For the 50th edition of SonarMix, we’ve got a special session from a pair of DJs with over 50 years of combined experience in getting dancers moving. Separately, Yen Sung and Photonz have made vital (and often unheralded) contributions to the development of electronic music and club culture in Portugal and this session, recorded at Sónar Lisboa 2024, captures them perfectly in sync.
 

Yen Sung wasn’t just a female pioneer of electronic music, she was a pioneer full stop, one of the DJs who helped coin the popular slogan from the country’s 90s rave scene: “Underground house music from a paradise called Portugal”. Photonz has done his part in keeping that flame alive in recent years, with his recently resurrected label One Eyed Jacks as well as his involvement in various community-run projects in the Lisboa, from radio stations to venues. Together, they’ve also recently started a label dedicated to Portuguese house music (including their own productions), Alphabet Street.

At Sónar Lisboa 2024, they’d prepared a set of “pretty classic house music… mostly focusing on American house, and not a lot of fireworks,” recalls Photonz, with typical understatement. “It went down so much better than what we expected,” he remembers, as the crowd fed off their seamlessly mixed selection of NYC tribal house, jacking acid, classic Chicago cuts, and even a few trancey tracks from present-day Portuguese producers. 

No tracklist on this one, just 64 minutes of unrelenting dancefloor heat from two of Lisbon’s finest DJs.