Immy on Love, House Music, and Drawing Dance Floors

By Alexander Cheves

Immy is a Berlin-based DJ and selector with a day job in music licensing. When I visit her, I see immediately that she is a proud music nerd, a lifelong student of music history.

Her biggest passion is for the NYC music scene between 1969 and 1999, focusing mainly on the disco and house scenes, especially at iconic spaces like the Loft and Paradise Garage.

Immy both collects and plays everything from ambient, soul, funk, disco and reggae to house, techno, electro, hardcore, and progressive trance. A firm believer that the dance floor can and should be a healing space, she often cuts and throws in acapellas in club sets.

I connected to her through her SEVEN House Mix, recorded live in the SEVEN “secret garden” in Berlin-Mitte. (Hinterhaus is a passion project by the SEVEN team.)

She tells me she is inspired most by nightlife impresario David Mancuso (who started the legendary Loft parties) and iconic DJ Larry Levan, and she aims, in her words, to infuse each set “with the power of love.” 

“It’s simple,” she says. “Music is love, and love is the message.” Here, she suggests I drop into this article the track “Love Is the Message” by MFSB. “It’s a Loft anthem.”

She’s best known in Berlin for playing soulful, jazzy, uplifting classic house—she was a regular artist at Lunchbox Candy parties. But many folks know her for something else: she draws in clubs. Her clubbing kit includes oil pastels and small sheets of A5 paper. 

When we sit down to talk in her apartment in Friedrichshain—the theme of the space is orange, she’s going for a retro “flower power” vibe—she shows me her archived stack of drawings from parties. They are bright, colourful and abstract: squares, squiggles, spirals.

“They’re dance floors,” she says.

Sometimes she even labels on the back who was present, who she was partying with, who was playing, and what the moment was.

She also has a massive vinyl collection, and for records with special memories, she creates her own art for them, inspired by the experience of listening to them.

Over the course of this chat, we talk about art, memory, and how club culture in Berlin is often not the safe, welcoming space it claims to be.

Tell me about your day job.

“It’s great to have a real job,” she says. “I saw a job posting for a royalty manager. I had no idea what it was. This was in my second or third semester of university, and I thought, hey, I know what royalties are. I study business, so I can do this. So I went for an interview.” 

At first, they turned her down because she had no professional experience. Then they offered to let her do an internship for her degree. “So I started as an intern! That was five years ago.”

Can you explain music licensing for our readers?

“It’s the administration of intellectual property management rights,” she says. “If you were to make a song, the second you made that song, you have a copyright on that song, whether or not you register it.” 

She talks about the deals people sign when they’re young—quick money now, decades of regret later. 

She’s blunt: “Signing a deal for twenty, thirty, forty years, or even a lifetime, it’s not a smart idea.”

Why do you draw in clubs?

“I’ve never gone on the record with this, so I guess most people have no idea. They just see me drawing in clubs, and they’re just like, ‘That’s so cute. Look, she’s having so much fun.’” 

It all started with an ex.

“One of my ex-partners told me I’m too focused on music,” she says. “She believed that I wasn’t giving other creative outlets a chance.” 

Immy describes her life as all sound—all research and obsession.

Her ex bought her oil pastels, and later, on a magic mushroom trip, something unlocked. “One day, tripping, I just started playing with them.”

Do you consider yourself a visual artist as much as a music maker?

Yes and no.

“In high school, I took art classes. I had to do this final project on shading. We had to pick someone’s style and copy it,” she says. “I didn’t really believe in copying. So I tried to do my own thing.” 

Her teacher was harsh. “She said, ‘Look, you have to shade like Monet. If you don’t shade like Monet, you’re not an artist.’” 

Immy didn’t know why she struggled. Now she does—she has aphantasia, which is the inability to create mental images in one’s “mind’s eye,” often described as “blindness of the mind”. It is a natural variation in human cognitive experience, affecting roughly 2-4% of people. People with aphantasia experience, at most, dim or no mental visualisation.

Key characteristics include no visual memory (when asked to visualise a scene, person, or object, aphantasics do not see a mental image); conceptual thinking (people with aphantasia often think using facts, words, or descriptions, not images); and while they cannot voluntarily conjure images, they may still experience dreams or involuntary flashes of imagery.

She has no visual inner world—her imagination happens purely in abstraction and feeling. Though she recognises everyday objects as she interacts with them, they aren’t visually imprinted.

