By Luke Nickel
I first saw Majdolen at an event called Wide Open, a club night of experimental performance art. This was the Walpurgisnacht edition; “Walpurgisnacht” is a holiday with pagan roots celebrated in parts of Europe, often described as a springtime Halloween.
As performers dunked their heads under water, danced naked, and wrestled in lube, Madjolen delivered hypnotic beats that seemed to wrap around the audience.
Held at the Berliner Ringtheatre, the event was fully sold out. By the end, I understood why. It was phenomenal, and her sound was so good that I had to speak to her after and ask about it.
Talking to her, I was amazed to learn she created all the music for the nearly two-hour-long event entirely herself!
Majdolen is a Syrian-born DJ, producer, sound designer, and event organizer living in Berlin. She’s a resident at queer Berlin’s latest party fixation, Power Dance Club, and has headlined parties like Gegen, Herrensauna, Cocktail D’amore, and WHOLE Festival.
In 2024, she released her debut EP Spirals on Umay Works. On top of all this, she runs SUBSTATION, a new monthly party at AMT in Berlin-Mitte.
This Saturday, 18 July, Madjolen will play at WHOLE Festival 2026 on the ambient stage. Her set starts at 1:30 am. I’ll be there.
Ahead of it, we chat about club culture, hot takes, and why the magic is still in Berlin.
When did you start producing music?
“Before moving to Berlin in 2018, I started learning electric guitar and playing psychedelic rock and kraut rock.“
Later, she shifted to electronic. ”I started learning production on my own, self-taught myself Ableton. Then I did a Bachelor of Music Production and Performance.”
The COVID-19 pandemic, she says, fully kicked her music self-education into high gear.
“In lockdown, it was the best thing to do. I had a day job, which I was lucky that I didn’t lose. So I could work from 8 to 5, then learn Ableton from 5 to midnight.”
Did you play any instruments as a kid?
“I tried a bit of violin! And I wanted to play the guitar so bad.”
She’s left-handed, which made it hard. Then, in 2017, a friend got her a guitar and helped her switch the order of the strings, which allowed her to play it more naturally. “It made so much more sense!”
Did you always want to be a musician?
Not necessarily, she says, but she always had a creative outlet and needed mediums of self-expression.
“I always had something, like creative writing. I used to write poetic texts. At 18, writing was my main obsession.”
Then she moved from writing to theatre, and did various performances in her first years in Germany, but was “disappointed” that her theatre peers weren’t into philosophy:
“People didn’t appreciate Kafka. There’s so much politics, and I just wanted to be excited about something. Electronic music can give you that freedom.”
“It’s not that I prefer to be apolitical, far from it,” she says. “By ‘politics,’ I mean the politics of the establishment and power dynamics within theatre. All that’s not for me.”
Why is music the chosen medium?
“Even with major life challenges, you can close the door, go to your silly machines, and do your silly beats.”
In other forms of art, she says, “it is not the same.”
I agree. I tell her it seems so difficult for friends who are filmmakers, who need to wrangle multimillion-dollar budgets just to express themselves and their artistic vision.
With music, you can just go to your bedroom, put on some headphones, and make something that reflects your life, mirrors what you’re feeling and experiencing.
She nods: “It’s just one day after another.”
“I’m having a bad day, I’m having another bad day, I’m having a bad month, then I’m having a really good week. It all translates into music.”
What’s your approach to DJing?
She puzzles over this a bit. “Because of my ADHD and my weird mind, I’m not reading or understanding things in a direct way. And a party, a dance floor, just doesn’t make sense, conceptually.”
I ask her to tell me more. “Remember when you were 18 and first went to a nightclub and wondered, is this DJ actually making the music? It doesn’t make sense, but at some point, it’s so powerful. It doesn’t make sense, but it still works. This contradiction is the essence of rave.”
I think I understand, but ask her to go on. “Beyond that, it’s really just about mixing and selection, and how to have this exchange with the room.”
Here she compares DJing with theatre, and these two things get compared many times in our talk:
“With theatre, there is an agreed-upon thing. You and the audience agree to engage in a certain way. But with music, you have more free will.”
