Delayed with... TSUNIMAN
We are blessed at Delayed to be gifted incredible mixes, personally and intently delivered podcasts for the series, alongside moments in time recorded from some of our favourite clubs, parties and festivals. Receiving the message from Iman (TSUNIMAN) that her recording from the Hypnus event back in March at FOLD was ready for us was a real touch, and gave me a full beam smile. Iman has become a great friend of mine over the years, and being on the dancefloor for that set was something else entirely, surrounded by close friends, one of those iconic instances in the best club in London, the sun rays meeting the dancefloor, the energy of those who remained, the faithful wanting to be carried through til the end. The Hypnus events at FOLD carry this charm, as does Iman's style and groove. A radiant soul, always with time for others, and a DJ the scene is only going to see more and more of on lineups across the world.
An 8 til 10 slot. We watched it happen, messaged each other about it the next morning, still buzzing. So when Iman offered us the recording for the series, there was only one thing to do, sit down, talk it through properly, and get the story behind the set and tell people out there. From FOLD as a second home, to the Hypnus lineage that shaped her sound, to the ten minute closer that's followed her for almost a decade. Here it is.
It was perfect. I thought I'd never get to hear it again, but here we are. Thank you for the gift, Iman, and I'm sure those who listen will thank you too. Enjoy.
Dan: Really excited, thank you for choosing us for this one. With the mix series recently, the attitude's been quality over quantity, so it's been stripped back in terms of frequency. Which is exactly why something like this coming in feels so exciting, and why it's nice to actually sit down and have a conversation around it. It's one of the best clubs in the world, a favourite label of the platform, and me and you are friends. It just feels pretty bang on.
Iman: Makes sense. Thank you for having me.
Dan: I think a good starting point is talking about FOLD as a space for you. I know you mentioned to me before how excited you were to play this, and the timing of it. Do you want to talk about the starting point with the venue and why it's special?
Iman: So obviously FOLD is quite a recent club, in late 2018, and I started going from the very beginning. I remember the first Unfolds, which blew my mind, and just getting to know the community there and the people behind FOLD. I befriended everyone, every staff member, from day one, and they became genuine friends of mine. I feel like FOLD was the first club that believed in me, that gave me opportunities and launched me in a way, putting trust in me to play my sound in a club that was initially a very techno club. My sound is quite psychedelic, can be quite trancey, and yeah, they trusted that, and from the beginning let me be fully myself in a space that's traditionally very technical. It's so beautiful to have a club like this in London, one that not only has the most amazing sound system but so much variety in sound and genre. So for that reason it's always been a very special place to me. It's my home. It's the school where I learned to do what I do. It really formed all of us.
Dan: Yeah, I've got a similar connection to that club, that feeling of safety and locking in, knowing you're going to bump into friends and family, that you can go alone and just feel relaxed from the absolute get go. There's no other club in my eyes that does it like FOLD in London, and there's real variety too. You've got Unfold, which is eclectic but has its own kind of routine crowd and community, the more techno driven nights, and then different promoters coming through, Hypnus being one of them. For me and my crew, this is our annual pilgrimage to FOLD, the big extended one. It got announced quite late, and I got a little sneak intel to the lineup through you, that you were playing. You've talked about your love for FOLD, but can you tell us and the readers about the association with Hypnus, and how that came about?
Iman: My association with Hypnus has been an ever evolving process. From the moment I started focusing more on techno, about five years ago, after playing predominantly trance for two, three years, I started going to more techno nights, and I think it was FOLD that introduced me to that sound. With my first gigs there, I was playing a lot of trance, and with FOLD and also my residency at Klub Verboten, which is a big party that moves around a lot, I do tend to play a lot of techno. And with the influence of trance, what's better than deep techno, a sound so versatile in blending with psychedelic, psytrance, and progressive elements. So Hypnus is the obvious label.
I also want to say, I went to my first Modem in 2023 and attended a talk by Michel, the Hypnus label founder, about the intertwinement between deep techno and psytrance, which felt so relevant to Modem, that has for a long time incorporated a lot of deep techno into its curation, unlike festivals like Boom and Ozora who only recently started booking this sound. Modem is very forward thinking, and Hypnus curate the Swamp stage there every single year. So with that and with Modem, my love for Hypnus was obvious from the beginning. When that booking came, it was a no brainer. It felt like one of the happiest achievements in my DJ career, and I had to go for it.
Photo by Ava Eliza Smith
Dan: I can imagine why it feels like such a pivotal moment in your DJ career, and a big part of that was the closing slot. You closed, am I right that it was 8 til 10?
Iman: Yeah, 8 til 10.
Dan: Hypnus have always platformed live artists, they're a label first and foremost with some incredible producers, so a lot of their sets have that live element. By the time you were playing we'd seen two fantastic sets from Luigi and Innersha, both quite focal, taking you down this tunnel. Great, and you can really celebrate the producer sound in that, but for me I was really looking forward to the dynamic element of your set closing the night, bringing in that psychedelic element, that euphoria. In terms of planning for that, was it something you were aware of going in, or were you more free flowing based on what the crowd needed?