“I don’t say I suffer, because it makes me seem like a victim,” she says. “But drawing figuratively, for me, is physically impossible. For a long time, I was really upset about this and gave up on art.”

What does your club art capture?

With oil pastels, drawing became a memory tool.

“There was something therapeutic about the first time I tried it,” she says. “I’d taken mushrooms and decided to make some squiggles, play with the colours, see what happened. I had so much fun. It wasn’t about what came out at the end. It was the journey, the doodling that happened while I was doing it, and I believe that kind of open curiosity is a good way to approach music, too.” 

She talks about memory in physical terms. “When I make a memory, or a drawing, it’s an effort to recapture how I felt. In the pictures, I can nearly hear the beauty of the music again.” 

The drawings capture the impression—the sensation, the feeling—of her nightlife. 

“It’s the visual representation of a memory for someone who doesn’t think in images.” 

Pointing to one picture—a swirl of light and green colour—she says, “That’s me at a party.” She pulls out two others, a cloudy blue mess of spirals and zigzags and a burst of electric pink and orange, and says, “Those are special memories. Octo Octa playing in the Berghain garden and Eris Drew playing at Panorama Bar.”

I point out that in most Berlin clubs, photos are not allowed, so parties are, for most people, hard to capture—we often only have our memories of them. 

“Exactly,” she says. “You go to an event, you have this crazy experience, then come home, and there’s nothing to remember it with.”

And because nightlife is nightlife, memory fades faster than it should. “You probably took substances or drank alcohol or did both, and within hours of waking up the next day, you forget eighty per cent of a good club night.”

At some point, she started bringing her art kit into clubs. She describes this impulse as obvious in hindsight. These days, she draws during sets, and after a particularly moving one, she asks the DJ to sign it. 

“It’s easy! I say, ‘Hey, I drew this during your set. It’s inspired by your sound and energy. Would you mind signing it for me?’” 

She likes the moment of confusion on their faces. “They always look at it and are like, ‘You drew this? Right here?’ I say yes and tell them this is what their sound looks like to me.” 

Here, it’s worth mentioning that my first time meeting Immy—though we didn’t realise this until this talk—was at Panorama Bar, when a stranger (her) passed a blank page and a crayon through the group I sat with and asked everyone to contribute to it. I drew something—a bird, I think. 

The memory becomes clear to both of us. I say: “You handed around a picture, and we all did a little squiggle.” It was after our mutual friend Ketia’s set.

“Yes!” she says, laughing. “That’s so funny. So you’ve already participated in this ritual.” 

With people doodling in altered states, I ask if she’s discovered any insights into humans by asking them to do this on drugs. 

Her instruction is simple: Don’t try to be good. “Just take the crayon and do something,” she tells them. “I’m just asking you to add your energy to it.”

Why do you care so much about remembering nights?

Immy is a meticulous archivist. For reasons she can’t fully explain, memory matters to her—in part because it seems undervalued by others. 

She describes a recent experience. She had a great conversation with someone in a club for over an hour, then wrote parts of it down to remember it later. A month later, she saw the person again. “I asked them about something we talked about, and they said, ‘How do you know about that?’” 

Immy is currently writing a book about her years in nightlife. “The basis of the book is very much my experiences.” She can’t tell me much yet, since it’s still in process, but she’s excited about the idea of publishing it or seeing where it goes.

We browse her extensive, meticulously labelled and organised vinyl collection—shelves of vinyl stacked floor-to-ceiling in all rooms of her flat—and she says everything is organised.

Also, she’s recorded every set she’s ever done—all are saved in her personal files. “Most of them I will never release to the internet or do anything with them,” she says. “But I record them all.”

She tells me more: “I also often send set recordings to friends who missed the gig because they don’t live here, and sometimes to fans who talk to me or message me later saying they really enjoyed it.”

Do gigs count as “going out”?

She keeps notebooks of data, records of her life in clubland. Flipping through one, she says: “Let’s see: in 2023, I went to about 150 events.”

Yes—and, more than gigs, what really increases the number are what she calls “industry visits.”

This is a quick club visit. “Drive-by parties,” she says.

What’s your relationship to substances now?

She doesn’t define herself as sober—just “deliberate.” 

“I was a stoner growing up,” she says. “At some point, I just shackled myself free of the chains.” 

Now, weed is occasional. “I might get a little high before I play some records or before I watch a movie. But if I get too stoned at a party, I’ll go home and be like, what was that person’s name again? And what’s the point of that?” 

