Anyone who lived in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s understands the sanctity of release. It was an era when men partied to avoid the draft, clubs opened their doors in the daytime to block out the sound of NATO bombs falling, and a stable future was by no means assured.

These challenges shaped Tijana Todorović, who found a calling in music as a pushback to a bleak national backdrop. She would call up station B92 to ask for track IDs as the programming flitted between rock music and news reports to counter state propaganda. She scraped together pennies on the street to afford tickets for The Prodigy's groundbreaking 1995 performance in Belgrade, but then was too sick to attend. Burning torrented files onto CD-Rs became a way to circumvent the paucity of available records in stores. It was a paradoxical time: the national borders were closed, but her horizons were open.

Tijana's career began immediately after the fall of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević in 2000. At 19, she became one of the country's most prominent faces in the media as a video jockey on channel Studio B—although she was eventually kicked off air for playing a raunchy video by experimental synth outfit Add N To (X). As well as writing columns and working on TV productions for B92, Tijana worked for EXIT, by far the region's largest festival, as an in-house interviewer and, later, stage curator. A period in the mid-'00s touring as a singer alongside electronic musician Abe Duque sharpened her understanding of the live arena. She began taking on all-night-long residencies in Belgrade as another way to present the sounds she loved, rising from thankless Monday evenings in front of moneyed crowds to extended sets at the cherished boat Klub 20/44 and at Drugstore, the city's biggest club.

I meet Tijana in her Belgrade apartment, a stone's throw from the city's bohemian Skadarlija district. Laurent Garnier's Electrochoc and Cosey Fanni Tutti's Art Sex Music rest atop weathered editions of Das Kapital and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, a series of comics that detail the psychological aftershocks that come with living through revolution. A few days prior, Wally Badarou had told me during a live Exchange that if you "can't have the support of your local scene, you can't have total fulfilment." I had those words in mind. Though Serbia's biggest contemporary DJ, Tijana still had to take a circuitous route to local acceptance, weathering years of bitterness and vile abuse in the scene.

Is all this personal and political history translatable to audiences who just want to get loose and have a good time? Tijana parlays her memories into vivid performances, which have theatricality, flair and an evident enjoyment at being present in the moment. Taking her upbringing into account, you can see why she still says yes to the majority of opportunities, even with a tour schedule that would make most wince. As her all-time hero Björk once sang, "to get involved in the exchange of human emotion is ever so, ever so satisfying."

What's the first thing on your mind when you're walking into the booth?

Before walking into the booth, I'm always questioning if I'm even able to DJ at all. I get a strong hit of imposter syndrome, which really doesn't help. Some insecurities are not easily cured. Then when I'm in the booth, I'm first checking the CDJ and mixer functions, then the monitor levels, trying to make sure the volume isn't so loud it will destroy my ears. Once the technicals look good and it's set up the way I prefer, I like to stare at the crowd for a few minutes, just to see where the energy level is at, what I want to do about it, and what I can do about it.

Once I'm in the moment, the fear has almost entirely vanished. Sometimes, when I'm stepping up for a show after who knows how many flights and two days without sleep, I feel like I'm going to die. But once I'm in the booth, it's a different zone, a different set of parameters altogether. I'm present, and I'm focusing on the music—much more than I'm focusing on the crowd, actually. I go full introvert at the beginning of my set. After that quick first check, for about 15 or 20 minutes I am completely engaged with the music. No looking up.

Doing what?

I'm not always ready to just look in the eyes of thousands of people. I need to get adapted to the situation. I can prepare as much as I can. I can meditate, I can visualise, I can decide on what the first or the first three tracks would be, but once you're there, you can never really predict how you'll feel and what the situation will be. I guess I need these 15 minutes to somehow just fully assimilate with the overall energy of the situation, to gauge the correct moves.

Kind of like laying a welcome mat for yourself.

