DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ: The light dance producer who has been mistaken for the Aphex Twin | electronic music

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From London, England RECOMMENDED If you like The Avalanches, Chuck Person and the new AG CookUp album coming in the spring; Charmed’s six LP box set is set for July 2023

There’s a rumor going around that DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ — the obscure dance producer whose sprawling, sample-laden tracks became an internet sensation and led to a collaboration with 1975 — might actually be Richard D. James, AKA Aphex Twin. At Zoom in mid-December, the polite, witty woman staring back definitely doesn’t look like James, but I check back, just to be sure. “At one point, I was supposed to be Taylor Swift,” she says with a giggling. “And now the Aphex Twin, that’s very good ammo!”

You can understand how fans could have misrepresented it. Since 2017, DJ Sabrina has been churning out hours of the UK’s weirdest and most inventive dance music – shimmering groovy songs created from sleazy movie samples, happy pop ballad melodies and daytime TV-ready keyboard parts. The clearest antecedents are the Avalanches, but Sabrina’s songs are plastic and piercing, like Since I Left You Mattel. Who else but Avex would make dance music so sweet and perverted?

As it turns out: a part-time retail worker who calls herself Sabrina Spellman (after the Teenage Witch). Sabrina grew up across the UK, and started making music 20 years ago – first ‘more amateur’ electronic music and later guitar music. “I was a little disappointed—I had done some live shows in a band, and it wasn’t really going anywhere,” she says.

Sabrina The Teenage DJ: Charming Video

One day, I heard about lo-fi house, the burgeoning subgenre of the 2000s featuring groovy, downtempo moods, and artist names like Ross from Friends and DJ Seinfeld. Choosing the dumbest name she can think of, Sabrina sets to work on her debut album Makin’ Magick, with some help from her brother, whom she refers to as Salem (obviously). She continued to release albums and singles, and to her surprise, her three-hour 2020 album Charmed became an underground epidemic. “I get messages from people who say it really helped their depression or that they went marathons and listened to all of Charmed,” she says.

One such fan was 1975’s Mattie Healy. He was working on a demo that sounded a lot like Sabrina’s music and asked her to collaborate; The song becomes Happiness, a single from the band’s 2022 record Being Funny in a Foreign Language, built around a dense, hypnotic loop that is quintessentially Sabrina. “I’ve been a fan of 1975 for a few years, so I was a little surprised,” she says.

Happiness is the culmination of, well, a magical few years that earned Sabrina success on her terms. “People say ‘I don’t even know what kind of music it is’ and that’s great, because I don’t have to think about what’s popular or what might develop in my career, which can be very stressful,” she says. “I’m doing exactly what I want in music, and people are actually responding.”

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