In the end, it comes back to memory—drugs take away her ability to recollect.

What’s your relationship with Berlin nightlife now?

Here, her voice hardens.

“You know, people were horrible to me when I first started going out,” she says. “Before I transitioned, when I was eighteen, nineteen.” 

She remembers being grilled at the door and often turned away for excuses that didn’t seem to apply to anyone else. “No sneakers,” one bouncer told her. “And I looked at the people behind me, and all of them were wearing sneakers.” 

She understands it now. “In retrospect, it was discrimination, of course.”

She says club culture in Berlin announces itself as a safe space with claims like “No racism!”—except at the door.

Has door culture gotten better at all?

She’s careful about her answer, because she knows she has what she calls “subcultural capital” now, which comes from being known.

“Probably eighty per cent of the parties I go to, I walk up and whoever’s selecting knows me,” she says. “So by default, everyone is now super nice.”

But she knows the kindness is conditional. “They’re nice because they know who I am and what I do,” she says. “If they did not, I know I would still not be let in.” 

She muses on this a bit, then adds: “Well, actually, nowadays, since I’m always dolled up, I think they would let me in, but perhaps if I came over not dressed for a party, I’d still get a hard time. I know how to dress for parties now, too.” 

She admits it depends on the party and the space. “Nowadays, I mostly go to queer parties. Are queer parties better? Yes, I think so. I think they have a bit more of an understanding of things.”

What happened the last time you didn’t feel safe in a club?

She describes a gig at a more straight, heterono venue but doesn’t name it. She was excited about the gig, but the room felt hostile.

“I’m doing my thing, playing my music,” she says. “And during my set, I realised I was getting weird energy, weird looks. I felt like I was on the street getting the evil eye treatement,” she says. “I remember thinking, wait, we’re in a club. Why do I feel this uncomfortable in a club?”

Then something flew past her head. She looked down—someone had flicked a cigarette butt at her.

“These straight boys were just standing there staring at me,” she says. “And I stared at them, and they realised I clocked that they fucking threw a cigarette butt at me. This is why I don’t go to places like that now. I keep myself in queer spaces because they’re safer.”

When she was younger, rejection at the door made her angry. “It just didn’t make sense.” 

How do you handle door selection when you’re the selector?

How does it go? “I always ask, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ Even if I think they belong inside, I’ll still have a check-in.”

It slows the line down, but it’s worth it. 

“Have these little personal moments,” she says. “So many times you’ll go to a club, and the person will be like, ‘Hey, take your phone, stick it in the bag, have fun.’ It lacks the personal touch.”

Then she talks about “the ten-minute tax.” She explains: “When brown, POC, or FLINTA* people go through some kind of power trip or abuse at the door and suffer for the first ten minutes of their night, that’s the ten-minute tax.” The door experience ruins the beginning of the night for them, but it’s the “tax” of going out that many non-white Berliners expect from the door. 

“It’s the first experience of the night,” she says. The powerful influence of the door selector makes Immy take her selection jobs seriously.

What do you say to the people who are scared in line?

She tells me a story about a group of young girls, cold and terrified, holding their IDs like shields. She says they probably heard “god knows what” about clubbing in Berlin. 

“They were fucking scared,” she says. “I took it as a moment of education. I said, ‘Look, you must understand that in a situation like this, I only become more powerful than you if you look up to me. If you look me eye to eye, we’re on ground level. You’re a human being. I’m a human being.’” 

She told them what she wished someone had told her. “I told them that if anybody inside makes you feel weird or uncomfortable, don’t stand it.”

She wants people to have a point of contact. “If you have a problem with any person, go to anyone working,” she says. “You have a ground point.” 

Communicating this information is worth the ten-minute tax. “Selectors are getting paid, like, twenty bucks an hour to do this,” she says. “Put in the work.”

What advice would you give someone early in their transition?

Early transition is hard, she says. Young trans kids “go home and look in the mirror and have no idea what they are looking at. They were just born and told to follow the programme given to them.” 

She describes her own “self work” as something she’s done outside formal therapy—with reading, art, music, and cultivating her spirituality.

And then, in a final, sweet smile, she loops back to her aphantasia—back to why her drawings matter, and why she has no plans to stop making them.

“In my day-to-day imagination, I can’t see,” she says. “But I have five or six dreams every night, always abstract images and feelings, and I write them all down. Each one is a love letter to Immy, from Immy.” 

Words: Alexander Cheves

Images: Mara Menzel, with additional photos provided by Immy