Terre Thaemlitz’s new Resident Advisor mix, echoing a performance in Brooklyn this month, interrogates Israeli genocide, American complicity, and dance music’s ability to seed change.

On the afternoon of August 3, a few hundred people gathered at the Nursery, the intimate outdoor extension of Brooklyn’s stylish Public Records, to hear DJ Sprinkles. I think it’s fair to say most of us knew what to expect: Sprinkles, an alias of queer producer and cultural critic Terre Thaemlitz, blends deep thoughts and deep house into languorous, embodied critiques of everything from Madonna’s use of Vogue culture to British trade union organizing to laws restricting public dancing in Japan, where Sprinkles lives.

A typical Sprinkles production, like the ones Sprinkles expertly faded that afternoon into other artists’ downtempo jazz tracks and house shufflers, is long, nine or 10 minutes or more; and hazy, abandoning typical dancefloor strategies of build-and-release in favor of dubby immersion. We needed this escape: It’s been a hot, complicated summer in NYC, during which our current mayor and many of the city’s largest media, art, educational, and political institutions have thrown themselves under Trump’s autocratic steamroller, while a promising segment of city voters has thrown its support behind one of the only American politicians to oppose Israeli’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, the Democratic Socialist campaigner Zohran Mamdani.

A lot of us at the Nursery were on drugs; a lot of us were dancing; some of us were cruising or dodging exes or catching up with old friends. There was a bro next to me talking too loud and fist-bumping people, and there was another person who told me that the bro had never seen Sprinkles before and thus didn’t know what to expect, and I told him I wished he’d shut the fuck up and listen. It was so hot that day, and the thing about Sprinkles on the dancefloor is you sort of experience a dissertation and dissociation at the same time, and I didn’t want to miss it.

Also on August 3, Al Jazeera reported that Israel, backed by the U.S., had murdered 62 Palestinians since the dawn of the previous day. More than half of them had gone to the aid distribution site that Israeli authorities told them to, and had been shot there while trying to get food for their families. These dead join the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel (with U.S. political and financial backing) since October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other groups launched a murderous and terror-filled campaign against attendees of the Nova music festival and residents in other parts of the country. In America and some other places, talking about the Palestinian dead has cost people their jobs, their ability to travel, their freedom. And the deaths just keep on coming.

That afternoon, these two timelines - us in the Nursery; Israel’s ongoing massacre in Palestine as a response to murders at a dance-music festival - synced up about halfway through Sprinkles’ set, when the beat dropped out and, instead of typical house vocals urging us to feel it, voices began talking about genocide. A tearful young woman with an American accent told Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish American political scientist and author, that his criticism of Israel and its genocide was disrespectful to Jews who lived under the Nazis, and he fired back that playing the "Holocaust card" wouldn’t shut up a person like him.

In another, longer sample, the physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté repeatedly refuted a questioner’s insistence on unsubstantiated allegations that Hamas committed mass rape, and criticized her description of Arab people as "animals." The sample climaxed with him saying, "You and I don’t live in the same world." Sprinkles ran the phrase through a delay, so it echoed. It drifted over the rolling couple making out in the front, one person’s back against the speaker so their bodies vibrated. It rippled over those of us stilled from dancing; it waved solidarity to those of us who agreed and waved goodbye to those of us who walked out, whether in disgust or boredom or thirst or whatever; it circled the perimeter where people were smoking, calling them in. Some cheers joined its echoes, some rumbling murmurs, and soon the beats were back.

Now, what happened in the Nursery reappears, remixed and expanded, as an astonishing mix for Resident Advisor. It forgoes standard mix narratives of dancefloor epiphany or genre exercise. It’s not the kind of hour you’ll probably want to party or fuck to. Despite its stunning arrangement of downtempo and ambient tracks, it’s no afterparty comedown. Instead, it makes an argument that our relationship to Israel needs to change, and, in its deployment of DJ tactics like selection and sequencing, creates conditions in which you can feel that change become possible.

Despite her consistent political engagement, Sprinkles is hardly an earnest producer; fittingly, then, the mix starts with bitter irony. Ocean sounds bring to mind Ibiza, Miami, the Orb; Israeli podcast veterans Two Good Jewish Boys (Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein) caustically describe what they see as their country’s blithe dismissal of Palestinian suffering; those waves suddenly remind us that Gaza is a beach. These kinds of audio puns - later in the mix, following a discussion of annexation, Sprinkles transforms jazzy guitar picking into an allusion to frontier cowboy music, and a noodly trumpet solo into a terrifying echo of martial calls into battle - are, in their own strange way, generous.

If you can make these connections, he seems to say, you can handle what’s to come. Which include: Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos thinking through who gets to remember the Holocaust and how, and former IDF combat soldier and sergeant Eran Efrati ruminating on the damage mandatory military service inflicts not just upon those the soldiers brutalize but upon the soldiers themselves. Sprinkles chooses these sources and edits them with the same care they apply to the musical beds they prepare for them, which range from mournful, twinkling expanses by Susan Alcorn and Bing & Ruth to the rougher pastures of Vladislav Delay, whose clicks and cuts in this context sound just like glitches in the matrix.

Maté’s words form a climax in this mix, and, just to be sure you don’t miss them or mistake what she’s up to, Sprinkles doubles the vocal track, either saying the words along with him or running his voice through echo. "My emphasis on critical Jewish voices," Sprinkles told RA, "is not intended to minimize or distract from the voices of Palestinians and others suffering under Israel’s attacks." For those perspectives, I would suggest tuning in to the essential work of Radio Alhara and artists like Bashar Murad. "Focusing on Jewish critical voices," Sprinkles continues, "also complicates likely accusations of anti-Semitism." I don’t know if this will work. But it’s an opportunity for DJs to consider the relationship between their source material and their audience. Why use recordings of Jewish speakers but not Jewish musicians? Why are DJs who play white producers’ sampling of Black musicians often more successful than those DJs who play the originals? Or cis producers playing music that lifts from trans modes of cultural production, like ballroom? What do we want from our DJs, and will it make the bros stop talking if they give it to us?

In work including the epochal album Midtown 120 Blues, Sprinkles has long interrogated the idea of the dancefloor as a site of liberation. Freeing your ass won’t make your mind follow. Further, in a moment when despair is a rational reaction to a livestreamed genocide, listening to music can feel futile, or worse. In what might be the mix’s most shocking moment, though, a cynic like Sprinkles drops Billy Paul’s psyche-funk ode to hope "I See the Light." The epic track is a synecdoche to the mix itself, or maybe its beating heart. It’s a moment in which you experience Paul changing, so you can do it too. The song, like the mix, is not medicinal. It won’t make you feel better. But it tells you the truth: We live in different worlds, but can hear each other at the same time. Like two records segued up. We’re all mixed up in them, together.