As part of RA2122, our ongoing celebration of 21 years of club culture, we'll be featuring some of our favourite DJs from around the world, highlighting the parties or clubs most important to their lives in dance music.
Chris Clayton, AKA Karizma, takes DJing seriously. But he also knows that it's about having fun, or at least helping other people to have fun. This is the formula that makes him such a fantastic DJ, and one of the most technically skilled around (he uses CDJs like few others can). He practices two hours every day, and has been DJing since he was 13. For him, there was no specific party or club that made him the DJ he is today—it was the whole Baltimore scene he grew up in. He is the party.
His approach is deeply informed with his history in Baltimore, a city with its own vibrant music scene that always taken a different tack than the rest of the major American undergrounds. House, techno, hip-hop, jazz (and of course Baltimore club), there have never been any boundaries for as long as Clayton has been DJing, which makes his DJ sets as musically adventurous as they are technical. This hour-long set is a neatly-packaged example of his genius, leaning on the jazzier side of his sound, featuring plenty of Atjazz records, his own wide-ranging material and killer edits of Rihanna and Kendrick Lamar.