Exactly. I will always let the person before me wrap up in whatever mode, style or mood they would like. They can play the hits, or the most flamboyant finisher of all time, and let it ride until the end, the very last bar—so that I can start with a fresh beginning. If I'm thinking about mixing in on what the other person is playing, that inevitably affects where I can go. Especially in the last two years, if I would play techno parties, the DJ before me will be hammering it really fast, much faster than I would ever play. I can't always start with an ambient track by Rex Ilusivii at 89 BPM, but I do have to start with something that utilises a long intro, so that when I introduce my lower BPM, it doesn't...

... jar the crowd?

Yeah. Trying to ride whatever the DJ before me is doing creates a dependency, and often some tension between the two people in the booth. It's best avoided.

Does appreciating a hard start and a hard end come from your entry into music? Your apartment is stacked with mix CDs, from Meredith Monk to R&B party classics, with ordered tracklists and handmade jewel covers. There are flyers dating back 15 years, stickers of labels that no longer exist and various trinkets from travels. A lot of people shed their skin when entering a new era, but you seem to snowball it all together.

Whatever happened in the past is what shaped me in the present, and whatever I do in the present is going to shape my future. So I don't want to dismiss any parts of my life, especially if it's musical experiences. Artefacts that are truly resonant in my life—such as that Meredith Monk, which was a gift from a close friend—I kept. But then, I don't have anything to show for ten years of my journalist career. I conducted over a thousand interviews and I don't have a single tape at home. And there's also a lot of beautiful rave flyers that I never held onto. There were times when I was more careless, at a time in life when I had this anarchist, punk spirit.

What has never left was the way of seeing and creating different kinds of media formats relating to music. Be it a VJ show, radio or interview, these CDs, the medium would always have sort of clear message. That's just the way I think and express myself, and that also translates to my DJ sets as well. I'm not one of those DJs who would insist on telling a story. You can tell many stories, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people who are listening to that story will perceive it the way you do. I have to see it as presenting frequencies for people to relate to on a physical level, rather than dictating the narrative. When I approach my sets, I think about what will be the first track and what the last track will be. Then the rest is actually never really planned. Whatever happens in between, happens on the spot.

I couldn't help but notice you have hundreds of USB playlists, tailored for more or less every gig, every radio show, every studio mix, every month. And they are all overflowing. How are you making sense of all that on the night—isn't it chaos?

It's completely chaotic. I have a really good memory, and that is about all I can say to explain how it works. Watching Avalon's videos gave me so much anxiety [laughs]. Then I saw the others and I realised, it's just her way of doing things. She comes from programming, she has this precise mind and method. My approach is a bit more, as she would say, vibey. There's not enough time in your life to listen to all the music that's out there, or to own all the music that's out there. I had to break the stigma of needing it all, right away. Whatever music comes my way, that music belongs to me. If it doesn't find its way to me, that's not for me. If it finds its way to me five years later, then that's the right moment when I should play it. I've been DJing for 15 years, with so much music already and I listen to about 70 percent of the promos I receive week to week to refresh the collection, so I'm quite convinced that I have enough music to deliver. It's fine.

So this is why I have hundreds and hundreds of playlists. The playlists are titled after certain parties, which I'm playing every week, or festivals, or radio shows. It doesn't necessarily mean that an Afterlife playlist will only consist of trancey, epic tracks that I'm supposed to play at Afterlife. First of all, Afterlife does not book me to play the music that they play. They book me because I'm not playing the kind of music that Tale of Us or Dixon would play. This gets lost so often—I am not there to imitate them, but bring something of my own. So, that Afterlife playlist is just what I found on the week and I know exactly when I bought something, or even put it on my USB. It's the same with my records at home, they are organised by eras when I purchased them, rather than genre or style.

Like an iTunes playlist, where you're listing it by "Date Added," but in real life?

It's just how my mind works. I guess it's unlike what most DJs are doing, but I really thrive in this chaos, and that's why sometimes I have unexpected transitions in my sets. If my folders were organised by "Techno," "House," "Peak Time," "Intro," "Beepy," "Ravey," whatever, maybe I would miss out something that just appears as I'm scrolling through my jumbled folders. When I browse, I'm like, "Oh, fuck, I forgot about this one, I can play it now." If I would just search through what I think I need at the moment, the sets would feel functional more than anything else.