Do you remember your first favorite CD?
She smiles warmly at this. “Yes. We had a home studio CD player when I was between three and six years old. It had crazy visuals and some sound effects on it. I’d just sit in front of it for hours.”
I ask what she listened to. Mostly, she says, it was her father’s music.
“My dad listens to a lot of Ziad al-Rahbani, either his theatre plays or his musical work. It was so revolutionary back then to listen to this artist because he revolutionized Arabic music. He revolutionized a lot of things.”
The work of Ziad al-Rahbani cemented, in her mind, a link between music and performance. “His plays had a lot of social impact, and he was ahead of his time with his feminist approach. He also did this radio show with lots of ranting and swearing and being so controversial. It was kind of a dirty pleasure.”
What is some music that you like to play at gigs lately?
She gives me the list.
“Alinka. Every release is on fucking point. And DJ Rush, who is the sound of techno from 10 years ago, when I first moved to Berlin. And Ceçille, a great label for house.”
“After playing WHOLE and Cocktail, I discovered that connection between dark EBM and slow, nasty techno, which is a bit sleazy. I love it.”
She tells me to check out her B2B set with Liad Krispin from WHOLE Festival last year. “There’s fat bass chunks, a lot of toms,” she says.
And yes, sometimes she likes “good, fast techno.”
“And let’s not talk about hard groove at all,” she says. “We don’t even have to mention it.”
I think we do.
What’s your beef with hard groove?
Her eyes flash. She tells me, “It’s getting out of hand.”
“’Hard groove’ now means TikTok. It’s about outfits, neo-tribal tattoos, and appropriation of gay culture by kids with no real connection to it. They’re getting drawn to club culture by the looks. And this is very dangerous.”
I make a mental note to ask later for other hot takes. But first:
Why did you move to Berlin?
She loved “the sense of adventure I always had when I visited Berlin.” Her journey here from Syria was not easy, she says, and in her first years, she couldn’t choose which city to settle in. But then something closes, and I find I’ve encountered a boundary: she doesn’t want to talk about that time in her life.
No problem, I say. Let’s go back to Berlin.
These days, she believes the city is still a place where magic happens:
“You go out to the street and something will draw your attention. If you follow it, you’ll end up in crazy places. There’s a feeling of liberty here as a queer person. Not safety, but liberty.”
We talk about Berlin’s club culture, and I tell her it amazes me too: We can hear musicians any night of the week who would be headliners around the world.
She nods. It keeps her optimistic: “No matter how gentrification comes, we will always manage”.
Tell me about your party, SUBSTATION. How did it start?
It starts with afters. “I’d be at an after, listening to people tell me how Berlin was before I came, and I’d think, oh my God, this is amazing. It doesn’t exist in any other city.”
In these afters, she met her close friend, Mihu, whom she calls her “partner in crime.”
But since the pandemic, she feels the afters have become a little too attractive.
“Don’t get me wrong, when I’m not doing well financially, I’d rather go to an after, since clubbing got so expensive. But now we have to bring people back.”
She describes the “broken” Berlin queer scene after lockdown. “I felt that a lot of the scenes got very separated. You have to look like this way to go to this party, and so on,” Majdolen says.
To counter this, they envisioned a party where all different types of people could come together and feel comfortable.
“There is the tranny part of me, the fag hag part of me, and the dyke part of me. I want to go to one place where I have friends from all these scenes.”
These feelings led her and Mihu to create SUBSTATION. Its manifesto:
“SUBSTATION is a moment in the present that connects the past and the future. This is queer culture adapting and doing the best with what’s here.”
This next edition happens on 25 July during Berlin’s CSD pride festival. The name shocks me: It’s called CSD STD.
Oh my god. Tell me more.
“CSD STD stands for SUBSTATION Transmitted Disease. It’s the idea of this infectious feeling of togetherness that SUBSTATION is activating. And of course, it’s showing the other part we all know and experience when it comes to pride.”
I play dumb. What’s this other part?
She smiles. “It’s about what we experience in darkrooms and waiting rooms at the doctor’s office. It’s sex and recovery and connection.”
