Phillie P

Reading Phillie P through genre labels feels limiting. His scope reaches far beyond the formative years of club culture that most DJs in his orbit tend to draw from. A more accurate lens is one where the magic appears beyond fixed boundaries, and where contemporary playfulness sits alongside the building blocks of dance music’s heyday. 

Nostalgia - inevitable in selections shaped largely by archival releases, and central to Ice City Records, the reissue label he runs devoted to obscure and undiscovered gems - feels strikingly current, while the dialogue between styles and eras is always perfectly fluid.

There’s a throughline in his approach - a mid-’70s groover and a DR-660 track from early ’90s Memphis carry the same charge, while current strains of club music rooted in Chicago house or early ’90s London club culture expand his palette beyond any reductive categorisation. It’s a refreshingly direct approach of a music lover who dispenses with pretence and trusts the music to speak for itself.