Celebrating DJ-Kicks

“The power of dance music is that there are no limitations of what you can do,” Horst Weidenmüller, the founder of Berlin’s !K7 label, tells Apple Music in Celebrating DJ-Kicks. “Everything is possible.” It’s that sense of freedom that’s guided DJ-Kicks since Weidenmüller created the series in 1996, and has allowed some of the world’s best electronic musicians to blur the line between artist album and DJ set. “When we started DJ-Kicks in the ’90s, there was no creative understanding that a DJ is an artist,” Weidenmüller says. “I recognized that the art form needs a platform and the DJ needs to be centered.” The DJ’s prominence has obviously shifted into a more favorable place in the decades since, and DJ-Kicks has played no small part in that evolution, as evidenced here through interviews with Carl Craig (who mixed the second-ever DJ-Kicks installment), Tiga, Jayda G, and Weidenmüller. “It’s a little bit like the history of DJs,” says Tiga.