"I couldn't sleep," said Nathalie Ogazón Faber, greeting me with a hug and a winning smile. "I was too nervous—about tonight and the whole weekend."

The plan was to squeeze in a disco nap. But where I managed, the artist better known as Ogazón failed. Jittery in her hotel room, she instead whiled away the hours between dinner and the club watching YouTube tutorials of Pioneer DJ's latest industry-standard mixer, the DJM-V10. In less than 24 hours, she'd be playing on it at Panorama Bar in Berlin, and because she'd only used it a few times before, she wanted to get better acquainted.

But first, The Pickle Factory. The East London club is small and sparse, with wood paneling and a deceptively roomy dance floor. Sometimes the air is so heavy that puddles of sweat form beneath the DJ booth and the walls turn into a "water feature," according to the venue manager, Jack. This wasn't one of those nights, though the club was still hot and busy as Ogazón dropped the needle on her first record: the swirling deep house of Jordan GCZ's "Tongue Twister."

The next hour or so was more of the same, all warm synths and gooey basslines. Ogazón mixed with precision, letting each record play for a good three or four minutes before easing into the next one. Track by track, the intensity inched up. Barely a metre in front of her, two women in shades clung to the wooden booth, their free hands lassoing above their heads. Periodically, a howling wooooooooooyahhhhh cut through the noise.

"This crowd is so crazy," Ogazón said, flicking through her records. "I'm not used to so much talking and shouting. Usually in Berlin it's…" [Motions being heads down deep in the rave.]

From 4 AM, the tunes got bigger as the crowd condensed. Slabs of tech house like Sol Ortega's "Waiting For You" and "Inda" by Comodo (AKA Marco Carola) kept the vibe soulful, amplified by Ogazón's perpetual smile. The party peaked with LADYMONIX's "Welcome 2 My House," a raw house cut released this year but giving heavy '90s energy. At some point things got silly: one lad pulled his LIDL T-shirt over his head, while a group of Mexicans huddled for a Polaroid. When the lights went up, Ogazón clapped the diehards, entertained a couple of Parisian fans and hit the exit for a well-earned cigarette.

"First and foremost, I'm just a raver," she said. "I started playing because I love it. I love dancing, I love listening to other sets."

In the past two years, Ogazón's blend of charisma and purist house and techno records have coalesced into a blooming DJ career. After debuting at institutions such as Panorama Bar and Robert Johnson last year, she carried the momentum into 2023, crossing off the likes of Dekmantel, Bassiani and Berghain. In January, she switched booking agencies, leaving the house-focused This Is Fun to join Good News, set up by Marcel Dettmann in the wake of Ostgut Booking's closure. For her, it was a dream endorsement and a chance to fully embrace her love of deep house, banging techno and the netherworlds in between.

Ogazón's simple, old-school approach to DJing stands out in 2023. She doesn't exploit social media or play too fast or too poppy. She loves groove and only plays vinyl. Her taste in records spans old and new, with a particular relish for classic labels like Ostgut Ton, Figure and Rawax. Ten or 15 years ago, the lineups of Europe's top clubs and festivals would have been filled with DJs like Ogazón. But today, she's outnumbered.

"I feel like lately the need for speed is taking over," she told me at her stylish apartment in Berlin, several days after The Pickle Factory. "This idea of wanting to ease into the night, to find your groove gradually, isn't something that most DJs have in mind anymore. I find it super important, both as a dancer and a DJ. Especially if you're playing first or second at a party where there's 30 hours to go. You have to massage people—and the staff—into the night."

That last sentence was in reference to Panorama Bar, which she opened the night after headlining The Pickle Factory. The 24 hours in between were a blur, starting in the basement of a flat in London Fields. In person, Ogazón is funny and instantly charming, with curious, piercing eyes. Born in Luxembourg to a Spanish mother, she speaks six languages fluently. The three of us—Ogazón, myself and Jack the venue manager—sat around sipping beers and discussing our most expensive vinyl buys (Ogazón: 808 Bassqueen, €50) and the majesty of quokkas. On the walk back to Ogazón's hotel, the first traders were setting up on Broadway Market as the unmistakable whiff of fish hung in the air.