When playing, are you actively trying to avoid being functional or predictable?

When I started, I DJ'd in a very spontaneous, joyful, playful way. I am completely self-taught in how to mix. YouTube tutorials and easily accessible instructions were not around, and equipment was out of my financial range. I was practising in clubs, at parties, sometimes on my own and sometimes with friends, yet always with the audience present. You need to be brave enough to try that transition you have never tried before, in order to grow into the technique. There was no reference point, and this still echoes in my doubts over if what I am doing is "right." I assembled a way of understanding DJing through harmonies and structures that cause and give joy, rather than utilising six turntables and numerous crossfader tricks.

But negativity came into it very early. The story is long but it boils down to jealous, bitter and inflammatory groups of guys in Belgrade. They were writing ugly shit. There was jealousy that I could travel with Abe Duque and get records they were not privy to while at home, a fear that the few girl DJs and TV presenters in town would be stealing their piece of cake. They were pushing a story that I was "tearing my knees" for records and shows. I had to develop a coping mechanism to be able to laugh it off. Like, "Yeah right. So I enter the club through the line for blowjobs, next to the ticket and guestlist queues? I have 100 gigs per year—where do I find the time to suck dick for that many promoters? What a sex life that would be!"

Because of this bullying, I'm now focused on not fucking up. It's not easy to neutralise that fear. It's made me also think carefully about how character comes across on stage. I never really managed to detach my DJ persona from myself. No acting, no crazy clothes. All I've really done in that respect is kept my hair recognizably ginger [laughs]. For some it's so scary to be on stage and exposed publicly in that way, that they get into character, or dress up their usual selves in some way. And it works! The person on stage is protected and feels less vulnerable, and the audience gets a show. The ultimate advice I would give here, to veterans and newcomers alike, is to bear in mind why you are DJing in the first place. Why are you there, exposed to all those people, blasting your selection through the speakers? If you have an answer to that, everything else falls into place. The style, the persona, the moves—it can all make sense. Somewhere I realised there is no right or wrong. Music is so personal. It's your own very individual frequency.

These personal favourites with a nostalgic attachment to your past come up a lot when you're in your element. How do you maximise the impact of an unusual pairing across genre lines?

Slow blends. Always. If I'm slowly blending a pop vocal, then it comes as a surprise. Depending on the song itself, I would locate the basic groove of a techno, acid, ghettotech track, whatever it might be, then weave the familiarity of the pop hook in by stealth. There were two moments that stand out when I played "Rhythm Is A Dancer" by Snap! It happened first at De School. It was a perfect, perfect moment. The vibe was just great, and I knew that the song would just tear everything apart. I had this vision of the ceiling opening and the sun coming in, although it's so dark in the De School basement. And so it proved more or less.

With my first time playing the downstairs of Berghain, it was a little bit more tricky. I was extremely nervous, and it was on a very heavy schedule, where I was playing The Bunker in New York at 8 AM until noon. So I got my stuff, got on the plane, landed, and only had time to take a shower then go straight to Berghain. I didn't want to take too many risks—anything trance-y or with wandering percussion had to come after a string of pure techno for padding. Then it was almost the end of my set, and I was going, "Is this really the right moment to play Snap!? What's going to happen?" But I had a contrary thought, that I might never play Berghain again, and what was there to lose? The first wave of reaction was more like confusion, people unsure whether to drop their cool and get into it, but luckily I had friends there, and they all started screaming, so then the whole room was screaming, and actually smiling, which is something you don't always see at Berghain. Big grins.

Did you mix gradually or just punch it in for shock value?

Gradually, mixed with Robert Hood. I would switch from Snap! to Robert Hood, back to Snap!, back to Hood. The Robert Hood track was eight or nine minutes long, but "Rhythm Is A Dancer" is maybe four and a bit, so with looping I could move between them fluidly, dictated by the vocals coming in and out of Snap!

Do you do that a lot? Flip-flopping between which track is dominant in a transition?