What can someone expect who hasn’t been to SUBSTATION before?
“People say it has a comfortable feeling,” Majdolen says. “It’s a place to loosen up, to have a kiki, to have a good dance. Honestly, it’s less about being something intense that pushes people. It’s a homey space, a place to come back to, and to look forward to.”
Above all else, she says, “It’s a melting pot, a gathering point. Come as you are.”
I ask about the lineup. “Like any edition, we invite artists that we trust, superstars from the local scene and a bit beyond.”
However, she asks me not to headline this piece with SUBSTATION or describe it as “her” party, and I ask why. “It’s a shared project with another person,” she says, “and I don’t want my contribution to overshadow his and other people who shape the party through their work.”
“SUBSTATION is about the queer community it brings together, which is what makes it special. It’s not ‘my’ party, it’s not about me. It’s about them.”
What’s your life like on days off?
“I go out and see a friend DJing, or some DJ in town that I really want to listen to.”
At this, I prod a bit, not quite believing her, and ask if there’s anything she enjoys besides music.
She laughs. “If you’re talking about summertime, there is always something to do!”
Tell me about your summer life.
“Lakes!” she says. She tells me about one lake in particular that she loves (it’s one I love too), but asks that I not name it in this article. I ask her why.
“At the moment, there’s a big discourse in German conservative media about this lake,” she says. “They want to ban gay cruising there and demand regulations for ‘family safety’ and this kind of bullshit. If I mention it and talk about how much I love the gay scene there, I fear it could end up damaging the scene. Imagine if someone who could do harm lands on the article by typing certain keywords into the search.”
I deeply respect her for this. The lake is known and loved by Berlin queers, and we have to protect it (and all cruising spaces) from those who think our joy and sex should not be seen.
I prod her for anything else she likes to do in her downtime: “I like to rewatch favorite movies, or listen again to audiobooks that I’ve read three times already. That’s my comfort zone.”
What about your winter life?
“Let’s not talk about it.”
What does success mean?
This, she feels very clear on:
“Success is translating your vision into a piece of art.”
She adds: “And if I don’t have doubts or second thoughts by the end of the day, even better!”
I think it’s beautiful that her idea of success comes from within rather than external markers, and I tell her I want to be successful in this way too. But we note that, for cash-strapped artists, it can be hard.
She calls herself lucky: “I’m able to do the thing I love and make a living out of it. Sometimes it’s just barely enough. Sometimes it’s more than enough. That is success, too.”
Finally, I lighten things up some:
Okay, any more hot takes?
I sense she has plenty. She says:
“Sample culture is getting out of hand. This is why so many producers are sounding the same, because they’re all using the same shitty sample pack.”
I feel optimistic talking to her, and say so. In a culture where many people like to complain about the state of things (nightlife was always better “back then,” never now), she’s actively shaping it into what she wants it to be. She’s trying to make it better.
Besides the upcoming “CSD STD” version of SUBSTATION, are there any upcoming events she’s excited for?
“Yes!” she says. “July is a prime month for me. I’m touring, and I’m playing WHOLE.” I tell her that the ambient stage, where she’ll play, is my favorite stage there.
I often describe the ambient stage to curious friends as a cuddle puddle in the middle of the woods where everyone lies around listening to floaty, meditative, experimental music.
She’s working on a release planned later this year, though details aren’t available yet. When I ask about the genre of the release, she won’t nail it down:
“I love dub techno, and I love Detroit dub. I love nasty, moody house. So it’s going to be in that direction. At first, I thought I should adapt to people’s expectations, but fuck expectations!”
Catch Majdolin at WHOLE Festival 2026 at the Ambient Stage, and get tickets now SUBSTATION on Saturday, 25 July.
Dr. Luke Nickel is an award-winning Canadian multidisciplinary artist, writer, and composer living in Berlin. His interests include experimental music, speculative fiction, roller coasters, and contemporary performance. He’s eager to write about people and practices on the margins of the mainstream.
Edits: Alexander Cheves
Images: Mara Menzel + photos courtesy of the artist