Half a day later, Ogazón and I rendezvoused in her hometown of Berlin under more sophisticated circumstances, sharing meatballs and pimientos de padrón at a bustling tapas restaurant by Görlitzer Park. Her agent, Mirko, joined us as the food was dwindling. Over glasses of white wine, they caught up about The Pickle Factory and unpicked their shared hatred for the Barbie movie. After a quick ice cream round the corner, we all jumped in a cab and headed to Berghain, where, a good 45 minutes before doors opened, a huge queue had already formed.

This was Ogazón's fifth time playing the vaunted nightclub. Her debut, back in April 2022, was on a Friday for a party run by ItaloJohnson. She had recently started working with Kevin Philipp Stein, her former agent and cofounder of This Is Fun. He spent a chunk of her opening set recording snippets as voice notes and sending them gleefully to promoter friends at festivals like Nachtdigital and Nation of Gondwana. Working with Ogazón, he told me over the phone from Berlin, wasn't your typical gig.

"It was completely different to what I'd experienced in the past five years as an agent," he said. "When I pitched Nathalie, promoters barely needed any convincing. Everyone was immediately hooked—'OK let's do it, let's do it.'"

"I feel like lately the need for speed is taking over," she said. "This idea of wanting to ease into the night, to find your groove gradually, isn't something that most DJs have in mind anymore. I find it super important, both as a dancer and a DJ."

For Ogazón, playing Panorama Bar was a literal dream come true. Back in 2016, the dream was so frequent that her friends clubbed together and bought her CDJ-400s and a Xone:23 mixer for her 22nd birthday. She was living in Amsterdam at the time, studying business in the week and raving hard on the weekends. She had moved there on a whim from Luxembourg in 2014, inspired by a trip to Pitch Festival the previous summer. There, entranced by the lights and emotional thump of James Blake and Disclosure, she had discovered electronic music.

Until that point, life in quiet, wealthy Luxembourg had offered little musically. She went to see The Fleet Foxes and other bands at local venues like Rockhal and den Atelier, and when she was 15, her parents bought her a record player for Christmas. This ignited a lifelong love of vinyl, although her early buys were mostly rock and indie albums. Because there was no decent local nightclub, electronic music and DJing weren't part of the picture.

This may explain why it took Ogazón's parents so long to accept her eventual career choice. It was only last June, around six years after her first DJ gig, that they were finally convinced, when she played to 10,000 people in Luxembourg's main square on a national holiday. During soundcheck, her dad watched in awe as she instructed several technicians on how to properly set up her decks. He also couldn't believe she had her own trailer with her name on the door and a fridge stuffed with free drinks.

Ogazón's five years in Amsterdam, between 2014 and 2019, were mostly spent "going out a lot, a lot, a lot," she said. (Her friends still have a joke from that time: whenever they go clubbing, Ogazón is the meeting point because she's always dancing at the front.) The legendary Trouw was her first love, countless hours melting away in its labyrinthine corridors and industrial nooks. When it shut in December 2015, she tried unsuccessfully to buy a piece of the building. "I saw Job Jobse play for the first time in the toilet of Trouw," she said. "It was amazing."

Not long after being gifted the CDJs, Ogazón was lent a pair of mismatched turntables by close friend and fellow music nerd Chris Voolstra, who would later help her with her bookings. She began adding to her small collection of records, inspired by her many hours on the dance floor.

"Pretty quickly when I started going out, I noticed that I was listening to sets and being like, 'wow, if I was DJing, I would mix this track in because it would fit the vibe so well' and then I'd zoom out in my head and visualise actually doing this," she said.

"I don't like these long captions on social media saying the gig was 'one for the books,'" said Ogazón. "Every gig is 'one for the books,' according to most DJs. But it's simply not true."

Voolstra, who was involved in running multiple venues across the city, promised Ogazón a slot at a new party series he was planning, on the condition that she kept practicing. She did, every day for hours on end.

"It was obvious she had a deep passion for music," Voolstra told me over email. "Every day, without fail, we'd exchange YouTube tracks. I'd wake up to find that Nathalie had been digging all night. She would send me ten tracks at 2 AM on a Wednesday with the intrusion that I really needed to listen to these bangers. She cracked the code of finding absolute gems with fewer than 500 views. And at one point she started to send tracks with informal non-disclosure agreements attached—she was a real digger now."