I do this sometimes. If the kick drums have a different sound, or if they have a different structure rhythmically, then I would switch kicks during the mix. I often go from a 4/4 beat to something more broken—breakbeat, electro, early rave—and you can lose the dynamic of the broken track by bringing it down in tempo to fit a 4/4 template. So to keep the energy consistent, I remind the audience of this previous groove that we had for as long as I can, until I entirely switch to this next track. I do that by going back and forth for a minute or two.

How else do you present a sense of high-octane energy without necessarily slamming out at a high tempo? Is it a case of nimble mixing, dynamic tracks with startling elements, the kind of bass that feels like an overwhelming wave—or none of them?

I would say it's a combination of these. The mixing then depends on the kind of tracks I play. I try to carefully listen to my selection so I can tell exactly which bassline starts where and how I can combine it with another bassline to accentuate the energy, or with a vocal or maybe mix in a distinct element during the break so it just breaks out. Sometimes the mixes are long and seamless with two or three songs interweaving, and I have a MasterSounds Radius 4 at home for executing more of these on radio shows. Super bassy tracks or electro and breaks, though, require quick cuts.

I don't use any kind of tricks. An occasional high pass filter is the extent of it. I hate the white noise thing. I hate all of that stuff that comes from these Pioneer effect machines. It sounds a little bit cheap. Someone once described it as like CGI effects in movies and that stuck with me—it looks really impressive at a certain point in time and then 20 years later it is totally outdated. I'm trying to play tracks that I really believe in, tracks that I can stand for and stand behind. So that when I play them out I don't need to cover it up with unnecessary knob-twiddling and excess flair. If it's the music that speaks to me, then the way it's produced or arranged already has a lot of dynamism and drama.

Bluntly, selection comes first. I prefer songs to tracks or tools, so that is the kind of music I always seek out. The usual pop song structure is something that works on a subconscious level: intro, chorus, break, chorus, outro. Everyone is familiar with that. The music I choose is maximal and that is where the energy in my sets comes from. No matter the tempo, even if I play ambient it's usually in the realms of power ambient. You can create very high energy below 100 BPM, it depends on the dynamics of the music itself. Even if there is just one exceptional element that elicits strong emotion, it is already energetic. There's different forms of strong energy to create in DJ sets. Sometimes you can create high mental energy or high melancholic energy. I don't think energetic necessarily means ecstatic or uplifting.

Are some elements naturally complementary when you are moving between styles?

I combine everything by ear and intuition, rather than trying to pair a clap with a synthetic bassline because of pre-analyzed frequencies. And with the CDJs I don't even think about BPMs in the range between 110 and 140, let's say. It's possible to mix all that together. What I do love doing is playing off contrasting tracks—a super distorted Surgeon track with a catchy popular disco vocal, say. Or in my RA podcast, there is this combo of Robert Armani's "M_____F" on Dance Mania which sounds very raw and distorted and somewhat dangerous, mixed with Fairmont's "Gazebo" on Border Community, that has a soft and warm kick drum underpinning rich melodies that sounds like birds and butterflies. Together they sound perfect to me.

What I also often like to do is play a longer segment of 4/4 tracks that really make you wanna dance, with a lot of groove and good flow. I build up that euphoric, physical energy and then just suddenly break it down with a rhythmic track that is either syncopated and broken or a deep, moody cut to snap the audience's attention back into focus. I guess this doesn't score me the best points among people high on E, but I love it. It's the same when a mixing mistake happens in the middle of a perfect flow. That's when everyone is really present. No matter how conditioned and traumatized I personally feel about technical perfection, I actually absolutely adore to hear a mistake in the mix sometimes. It's human and it's like some sort of alarm and it is something that naturally belongs to a party. If there are no mistakes I have the feeling like everything is robotic and planned and controlled.

Can you tell when something is having diminishing energy returns?

