By Alexander Cheves
The Portugal-born, Berlin-and-Barcelona-based DJ ketia‘s name is all lowercase, always: “Nobody gets this right.”
I promise to get it right. And it’s not an artist name: “It’s just my name,” they say. “There’s no other name besides ketia.” Ahead of their sets this weekend at tracey, where they are a regular artist, we sat down to talk about life, travel, and the perks of having a big, international queer family.
You’ve been DJing for a while. Let’s recap.
In 2017, at 21, ketia became a resident of Lisbon’s mina collective, described by Beatport as “Lisbon’s permissive nocturnal playground … a queer safe space for clubbers wanting to party hard and outside of the mainstream.”
In Portugal, ketia cut their teeth at clubs like Lux and Gare. At 22, ketia founded Kit Ket, which Mixmag described as a “femme-focused party series.” The first Kit Ket event happened in 2018.
Later, Kit Ket evolved, per a Resident Advisor listing, into a “trans-focused collective,” of which ketia is both a resident and the founder. In 2019, ketia told Huck magazine:
I tried and try to make Kit Ket as trans and femme as possible. I think this is an important experience to have as someone who’s experimenting with fragile forms of being.
Then they moved to Berlin, where they became a regular artist at Lunchbox Candy (now tracey), “the only party where I feel completely safe.”
Internationally, ketia plays often at K41 in Kyiv, Pawn Shop in Taipei, and Basement NYC, with stretches of living and playing in Melbourne. Most recently, on May 8, they did the event ketia All Night Long at Club RAUM in Amsterdam.
In person, ketia is gentle, handsome, introspective: a deep thinker, deep feeler. They have an athletic build, bleach-blonde eyebrows, short hair, and eyes so light brown they look gold. Head to toe, ketia wears only shades of brown. When we meet, shortly before their exodus from Berlin, I see their apartment in Berlin-Neukölln matches their wardrobe, fully decorated in brown.
“Brown is my soul color,” they say.
What’s your best early music memory?
Years before ketia became a DJ, they played in a drumming orchestra in Portugal. This experience honed their view that music is an ancient, spiritual rite, implicitly bound to nature.
But what’s a drumming orchestra? “Just what it sounds like,” ketia says, laughing. “An orchestra with only drums.”
Specifically, ketia played the “feminine drum.” They don’t define this instrument further, so I research and learn that traditional Portuguese and Brazilian percussion orchestras designate specific drum lines by gender. “In Portugal we call this drum orchestra Timbalão,” ketia tells me.
ketia played in a row of cisgender women. Years later, after they had language for their own gender (nonbinary), ketia would look back on this experience and reflect on what it reveals, both about their gender and the music they like to play now: “I’m very percussive. I love drumming.”
The drum orchestra was successful. “We toured all over Portugal: Porto, Tunes, Viana do Castelo, and more. Then I was invited to play internationally. The orchestra was invited to Dresden, Liverpool, Istanbul, Brazil, and Cairo. But my parents said no.”
Why? “You don’t clean your room,” they said, “so you can’t go. For them, this was a holiday for me, not me trying to grow and work as an artist.”
ketia shakes their head and admits that, in hindsight, it’s a small thing. ketia did not, in the end, become a drummer. But it still stings:
So much of my life has been about getting permission. It took me a long time to learn that the only approval I needed was mine.
These days, according to their RA profile, ketia “blends rave chaos with house-party intimacy, genre-hopping with heart, sweat, and serious groove.” Panorama Bar / Berghain is “Berlin home,” they say, but the club also holds complicated history for them. “Lots of feelings there.”
Let’s talk about the Berghain feelings.
When they first moved to Berlin, “I was young, 23, I think, and so impressionable.”
Jobless, living on savings, partying took over. “I found myself closing Berghain every week, without really wanting to. And that really affects your mental health.”
ketia describes those months as a tightrope between light and dark. “In the club, I had amazing moments with people. I’d spend weeks alone, then go back to Berghain, because it was the only time I’d actually have meaningful moments with others. I was always tired and depressed and coming down, but so was everyone else, so it became normal.”
It got out of control. “In about three months, I was having full breakdowns and serious mental health issues, and thinking about whether I should stay in Berlin.” Then they visited Portugal to see some old friends and take a break.
There, by accident, they had a mushroom trip that changed everything.
I thought I was microdosing, but it was a macro dose. Everything was colored differently. It was the last time I took club drugs. Something happened on that mushroom trip. It made me sober.