On February 18th, 2018, Ogazón made her DJ debut with a three-hour set at Voolstra's cosy afterhours. She chose her mother's maiden name because she wanted something androgynous and visually powerful. At the party, people entered through a fire exit and accessed the dance floor via the toilets. There was, Voolstra said, an "everything-goes vibe." In a short clip he shared, Ogazón is playing balmy deep house to a packed crowd, who clap and whistle in admiration. When the beat drops back in, Voolstra appears in the booth and gives Ogazón a long, po-going hug.

"It felt like something clicked for her," Voolstra said. "She was ecstatic, as if she had just discovered a new colour or something. I remember her saying, 'this is it, dude.'"

There were local promoters in the crowd that day, and offers started rolling in. After a few gigs on CDJs, Ogazón took the brave decision to switch to vinyl. Since then, barring the odd emergency USB set, she's never looked back and currently has around 3,000 records crammed into several units in her living room. She writes little notes on the inner labels to guide her while DJing: "Pano Roller," "Filler With Breaks," "Soft Sterac Vibes - Beauty."

"For me, vinyl just makes so much sense because music is all to do with feeling," she said.

Ogazón spent 2018 and 2019 gigging hard in Amsterdam while also balancing a job in branding for a design hotel company. Her heart wasn't in the work and she spent most days digging for records online. Eventually she left the role, and decided to leave Amsterdam, too. "I wasn't happy there anymore," she said. "I didn't feel like I belonged."

Berlin, where Ogazón had been visiting regularly for years to party at Berghain, was the obvious next step. She arrived in January 2020 and by March had secured a flat, filling it with everything she owned: four chairs, a blow-up mattress and her entire record collection. ("It was a bit sad and empty.") Then Covid-19 hit Europe and, fearful of being isolated alone, she ended up back at her parents' place in Luxembourg, enjoying the luxury of a garden. But after three months she returned to Berlin to fully focus on her DJ career.

"After lockdown, I met up with some DJ friends and they were like, 'yeah I was so depressed, I didn't touch a single record,'" she said. "For me, it was the opposite. I felt like I developed my sound so much. I was digging and learning about music and mixing, going on Discogs and making friends with sellers. But mostly I was just at home playing records all the time. There was nothing else to do."

Like many DJs from this era, Ogazón's breakthrough came via HÖR Radio in Berlin. Stein, her former agent, had met her briefly at Fusion Festival in 2019, where she was the "very first raver" at ItaloJohnson's set. A year later, he stumbled across her HÖR debut and had to double-check it was the same person

"I was hooked immediately," he said. "I'd never seen such charisma and passion through a video." (When I mentioned this set to Ogazón, she cringed—"I can't watch it now," she said. "The way I'm jumping around like a happy puppy in the woods.")

This video also caught someone else's eye: Ryan Elliott. Speaking over the phone from Berlin, he said he knew instantly that Ogazón "was someone I'd love to play with." The feeling was mutual—she'd been a huge fan for years, travelling frequently to catch him at Berghain and even framing and hanging his incredible Panorama Bar 06 mix, the first Ostgut Ton record she ever bought, in her bathroom.

As DJs, Elliott and Ogazón have a lot in common: a love of vinyl, a keen sense of groove and a broad, classy taste in house and techno. This has translated into a string of effortlessly fun back-to-backs at places like Multisex in Berlin, Butik Festival, La Terrrazza in Barcelona and HÖR Radio. Several more are already in the diary.

"Sometimes with back-to-back it's not an exact match—which is OK—but you've really got to prepare for the other person," Elliott said. "I never have to do that with Nathalie and I know she feels the same way. We have a very similar take on music and how we read the crowd, where we want the party to go. Sometimes in a back-to-back the DJs want to go in different directions—there's this push-pull that the crowd can always notice. She and I never have that. It's always just one thing coming out of the booth."

He added: "Like me, she was a dancer before becoming a DJ. I liked the music for the music. And when you come from that, I think you have a little bit more of an understanding of what people are going through on the dance floor, what they need and what they want. So you can either give them that or choose not to. You were there before, so you can read what's going on really well. She has that."

"After lockdown, I met up with some DJ friends and they were like, 'yeah I was so depressed, I didn't touch a single record,'" she said. "For me, it was the opposite. I felt like I developed my sound so much."

