The Sustain-Release co-founder steps up to the Phonica mix just ahead of the acclaimed festival’s 11th year.
New York has an iconic history when it comes to club music, and over the years has seen many great names emerge from its underground scene. In modern times, Aurora Halal is undoubtedly one of those names.
Aurora has become a staple at forward-thinking institutions like Berghain, De School, and her home base, Nowadays, where she holds a residency. Alongside her international touring, she’s carved out her own vital space through the long-running Mutual Dreaming parties and Sustain-Release, the DIY-rooted festival she co-founded, which continues to push boundaries as it enters its second decade.
Her Phonica mix offers a vivid snapshot of her deep, intuitive approach to DJing—captured live at Mansions, a cozy NYC wine bar turned house party haven. Known for her genre-fluid sets that blend hypnotic techno, house, acid and experimental textures this is the perfect calling card to showcase why she can hold it down with a range of greats like DJ Nobu, Vladimir Ivkovic and more.
We had a chat about the mix with Aurora as well as touching off Sustain and some of her favorite moments at the festival.
Hey Aurora, thanks for joining us! Can you tell us about your mix and what the idea behind it was?
Thanks for having me! This mix is a live recording from a Sunday night at Mansions, one of my fav tiny clubs in NYC. It’s a wine bar with a little carpeted dance floor and weird grandma’s knickknacks everywhere that focuses on groovy/housey music, vinyl, deeper digging, and local djs. The atmosphere always feels like a house party with your friends and it’s special to play there for me because it always gives me an opportunity to explore other sides to my sound and let loose, nothing too serious. This night was an all night b2b with Amelia Holt where we both did solo sections first, and I went into the night with a vague idea to be “housey” and just explored intuitively and by the end it was packed and sweaty, us all feeling free, drinking wine, jumping around and yelling. This recording is from my solo set while the room was still building up and in the mix you can hear the mood shift from deep to energetic in real time and I guess the vibe is that playful night encapsulated.
What are your preferred methods for finding new music—do you still enjoy digging around in dusty crates, or do you prefer to buy online?
I have never really dug for physical vinyl to be honest, and I know I shouldn’t be saying that to a record store haha! I do digital digging in a chaotic frenzy, following various leads on 20 tabs through record store websites, discogs, youtube/ soulseek/ bandcamp/ old beatport playlists. I have always played a wide mix of old and new music and recently been on a journey of finding harder to find rips via soulseek trading and starting to buy records to rip them, so that might bring me into the record stores for that physicality experience. I do admire vinyl DJs a lot despite it not being my preferred format, there’s def something to the way it influences the selections and groove that just flows differently. But I love using CDJs to do loops, making my own edits, super long blends of different rhythms and I think my mixing probably “sounds digital” for that reason so I always try to include archival music in my mixes to prevent it from sounding too modern or one dimensional texturally.
What are five records you couldn’t live without? In terms of influences?
These all might be kinda basic but
J-Dilla – Donuts (was so obsessed with the sampling that it made me buy an MPC and get started on making music),
The Cure – Disintegration,
Plastikman – Sheet One,
Burial – Untrue,
Sandwell District – Feed Forward
What has been one of your most memorable sets over your career?
Hmm that’s a tough one… looking back, probably playing a live set at (my festival) Sustain-Release in its third year, 2016, (LISTEN HERE) when the festival felt like it was really kicking into gear and the magic was flowing. I wrote the set in the month beforehand while juggling endless production work for it and just had Sustain in my inner vision informing all the music I was making, and when finally playing it with my nyc community in front of me who had also been helping make the weekend happen and encouraging me, it felt like it a gasket was blowing in my mind, a big sense of release creatively. As for DJ gigs, some of my Nowadays gigs were the absolute best but they all kind of blur together.
You mentioned your festival Sustain-Release, which is now going into year 11. How did the festival come to be to begin with and after 11 editions has the idea behind it changed much or evolved?
Sustain grew out of my Mutual Dreaming party which I did pretty often in Brooklyn from 2010-2018, renting loft venues and warehouses, doing parachute installs, having artists like Terence Dixon and Hieroglyphic Being sleeping at my house, etc. I had always wanted to throw a party in nature and had been looking for venues when I met Zara Wladawsky who had moved from London and was inspired by Optimo parties and Free Rotation. So we started it together in 2014 with only 500 people and tbh it was a near disaster! Freezing rain all weekend, the sound people were on acid wearing bathrobes and doing wiccan curses on everyone, various other confusion but it was still genuinely incredible to see all the local talent completely let loose creatively and achieve that feeling of connection with each other in a way we couldn’t in the city. Since then it’s grown to 2000 people max and I’ve been directing it solo with a really great team of collaborators and it’s a much tighter operation, yet still has that seat of your pants DIY vibe that never stops evolving along with the underground musical developments of our scene here. One of my goals is to plant seeds here creatively via the lineup. I’ve always gotten such a thrill from throwing parties because I love how surprising it is, it’s simply a proposition you fling into the universe and then see what happens..
What do you have up your sleeve for 2025?
Releasing more of my music finally!!!
Thanks Aurora! 🙂
Interview: Daire Carolan
Photo credit: Sam Clark