Sober, in Berlin, of all places: “You kind of have to,” they say. “It makes or breaks you.”
Berlin will force you up against your greatest darkness. It’s a trial by fire. If you can get through it, you’ll know your margins. But you have to survive it to see where that line falls.
This makes Berlin dangerous, ketia says. “It’s how people die. Some people don’t survive it. I think there’s a kernel of truth there, in the sense that if you can push your limits, you will find them, because no one in Berlin will tell you no.”
Let’s reflect on your life in Berlin.
We meet shortly before Ketia planned to go (they left last May), but they will visit often. I tell them this interview will come out long after they’ve gone. It feels, they say, like a bittersweet goodbye.
ketia first visited Berlin in 2017 “just for fun,” for Pride. On that first visit, they saw the big list of parties and things to do, and Lisbon’s own Pride felt small by comparison: “In Lisbon, we had one big event, maybe a couple of underground parties, and that’s it.” Within two years of that visit, ketia had moved here.
Now they’re leaving, not back to Lisbon, but onward to Barcelona.
What pulled you to Barcelona?
“I love hiking. I love the idea of moving to Barcelona and being able to hike more. Nature is my source of inspiration.”
Music, for ketia, is one way of being in communion with nature. They point out that music and dancing are ancient practices that emerged in early humans to celebrate harvests and alliances and rain and gods.
Club culture might seem like a very indoor thing, very industrial, but it comes from nature. In a way, it’s the oldest ritual we have.
As for the other things that occupy ketia’s life: “Honestly, I don’t think about anything besides music.”
Barcelona isn’t an escape; ketia says they are not running from anything. They feel like the darkness in Berlin is mostly conquered, and they mostly have good feelings about the city.
“I’m a bit claustrophobic,” they say. “Berlin is so flat. Besides Tempelhof, there’s not much open space.” Barcelona is still a major metropolitan area, but the geography offers more. “At least you can go to the sea. You can hike a mountain pretty easily.”
Hiking, for ketia, is key to their mental health.
Physically, geographically, being able to go up and down helps. You have a bad day, just go see a sunset from a really high point. I promise something will click. You’ll think, ‘Okay, I can do this.’
Here, ketia gets quiet, reflecting. Then: “Of course, there’s a chance I’ll still struggle with the same thing, which is mostly myself.”
Where is the dark? Is it me, or is it Berlin? I guess we’ll find out.
You’re a vinyl DJ. Tell me about that.
ketia has been DJing for nearly a decade, but vinyl is a new part of the journey. “I started with vinyl in March of 2025,” they say.
I saw ketia play a vinyl set at Panorama Bar in October 2025, which inspired this interview. ketia and I have a sweet history: I was there to hear them play because we’d been messaging a lot that year.
ketia found my first book, My Love Is a Beast: Confessions, read it, and made several posts about it on Instagram.
Their final post, when they finished it, moved me to tears. They wrote: “Took this book across 7 countries and 2 continents. It got me out loud laughing from the first page and all throughout, mixed with crying and horniness. It is not a comedy but a witty, incredible, genuine, raw, and unfiltered account and exploration of his love and desire in ways that have been really helpful to understand my own. A love letter to the ones before us and the queerdos who love to f*ck.”
It is perhaps the best response to my book I’ve read. I had to message ketia to thank them; at the time, I had no idea we both lived in Berlin.
From there, ketia invited me to their set at Panorama Bar, and after the crowd cheered and they left the booth, we met in person for the first time, hugged, and talked about how lovely it was to “meet” each other through our respective art forms first.
On that night, ketia seemed a vinyl master. Not so, they say: “By October, when you saw me play at Pano, I had progressed to about 50 or 60 percent vinyl, which is pretty ballsy, to be honest, doing a vinyl set only seven months in, at Panorama Bar of all places! I could have fucked up big time.”
Vinyl came into their life with an old turntable from a friend and “a handful of records with no digital version, no rips, where playing vinyl was the only way to play the music at all.” It seemed a shame that they’d never be able to play this music.
So I decided: Fuck it, I have to be a vinyl DJ now.
What do your parents think of your DJ career?
“I think they like it now,” they say. “But I keep distance between them and my job, because they were never supportive of it. It doesn’t feel fair for them to be excited about the light when they only gave me darkness. I know that sounds unforgiving, but it isn’t. I’ve forgiven them. But music is something good in my life, and they did nothing to create or support it. If anything, they did the opposite.”
ketia and I share this: I also don’t share my writing with my family.
ketia opens up more: “I grew up with a lack of culture or kindness in my family. We were mean and cruel to each other, and we’d be this way in front of anyone, especially in front of guests.”