The history of electronic dance music has taught us that "the crowd" always wants more of the same. Really, house and techno hasn't changed much since the '80s and it's just becoming more and more popular. To quote Milan Kundera here, "Happiness is the longing for repetition." I would love to hear a new music style that would blow my mind as much as I was blown away when I first heard electronic music in the '90s. Change is good and change is necessary. Trends do come and go: I think what Ricardo Villalobos did in the early '00s was quite revolutionary. He single-handedly killed fast, banging techno. Everything slowed down overnight. And not so long after that house music crawled back into vogue. In recent years we have Helena Hauff and Stingray leading the electro comeback. I genuinely couldn't imagine anyone playing electro to thousands of people in 2012.

The whole scene has grown so big that there's space for musical diversity. All sorts of music styles can coexist. Personally, I often reach my limits of one particular thing and have an urge to explore and change my own sound. There is always more to explore and you have no hope of ever grasping the entirety of it.

Let's talk about acid. It's one of your signatures, but you use it as a contour, not always a wrecking ball. There are lots of ways to work a 303, but I don't know how you can make use of 20 or 25 acid lines in a couple of hours without it becoming overbearing.

I mean, I was a teenager in the '90s. So the very sound of a 303 is something that is deeply embedded in my subconscious as part of growing up. My transition from being a journalist and a TV presenter to being a performer was actually performing acid live. When I was touring with Abe Duque in the mid-'00s, I started learning how to use all the machines, as the live show would have extended periods where singing was unnecessary. Abe thought that a 303 should be my machine, that it's the one I should play and learn how to use first. That's where my real connection with acid actually starts, not by playing acid records, but with hands on a TB-303. I am innately familiar with all the frequencies that this machine can produce. It's in my DNA, unavoidable now.

I guess the thing you are referring to is songs which are not necessarily labelled as acid, but they do have some 303 lines snaking around inside of them, rather than something billed as super epic acid trance. Even when I think of pop tracks that I play a lot, they are semi-acid: some of the Moloko tracks from back in the day, or Kylie Minogue's "Slow"—listen close and it also has a 303. It's there, but not in your face. I love that.

It gives the effect of a trail left in the sky by a plane. Little droplets of acid falling through the set. Which is nice.

Sometimes though, I get deeply introverted when playing, and the set begins to sound as if I am lost in my own thoughts. It becomes cerebral, pensive. I have caught myself going, "Oh fuck, this is too deep, I need to break the spell." So I break the spell with something that calls for jumping, dancing and being happy. Something with a rich sound. Something… musical. Drum patterns, big breaks, melodies, synths on synths, and probably not 4/4. But that can be a challenge for a crowd to get down with, especially in Germany. Once you play an electro track, no matter how strong it is, people just go to the bar to get a drink or they take a breather, or whatever. It's different in Holland, and the UK, obviously, because there it's a different national tradition.

I've heard you say that once you get the Italians on your side, the world is yours.

[Laughs] Italians do make for a very loyal crowd. Perhaps 15 years ago, the Japanese crowds would also be up there as the most fastidiously dedicated, but Italians and techno just go together. The national mentality is ripe for it. It's a kind of territory that is in a way self-sufficient, a universe on its own. There are specific rules that work on the Italian market which may not necessarily apply to the rest of the world. So once you somehow arrive in that zone, selling out parties in Italy, I think that's what makes you a mainstream popular DJ. They have heritage, a history of revolutionary clubs, and dancing is a fashionable hobby. It makes sense.

Going to see places like Colombia or India or South Korea or Australia is so rewarding—but also a nice test to see how that part of the world works. Sometimes I play in places where people don't express themselves so loudly, I fear that I am tanking. I played in Sweden some years ago at a festival and it was crowded. Nobody really left, but the place wasn't was going wild. So I thought maybe I didn't do a good job. But then after I finished my set, I saw a group of people, they were lining up to give me hugs. When you travel around, you need to bear that in mind. People express their contentment in very different ways, country to country.

One thing I've noticed in your sets is that they ebb and flow. The crowd is perhaps less sure of the playsheet—they groove but miss the cues. You might have an easier time if you were to settle on a routine of energy up and down, bass on and off, kicks gone, kicks back.

