Finding new tracks can feel endless.
One mix leads to another, one rabbit hole opens five more, and suddenly it’s 2am and you’re knee-deep in tabs that all sound promising – it’s not necessarily a bad outcome these are likely all gems but we have to test them in mixes and see how they can be worked in. Most days I’m bouncing between SoundCloud and YouTube, chasing down sets from DJs who speak my language. Lately, Michael Bibi’s sets have been so rich that it has made me want to ditch everything and rewire entire playlists.
There’s something addictive about the chase. You hear a track, trace it to the artist, then stumble into the label (find other artists in a similar style), check out collaborators, and any remixes that have been produced. There’s so much decoding of setlists on 1001Tracklists or scouring Reddit threads for IDs like it’s a game you’re quietly losing but loving. Some tracks are just so tucked away and unidentifiable through music recognition tools like Shazam.
There’s a point in every hunt where I start to think, “Perhaps, I should just DM the DJ and promise to name my firstborn after them just to have the track?”. You scour the comments, you ask friends and the track just escapes you (there will be others, it’s ok).
Lately, I’ve been deep in open-format YouTube sets, genre-fluid, no-rules sets that have a Baltimore/Jersey feel in them. Hip-hop edits mixed with complete curveballs. It’s chaotic, raw, and weirdly nostalgic and I’ve managed to find some belters through that process.
Some days, a track finds you. A random movie soundtrack plays in the background. A passing song in a friend’s car. A bold, unsolicited song request that you lowkey hate… until you hear it in the right setting and it finally clicks. *Cue the internal crisis where you admit: maybe Bec from work was right about one thing.
The beauty is: it’s a never-ending buffet. Digging, finding, remixing, sharing. If you can’t find the exact sound you’re after? Maybe that’s the nudge to make it yourself. That moment when curiosity turns into creation.
And perhaps somewhere in all the tabs and loops and late-night scrolls, you’re not just building a playlist, but a tiny map back to yourself.
