


India Jordan
High-spirited, peak-time club tunes that radiate joy.

Powered by colorful keys, ecstatic vocal samples, and the life-giving jolt of classic breakbeat hardcore, India Jordan’s Watch Out! EP is about as optimistic as dance music gets, and the London DJ’s Pride mix runs on similar fuel. Having just moved to a new house in Southeast London, they recorded the mix in their bedroom on a sunny Sunday afternoon, feeling “fun, happy, queer,” they tell Apple Music. “I was feeling energized and inspired. I think being in a positive headspace brought out the best of me.” The tracklist covers plenty of ground—the hypnotic juke of Traxman’s “Spinning My Mind,” the punishing hard drum of FALSEBOI’s “Skin,” the cheeky old-school trance of Storm’s “It’s Time to Burn.” But no track brings a broader smile than Earth Boys’ dreamy “I Just Love It With You (Lxury Remix),” which Jordan tells us is their favorite track at the moment. “It’s really joyful and reminds me of a happy time.”


Worthy
An energizing coming-out mix from the Dirtybird cofounder.

This is the first set that Oakland’s Worthy has made since coming out as transgender, which made the occasion of crafting a mix for Pride especially significant—in multiple ways. “I really wanted to show the range of music I have been playing lately in my weekly Dirtybird live stream,” she tells Apple Music. “A lot of walls have come down this year around me, both personally and musically. I used to focus most of my mixing according to the genre I’m most labeled in, which is bass house. But since I’ve come out, I’m exploring a lot of different, softer sounds that expand the range of sets, so I wanted to give a little taste of that in this mix.” That means deep, dreamy garage (DIM KELLY’s “Voile De Chine”), psychedelic disco house (Jimpster & Matt Masters’ “Dub Come Down”), and, perhaps most significantly, an unreleased Worthy song called “Love & Forgive.”


Tygapaw
A fierce and uplifting techno mix from the Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based DJ.

Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based Tygapaw makes techno with a defiant attitude: It’s banging but also guided by mindful purpose, intent upon lifting up her peers and predecessors. She made her Pride mix at home in Brooklyn, where she has spent the duration of the pandemic. She tells Apple Music, “My goal when making mixes during this particular time in history is to leave a sonic trail of breadcrumbs for the listener to get an idea of how chaotic life has been globally.” The downtime hasn’t been all bad; with touring on hold, she’s had the opportunity to focus on her craft, writing and recording an acclaimed album, Get Free, that appeared on Mexico’s NAAFI label in November 2020. “It was a very affirming experience for me and gave me a bit more confidence to overcome the fear of putting my music front and center in my DJ sets,” she says. “‘Run 2 U’ has become an unexpected club banger without clubs being open, and I genuinely love to see it. I love making music that defies the odds, much like the person making the music. It’s the underdog techno anthem. It’s a song about facing myself and acknowledging who I am in my entirety. It’s about acknowledging that I’m trans and have always been and that I can finally shed that layer of fear that prohibits us from acknowledging ourselves.” 


Mike Servito
Warm, soulful house from the Bunker New York resident.

A Detroit-area native and New York resident, Mike Servito is known for the intensity of his playing: His sets at No Way Back, an annual after-party at Detroit’s Movement festival, have become the stuff of legend. But for his Pride mix, he opted for sunnier vibes, reaching into his crate and pulling out uplifting classics by Frankie Knuckles, CeCe Peniston, and Inner City. “I wanted to show a deeper, warmer side of my musical taste in house music, with its rich, soulful, and powerful energy,” he tells Apple Music. “[My mix] was inspired by love and pride, fear and struggle—perseverance, keeping your head up, living your truth. House is an empowering, uplifting force that has spoken volumes for decades. Its very necessity was born out of awareness, community, bonding, self-expression, bravery, and pride. And it can bring us together on the dance floor and in life.”


Lelowhatsgood
Hard-charging gqom and club sounds from the Johannesburg DJ.

Johannesburg DJ Lelowhatsgood crosses multiple genres, moods, and continents in his Pride mix: Deep house from Germany’s FJAAK and Korea’s Peggy Gou rubs up against Jersey club from UNIIQU3, hard drum from London’s LSDXOXO, and baile funk from São Paulo’s MC Bin Laden. “Often, we get put into boxes, and this is the one chance to reclaim my musical influences and love for different genres that are influenced by the queer community,” Lelo tells Apple Music. The backbone of his set is made up of songs by South African artists like Black Major, DJ Lag, Faka, and Griffit Vigo. “Gqom is spiritual to me,” he explains. “It reminds me of growing up in Durban when the sound was so raw and untamed. You’d just let it take control of you. It still does that, and that’s why it’ll remind me of home even on an international scale. Everyone wants a taste of that feeling.”


Octo Octa
A vinyl throwdown mixing classic house with fresh club innovations.

As usual, Octo Octa opted to play vinyl on her trusty Technics 1200s for her Pride mix. She recorded the set at home in New Hampshire, where she lives with her partners Eris Drew and Q. “My headspace was to make a very gay mix for Pride this year,” she tells Apple Music. “Themes of queerness, love, and hope always weave into my mixes, but I also wanted to foreground unity.” Her selections lean toward recent fare, she says. “I played a lot more ‘contemporary’ music for this mix than I usually do. I tried to showcase a number of artists that I find really exciting and are making great new music.” That includes mind-bending percussion from American producers CCL & Flora FM, throwback breakbeat hardcore from London’s Anz, and sidewinding techno from Lisbon’s Violet & BLEID. But Octo Octa also makes room for some stone classics from Robert Owens, Jamie Principle, and Crystal Waters—as though acknowledging that certain anthems are practically synonymous with Pride.


Eris Drew
The New Hampshire DJ blends life-sustaining classics with recent obsessions. 

Recording at home in the woods of New Hampshire, Eris Drew joins the old and the new, blending all-time favorites like Kraftwerk’s “Home Computer” with recent obsessions like Gacha Bakradze’s “Elevate” and her partner Octo Octa’s “Find Your Way Home.” Explaining the pacing of her Pride mix, she tells Apple Music, “I build the heat quickly and then settle into a rolling, ecstatic groove, because I felt the need to transform the chaos inside me into something radiant and full of beauty. I included Orbital’s ‘Halcyon and On and On’ because of the power it has in my life to help process and transform difficult states of emotion. It is one of those songs I go back to over and over even when I am not behind a set of turntables, like an endless well of pure water.”


Derrick Carter
A frisky, surprise-filled set from the Chicago legend.

As a DJ, producer, and cofounder of Classic Music Company—a record label every bit as iconic as its name would suggest—Derrick Carter has been helping define the sound of Chicago house since the late ’80s. Endowed with an unerring ear for a groove and a keen sense for cultural shifts, he’s kept the style evolving without ever letting it drift too far from its funk roots. Carter’s Pride mix is a testament to his open-minded sensibility as a selector. Alongside canonical artists like Honey Dijon, from his own label, or Chicago’s James Curd, a longtime peer, he sneaks in clever remixes of Lil Nas X and Amy Winehouse—proof of just how much variety he can squeeze into his version of house music and still feel right at home.

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