I probably would, and if I were to ever to become that kind of DJ, I guess I would organise my folders differently. That would lead to having these more linear and predictable sets, but I was never that kind of person. For my whole life, I'm fighting to not be put in a box, and I just don't want to be that. Also, I was not originally someone who's into dance music. I was going to raves as a teenager, but it wouldn't be at home, I was listening to punk and grunge and IDM and the Ninja Tune sound of the late '90s. I was a consumer of electronic music, but it wasn't really dance music. I think that's also something that plays a big role in the way I'm DJing. When I was working selecting music for TV shows that were broadcast in the daytime, you would have kids getting ready for school or housewives watching that. I didn't think that playing only Autechre and !!! would somehow have some sort of longevity. I wanted to keep my job and continue doing it. I always had to find a way to make it interesting. I could play a full ten minutes of Autechre noise on Serbian national television, it was fine, because the next one up would be The White Stripes or an old house edit of Madonna. Then, more noise.

Is there a frustration that you are primarily considered a techno DJ, at the exclusion of your wider tastes?

I was a house DJ for a long, long time. If I was to define myself by genres, that would be the best definition of the music I played in my first years of DJing, holding down residencies in commercial clubs in Belgrade. I guess I had this ability to play music which was different to what was normally played in these places, and somehow people would still come, and they would still enjoy it. This formed my perspective of what DJing is: that you should put yourself in all these different situations, and then just see what you can do. From there, define your comfort zone and make good on that, but still push it where you can.

This techno / no techno thing is a bit tricky for me. When I started touring intensively and internationally, it was the period of my life when I mostly played techno. Drugstore opened opened and the first time I played, the environment demanded something more than the house I had my mind set on. And I really enjoyed throwing out the hardest stuff I had. Techno was on the come-up again at this point, with so much good music coming out around 2012-13, so I was ready to let it out. By 2015, I was working with Dystopian, a pure techno agency. I was on techno bills and loving it—but then, techno changed. Now, I don't feel like I can identify with it as much, because it's just much, much faster. It's in this hardcore, gabber-style cycle, which was never popular in Serbia, and I have no connections with it. My techno is a little less ferocious, a bit more groovy, melodic and even house-y. It's not this banging, raw meld of 808s, 909s and the occasional 303, all thrown out at 145 BPM. I just can't do that.

I didn't think that's where your answer was going to go. I thought you were going to talk about the change in techno as an identity thing, throwing it around rather aggressively as this macho, showy, all-caps TECHNO movement. Or the sound of "business techno."

In that sense, techno is now what tech house was around 2010. It's mainstream and it's wide and it's popular, and it's a big industry, and I think it was inevitable in a way. I wouldn't say it is right or wrong, in any way, because we already live in an upside-down anarcho-capitalist world, so whatever brings profit is legit. Someone making millions means the demand is out there to pay the millions. I never really belonged to any movement or clique or dress code, so at a base level this all-caps techno movement doesn't relate to me. I am neutral on it. I don't mind people who enjoy being stars, enjoying a glitzy lifestyle. There are people around me who play exactly the same music they played from the start, but the environment changed and they became stars within it. Why should I be the arbiter of someone else's success? Who am I to judge if business techno is OK or not?

It's like the concept of overchoice—if you go to the supermarket and there's 800 types of mustard, you reflexively track back to familiar ground. Could you say the same today for the flood of similar music, and by extension, DJs playing that music?

I grew up amongst sanctions, international isolation closing off imports and exports and inflation at 313 million percent. When the revolution happened in 2000, and our market opened up, I knew the exact feeling of going to a supermarket and being shaken by the sight of more than two or three products on the shelves. To this day, information overload is hard to process.

But when it comes to your playlists, navigating that glut of colours, labels and choices is somehow intuitive?

In a supermarket, ultimately it doesn't matter what type of milk I buy. But when DJing, the decision-making is vital. All art is in the decision-making; it's a series of decisions you make and they ultimately lead to something that you create. What I heard many times from DJs I used to interview was that playing the right track at the right time is one of the hardest things to master. It sounds so simple, yet takes so much experience to arrive at that point. I think of pro athletes and the extent of their training for this to become like a natural reflex. It's a game of intuition and decision.

