ChewChew is sitting opposite me with a coffee. A few hours before her gig at Renate, one of the city’s best-known techno clubs. Smiling, dressed in colourful clothes, she seems almost like a counter-image to what one might clichédly associate with Berlin club nights.

Her name, too, tends to lead people onto thin ice at first. »ChewChew comes from getting wired, from chewing, right?« someone once asked her. But what sounds like an escalated afterhour actually has its origins in a caramel-flavoured ice cream. Instead of excess, for her it is about a gentler kind of ecstasy: community and spaces in which music becomes the occasion for meeting one another and entering into connection, carried by warm, genre-crossing house, disco or sometimes acid sounds that embrace more than they roll over you.

ChewChew began ten years ago, exclusively with vinyl. From two-euro crates, with a 50-euro mixer and with an attitude that has remained to this day: »Playing records is like learning an instrument. It takes years of practice and time.« Her sets are less spontaneous sequences than carefully built dramaturgies.

»At 16 I learnt that a DJ is an underdog, someone who does not want to be the centre of attention, but discovers special records and shares them with the audience. That is exactly how I want to be as a DJ.«

ChewChew

With her move into digital DJing and working with Rekordbox, she learnt to hear music more analytically: to recognise breaks, read arcs of tension, build energy deliberately or take it out again. She transfers this knowledge to vinyl, noting BPMs on the sleeves, sorting records by mood, often knowing transitions by heart. Her roughly 1,500 records are therefore not only a collection, but a finely sorted archive of memories and possibilities.

This deep relationship with music translates directly onto the dancefloor. Her own musical socialisation began in Hamburg with deep house, inspired by the Smallville label, Pudel Club, Julius Steinhoff, Mike Huckaby, Fred P. and Gerd Janson. In Berlin, her spectrum expanded: downtempo, synth-pop, later African boogie, calypso, soul and today above all disco, funk and house. That she herself became a DJ at all, incidentally, was never at the top of her life plan: »It was never my intention to become a DJ. It simply developed in that direction through organic relationships, and that is exactly why I enjoy it so much. Nothing about it was forced; it grew quite naturally.«

She was shaped above all by DJs who work in a strongly curatorial way: Motor City Drum Ensemble, Theo Parrish and especially Hunee. One of his sets »changed her life«, she says, laughing at her own drama. But that was exactly when she began to engage more intensively with the history of house and disco.

She wants to pass on this curiosity and depth in her own sets too: people should not only dance, but take away memories that extend far beyond the evening. At the same time, she moves quite naturally between obscure finds and iconic dancefloor moments such as »You’re So Romantic« by Sheryl Lee Ralph or »Javaroo« by Javaroo. Tracks she lovingly calls her »emergency tracks«, because they can bring the floor back to the boil at any time.

»After ten years of DJing, I would say: I have found my style.«

ChewChew

And that style is above all one thing: soulful, organic and carried by real instruments. And that is something she often misses in modern club music. For her, though, it is never only about the perfect track at the right time. It is about the feeling that arises when people give themselves over to music. Just as she herself was once able to experience it. Without distraction and without smartphones. She often misses that intimacy today. »The music should come first, above everything else, and that has been lost a little nowadays, because there are cameras everywhere.«

With her own party series »All You Can Feel«, she wants to create space for precisely that again: a place where people experience music together, give themselves over to the moment and become part of a community for a few hours – connected not by screens, but by what arises on the dancefloor.

And while the queue outside the club continues to grow that evening, ChewChew calmly prepares her set. And it will spark with energy. Anyone who has ever experienced one of her sets live knows that.