Iman: So with FOLD it can feel a mystery with timeslots which is exciting, and I found out I was closing less than a week before the party, a nice surprise. The whole time before that I believed I'd be opening, because compared to the lineup I felt like one of the smallest artists, and I wasn't doing a live set, so I imagined they wouldn't open the night with a live and I'd be on opening duties. When I found out I was closing, there was a touch of anxiety, honestly, because I love dancing and wanted to enjoy a whole night of Hypnus, but doing a whole night and then closing it would've been a lot. So I went for a nap and showed up about two hours before my set.
In terms of how I prepared, my motto is duality of dark and bright vibrations, that's how I see my sound. I love adding contrasting elements to a set because if something is dark for two hours, people can't fully appreciate that darkness, and if something's too happy for two hours, it gets tiring. So I like to alternate. In a closing set, I want softness, but also that driving, deep element that takes people on a journey. Having attended so many closing sets at FOLD in that exact same spot, I knew what I wanted to convey, because I'd been on the other side, I knew that feeling where you can see the sun coming through the shutters and all you want is that one track that makes your whole body vibrate. So I structured ideas of tracks I wanted to play, with separate playlists of things I could swap in based on how I was feeling, because if I'm feeling great, the crowd feels great. If I'm not enjoying my set, they won't enjoy what they hear either. I had a sonic structure based on specific moments, and I knew I wanted to end on euphoria. I hope that's what came across, because at least I felt it. To me it felt like one of the happiest moments I've had behind the decks.
Dan: It was definitely felt. I remember messaging you the next day about it straight up, because you could really feel that you were in your element, experiencing it, and you know that club inside and out, you've been on the other side of the dance so much. As much of the experience is fluid, you have an idea of what you want to create, and then when you're in that flow state, it just happens. The light was shining in, it was perfectly euphoric. For readers who are reading this before listening, can you highlight a few artists whose tracks you played?
Iman: Given it was a Hypnus night, I had to put in some Hypnus artists, so of course some of the usual suspects including Feral and Luigi. But I also included Laima Adelaide, one of my favourite artists for deep techno. And I had to include one of my top artists of all time, Robert Leiner, I played a couple of his tracks under the alias The Source Experience. I closed with "The Source Experience" by The Source Experience, which is probably one of the first tracks I ever downloaded since I started DJing. It has so much meaning to me, that track. It doesn't matter how many times I've played it or listened to it, I always get shivers down my spine. I never close a set with it, so it was quite special to play it almost ten years after I first downloaded it, to a crowd I loved, in my favourite club. There was a lot of old school '90s stuff in there too, a lot of old school progressive trance, but those are the newer artists I'd want to mention.
Photo by Ava Eliza Smith
Dan: That's closing track. I loved listening to it since. I remember looking over at Jake on the dancefloor, we were shocked, didn't want it to end, and it was never ending, it was perfect.
Iman: Yeah, it's a long track, I think it's about ten minutes long.
Dan: Lovely stuff. I think that covers the mix nicely, so let's look forward. Anything you've got coming up this summer or autumn that people can catch you at, whether that's festivals, DJ sets in London, or the rest of Europe, because I know you gig a lot. Anything announced you'd like to point towards?
Iman: Sure. This week I'm heading to Berlin to play my first Nation of Gondwana festival, taking over after Rødhåd for a sunrise set. I feel like people love booking me for sunrise sets, and I love them too, I played Refractor festival last year and did a sunrise set there as well, it's probably my favourite slot. Then I'm playing a new festival in Italy called Nemora, close to Rome, which should be really fun. There's also Space Safari Festival in Belgium, which I'll play in September. Then a few more bookings, FOG Festival in Switzerland, an important debut in one of my favourite clubs in Berlin in October, unannounced for now, and my first ADE booking, also unannounced. So that's what I'm super excited about.
Dan: A nice range, festivals, travelling, club nights, core cities, sounds fun.
Iman: It feels like all dream bookings, honestly. I haven't had such a good year in my whole career, so it's really good to have achieved this, and I'm excited to see what next year has in store. But yeah, keeping the full time job for now, you never know.
Dan: Playing the juggling act, seeing where you end up. Thanks again, Iman. I think your sound, and you've talked about the range of it, starting from trance and sinking into deep techno, that psychedelic element, is very much rooted in what Delayed stands for. So it just feels like a real alignment. Super excited to get this out and have people listen to it. Anything you'd like to add about the mix, or about Delayed, that we can add to the read?
Iman: First of all, thank you for hosting this on your platform. I've always been a fan of Delayed and regularly listen to pretty much every mix that comes out, so it was a no brainer reaching out to you. This Hypnus recording was one of my proudest moments playing, because I felt super happy, everything aligned, and I wanted it to live on the right platform. Delayed was an easy one to think about because I'm such a big fan. Nothing else to add, really, just super happy we could do this. I hope people enjoy listening to it, and if they haven't been to FOLD, they should visit, because it's one of those places with the most amazing lineups and sound systems in the UK, maybe even in Europe.