Choice is a complicated thing. If I stuck to one genre, hemmed in my interest in social troubles and books as much as club music, perhaps I could be a more digestible prospect on the market. You see Richie Hawtin––and he's an intellectual with so much musical history––but the way he presents himself is very translatable. The haircut, the black clothes: that's Richie. If you see techno as a business, you need to apply the same rules to yourself as you would to a product. But if you take the road less travelled, I think the reward is much deeper in a way.

Honestly, I also believe that the more things explode in the mainstream or pop area, it creates more space for underground things, because it's a natural reaction. If you're frustrated with something that's popular, then that inspires creation and a breakaway scene. I see that all around right now. If techno giants occupy the space where EDM was, then super-dedicated, deep-digging types move into headline slots and get the 100 gigs a year vacated by the departing techno superstar. Component parts move around but everything grows together.

That luxury—of leaving home, let alone taking 100 gigs a year—was not always available to you. To this day you still get shut out at some borders. Your relationship with the notion of success seems to be rooted in breaking out of where you came from.

I really wanted to become an international DJ, and to have an international career for some time. Coming from a country that doesn't belong to the Western world is difficult. There's not too many Serbian DJs travelling around the world, nor musicians, or actors or artists. For me, this path and this struggle was a long one. One of the friends who believed in me gave me a little note for my birthday, I think in 2015, saying: "Great success and nothing less." She also told me about a few psychological tricks that I could use to overcome anxiety. This little motivational present rests on my mixer, just to get a boost when I'm down. Coincidentally, it was exactly the year when I found my agent, and the year when things actually started happening.

There was so much negativity around, we were living in sadness. As a teenager, there were years when we had nothing to eat. There was no food on the table. I decided not to live that life forever. I just don't want to be this, I don't want to be the stereotype of this poor, struggling artist, or this miserable Eastern European. I guess that's why I don't believe success is a bad thing. Success is also a relative thing. I wouldn't consider success as a sister of vanity. For me, it was about the fight.

You've mentioned the name Bogomir Doringer before, as someone who has helped your understanding about the necessity of dancing in spaces undergoing communal trauma. Tell me about him.

Bogomir is a good friend. We met each other at the turn of the century. We were part of the same rave tribe back then but soon after he moved to Holland to become an artist and a curator. In recent years his field of ongoing artistic research is the politics of dancing, or more precisely asking: "why do we dance?" This research focuses on the dance floor from a bird's-eye perspective. Rave choreography and communication depends so heavily on social, political, cultural and economic circumstances. We both come from the time where going to raves was the only way to maintain sanity. During my teenagehood, reality collapsed. There was war, sanctions, extreme poverty, hunger, electricity cuts and finally bombings. For my generation, a way from home to school was dangerous as there was always a possibility that some other teenager will pull out a knife or a gun and take off your sneakers and jackets. I was lucky to be so poor that nobody would even want my clothes.

In the midst of all that, young people wanted to keep a visage of the same lifestyle they had before the war broke out. Partying was our way to create a parallel culture: we were living in the night, hiding from the grim daily life. Raving was individual as much as it was collective, the music was abstract enough to give space for individual interpretation and introspection and it was repetitive enough to create collective hypnosis. It was a proper tribal healing experience. It served this purpose. And a few other purposes. Men would escape being dragged to battlefield by never being at home at night. All this obviously adds up to a very different purpose than pure hedonistic weekend escape from a nine-to-five job.

Bogomir extended his research to dance floors across the globe—Brazil, US, Georgia, Portugal, Germany, Palestine, plus Holland and Serbia. The way we in Serbia rave is much closer to someone from Detroit or Chicago in the '80s than to someone in Belgium. I guess it's the same story with Berlin in the '90s, and what is happening in Georgia these days. It's more of a necessity than anything else, with an attitude that if the apocalypse is on our doorstep, let's enjoy 200 percent of life now. Bogomir coined a new term for this, the "dance of urgency." He invited me to give talks at several conferences where he presented his project and made me think about why I ended up at raves and how I became a professional DJ. I had to rewind my whole life and dissect historical and political circumstances in certain periods and connect them with my own perception of parties in order to give these talks. I discovered interesting social and historical patterns threaded everywhere. More importantly, it made me define that this collective transformative experience is one of my driving forces. In the mad world of mutating, inhumane capitalism, a proper rave experience is still the closest way for people in urban environments to get some sort of collective awareness through which they can accept others as part of the same universe and create a bit more of a loving attitude towards each other.