In a way, it’s a very Portuguese thing. Don’t talk about the problem until it’s Christmas, and everyone’s seated and eating, then let’s bring up the fact that this kid is a faggot.
“Or they’d say that you did something wrong, or that your hair looks weird.”
ketia grew up believing that’s how people behave, and lost friends this way. “A lot of friends abandoned me, which was painful, but it was because I was very intense and rough with people.”
Their parents did not help with the mental toll of growing up in a hostile home. “They didn’t do well with the fact that I was depressed. And I was borderline, completely undiagnosed until I was 20, and suffering from PTSD. And I know I have some autism and ADHD.”
Even so, ketia says, “I’ve forgiven them.”
I did the best I could, and I think it turned out okay. I just don’t need my parents’ approval anymore. I graduated from needing it.
The family that matters more is chosen: “I could only call myself an artist starting last year,” they say. “It was so deeply ingrained in me that I’m not an artist, that I could not be an artist, because of how my parents saw all this.”
Friends, a creative community, fellow artists and collaborators, changed all that. Their queer, chosen family saved them.
What is an aspect of working as a DJ that you did not expect?
Many artists I interview tell me how lonely DJing and touring can be, which they did not foresee.
“DJing can feel lonely at times,” ketia admits. “But I didn’t realize how many places it would take me and how many amazing people I would meet through it, and how many people I would miss all the fucking time.”
Missing people is the hardest part, ketia says. “I miss people all the time, because I have amazing friends everywhere.”
I play in New York four times a year. I play in Australia on extended tours. Sometimes I live with someone for 3 weeks, just doing home life with my best friends, people I love. And then you say goodbye. I never get used to it.
More than anything, ketia tells me they feel lucky. “I get to meet all these people. I call them the worldwide angels. It’s becoming this whole thing!”
ketia is working on a website called Worldwide Angel, which will be their official artist site when it’s done. “It’s still under construction, but I plan to make keychains and merch. I really believe there’s this network of sweet, queer angels that live everywhere.”
Also, the music itself is a force bringing people together in surprising ways: “The kind of music I play has been attracting people I never expected to meet.”
I think about when I was 17 and had no friends and this is all I wanted: I wondered if there was someone else out there like me. Now I know there are hundreds. That’s what music does.
Then ketia says something so kind, it makes me choke up a bit:
“You’re one of them, you know. And Octo Octa is one of them, and Eris Drew is one of them. It’s a long list of beautiful people I get to spend time with a few times a year.”
ketia recalls their debut at Panorama Bar “with ten different worldwide angels” who had never met each other before, friends from four continents: USA, Australia, Europe, and Asia.
“They were all dancing and fucking and kissing, and I was just, like, this is perfect. My music brings ten people I love into one room, and I get to play for them.”
What’s something you’ve changed your mind about over time?
ketia seems to think hard before answering:
I didn’t believe before that everyone has a chance of redemption. I wasn’t sure I believed everyone is capable of being forgiven, or of being kind to themselves and to others. I believe that now.
They believe it about themselves now, too.
“I believe I’m not a bad person anymore. I really did before. When I moved to Berlin, I thought I was the worst person in the world. I believed that’s how my parents saw me, how my friends saw me. I don’t believe that now.”
That’s a profound change. How did it happen? “I was exposed to kindness and love by other people. That’s it.”
That’s how it always happens, ketia says. All the hokey, overdone phrases are true: “Love really saves the day.”
Berliners, with their characteristic frankness, helped: “A lot of people were like, hey, I love you, but when you’re rough like that, it doesn’t make me want to become close to you. They’d say, I’m here to shine a light on you, which is the best someone can do for you, because you can’t see it for yourself.”
ketia smiles warmly at this and says: “By being shown that grace, I now can do it for myself, and do it for others. And that’s love.” ★
Follow ketia on Instagram and RA, see all their links, and listen to their music on SoundCloud.
Alexander Cheves is an author and essayist exploring sex, culture, art, and music. Winner of the Geoff Mains Prize and an NLGJA journalism award, he can usually be found dancing or working on his next book. Follow him on Instagram and visit his site.
Photos: Mara Menzel + additional photos courtesy of the artist
