Recognise: fka.m4a

A conversation with fka.m4a can feel a lot like listening to one of his DJ sets. Bearing the range, depth and know-how of someone twice his age, the forthright UK-born, Berlin-based selector brings a refreshing energy and brightness to a scene so often mired in pomposity. You can practically hear purists’ heads exploding in the distance as the young, self-taught player speaks unabashedly about his roots in pop music and drag, his reliance on Spotify and Google for his house music education, and his unalloyed ambition, now being fulfilled with headlining tours across the globe and a debut EP, ‘Summer Nostalgia’, released on his own Contrast label.

“Lady Gaga was my diva growing up,” he says from his Berlin living room over Zoom, having just returned from a whirlwind run of shows in the US. “I realised my queerness with her; I’m Generation Gaga. I think something I took from being a Gaga superfan was that she is very big on storytelling and really making you feel emotion. She’s also a very multi-genre artist. She does jazz, she does pop, she does rock elements. Once I became a DJ, she influenced me to be big on storytelling, to jump between a variety of genres and sounds.” 

Kylie Minogue and Roisin Murphy also ride high in fka.m4a’s divasphere, and while mainstream pop remixes very rarely figure into his sets – which vary widely from ‘80s Italo disco and Hi-NRG to the harder side of modern techno – the way popstars build narratives and foreground musical personality comes through in his style. “I think for a lot of DJs, especially old school DJs, the journey is very important, the building up from zero, taking you up and down and all over the place. Similarly, when you listen to a pop album or a record, it’s usually a very cohesive journey that’s been worked on over the last year or two prior to its release. I’ve approached my sets, and now my own music, with this.

“Often with electronic artists, I feel like they’re always like, ‘My parents grew up playing me electronic music’. You hear that story a lot, but you don’t really hear about a pop convert. I was a bit skeptical about even sharing that for a long time because I was a bit worried that people were going to look down on my background. Because the electronic music scene can be a little bit snobby in many ways. Just a tiny bit. I was like, well, if I tell people that I love pop music, which I still love now, and if I tell people that I was once a pop DJ, will they take me as seriously? I decided eventually to let that go. That is my truth,” he says with a laugh, gesticulating heavenward. “We live in our truth.”