In the past year, Ogazón has also struck up a friendship with another Berghain great: Marcel Dettmann. Although she joined his new agency in January, only three months after quitting her software job and becoming a full-time DJ, they didn't actually meet until March. At the end of April, they were due to go back-to-back at a Boiler Room party in Bristol. She went round to his studio in Berlin, where they drank coffee, listened to records and even practiced on vinyl together, which Dettmann, she said, "never does."

Unfortunately, the gig was a disaster. In terms of technical issues, "everything that could go wrong went wrong," Ogazón said. The needles were skipping, there was feedback and the sound cut off after a tech guy pulled a cable out. Thankfully, Boiler Room agreed not to publish the set online.

"Afterwards I was really upset," Ogazón said. "But in the end we just took the bottles of champagne from our rider, got drunk, went to a Chinese restaurant, ate a lot of food and went to bed. But I did cry myself to sleep that night."

Ogazón is getting better at dealing with disappointing gigs. After this year's Glastonbury, where Dettmann, clashing with Elton John, played to 200 people at the vast IICON stage, he gave her a sage piece of advice: "care less." Not every show can be great or even good, despite what social media might portray.

"It's so easy these days to make every show look amazing," Ogazón said. "You just need one good video from one good angle and you can be like, 'oh amazing crowd, amazing vibe.' No, I don't do that. I don't like these long captions saying the gig was 'one for the books.' Every gig is 'one for the books,' according to most DJs. But it's simply not true."

Of course, some clubs do guarantee a special time, chief among them Panorama Bar. Even just being inside before the doors opened was a unique experience, Ogazón's soundchecking mingling with the clink of bottles and the thrrrrrrrrrud of ice hitting buckets. At 11:45 PM, everyone shuffled downstairs to Berghain, where, in keeping with tradition, one of the bartenders had arranged a spread of shots—Berliner Luft, Jägermeister, tequila, apple juice, schnapps—on the long, silver counter. We all raised our little plastic cups and smiled. "Prost, cheers, schönen Abend."

Ogazón's plan was to play some of the deepest house and ambient records in her collection. She opened with Global Communication's 1994 epic "14:31," its alien bleeps and tender melody coating the empty dance floor in a soothing glow. As friends paused by the booth to blow a kiss, other early birds chilled on the fringes, smoking and drinking cappuccinos. Gradually a dance floor formed, and by 1 AM the first tentative moves had blossomed into billowing pirouettes and full-body workouts.

Ogazón stuck to her mission, maintaining a gorgeous groove and never peaking over 125 BPM. Occasionally, she'd "throw some cookies"—sparkier tunes like Omar-S's "Set It Out" or JohNick's "Good Time"—before taking the foot off the gas again, resisting the urge to crescendo. One of her final tracks was Head High's then-buzzy new one "Break Away." Its patient build-up, all zingy hi-hats and dusty euphoria, slowly cranked up the tension. When the kick drums finally poked through, the place erupted.

Two days later in Kreuzberg, Ogazón and I debriefed the set in her living room over glasses of fizzy water. The smell of lunch's chicken teriyaki lingered in the air. Along one wall stood a beautiful all-in-one DJ unit; along the other, a big, grey couch littered with vinyl for her upcoming shows. She had enjoyed Panorama Bar, although some sound issues in the booth meant she was too focused on beatmatching to really luxuriate in the experience. As soon as she finished playing, she found her boyfriend and their friends and got stuck into the party, only emerging 16 hours later into the Berlin night.

The incremental success of the past two years has left Ogazón in a buoyant headspace. During our time together, she came across as quietly confident yet never cocky, ambitious but not complacent. She's clearly loving every element of the process, from discovering new tunes and working out which clubs can be trusted to set up turntables, to educating herself on electronic music's long and winding history. On the way back home from Panorama Bar, she couldn't stop thinking about the old-school techno of Italian master Gaetano Parisio, who had rocked Berghain in the afternoon.

"First and foremost, I'm just a raver," she said with a smile. "I started playing because I love it. I love dancing, I love listening to other sets. I came home so inspired, he was playing so much stuff I'd never heard before. The first thing I did in the morning was jump on Discogs."

Update, October 18th: This piece was updated to more accurately reflect Chris Voolstra's work when he booked Ogazón's first DJ set.