Are you chasing transcendence when you play?

I'm not doing so explicitly, but I'm really happy when it happens. Honestly, I'm happy when a gig goes well or simply OK. Of 100 or so gigs per year, I would say a handful are terrible, about 50 percent are good, the rest great and maybe two or three are the ones where I walk away thinking, "This was mind blowing. This was like a transcendent experience."

People talk about the very best shows as if they were out-of-body experiences. Whether through a kinetic bond with the crowd or a heightened flowstate, the records supposedly pick themselves. I've never seen anyone pinpoint what the phenomenon is like from the DJ's perspective. Can you break down what's happening in that moment?

Yes, there are these perfect moments, and for me these moments would always happen when I'm extremely tired. When I'm so tired all the pressure is off, I don't even have the energy to be anxious and I don't have the mental capacity to overthink what I'm doing. That's the magic of it. When the barriers that kept me apart are lifted, the negativity that clouds life dissipates, when it all falls off, that's when everything flows. I would say it's a subconscious process. So I'm not sure if I would be able to precisely break down what exactly is going on there. But they always seemed to come during all-nighters, at 20/44 where most of the start-to-finish residency sets took place. After five, six or seven hours, then comes the moment of total bliss, when everything just fits. I don't understand, but somehow the lights, the people, the sound, the music, the breaks, this collective choreography of everyone and everything that's happening, it all becomes… not to sound too spiritual, but it does appear to sync as one. There is something that overtakes and I feel barely awake, barely aware, yet totally present. I don't know how I choose records in these moments.

So the records are guiding you rather than the other way around?

The records are there. The playlists on my USB are also there. Everything that crosses my mind works perfectly, miraculously—even if I know with absolute certainty that some of these mixes would not work in a different situation. I think that's the pitfall of trying to define the art of DJing. It's not necessarily something that you can translate into words. A person like Eris Drew can probably talk about it so much more eloquently than I can, with her history of collective experience and musical mediums. If we're really talking about the art of it, the art of it is not being able to replicate moments. I used to record these all-nighters, so I would listen to them exactly for that reason, because my memory was zapped. I could remember the energy, but not the sequence, or the hour of day. But memorising the combinations for use in the future is a fallacy. Which means that no matter how prepared you are, no matter how much you practise, even if your playlists are super organised and extremely planned, you cannot replicate the same mix twice and you cannot replicate the same moment twice. And that is the actual art of DJing.

You're no longer the ring leader, you're just part of the overall atmosphere.

That is true. The best example I can give you was one of my last all-nighters at 20/44 prior to international touring picking up. It was the beginning of September, a local and loyal crowd back from vacations, the weather is still nice, but the seasons are also changing. At some point during a transition between Bicep's "Just" and Monday Club's "Your Future Is House" came an extended break, and as this break was unfolding a thick fog surrounded the boat. Normally when there's no fog you can see the old town and you have a nice view of the bridges and the whole of Belgrade. Yet in a 45-second period, timed perfectly with the beginning and end of the break, fog descended. The moment the kick came back in, it was all white. A party suddenly in a void, isolated at the end of time. The synchronicity of nature was staggering. To this day I have never played that Bicep song again, it would be like blasphemy.

I played on for another three or four hours in this fog, when it seemed as if there's nothing else in this world except for that party. Then came the morning and the sun started rising, and like we spoke about earlier, it was a case of happily mixing one favourite after another. I played "Maze" by Actress, then The Future Sound Of London, and then right after that Massive Attack. Somewhere between "Papua New Guinea" and "Unfinished Sympathy," the fog disappeared. When the vocal kicked in, we were bathed in yellow rays of light. The party turned gold, and that was the last track I played. That was as close to perfection as it gets.