Jubilee on Miami, New York, Indie Sleaze, and the State of Nightlife

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

Yes, sadly, the holiday subscription sale is over...that's what happens when you run out of holidays. However! Paying for this newsletter is actually a better deal than pretty much almost any other newsletter, and I'll swear by that. It's $3/month or $30/year, what could be better than that? Hit that little pink button in the upper (or lower!) right hand corner to tap in, you won't regret it.

OK, down to business: I'm a big fan of Jubilee as a DJ and producer. Her Magic City label is a destination for electrifying club music, and her catalog of solo work—from 2019's sensational second full-length Call for Location to her excellent Main Character EP that dropped on Numbers at the end of 2025—continues to grow impressively. On social media, she's also been a mainstay for sharp perspectives, and that's one of many reasons that I've wanted to talk to her for the newsletter for quite a while now. We linked up near the end of last year to chat it all through, and the conversation was well worth the wait. Check it out:

So you're in Japan?
Yeah, I'm actually in the Ace Hotel Kyoto lobby right now. I usually go for three weeks in November. It's kind of like a reset to my year—and I don't do anything nice all year. I just come here and dump my whole brain out.

When's the first time you went out there?
The first time I ever played here was on a proper Asia tour in 2017. Then, four years ago, me and my boyfriend came here together and I did a small tour of Korea and a bunch of cities here. Ever since, I just keep making it longer. I also don't get emails all day. I'll wake up to all the emails and be like, "Cool, everybody's sleeping now,."

I love the new EP on Numbers. Talk to me about your evolution as a producer and DJ.
I feel like I've had like three different boosts—maybe more—in my journey as a DJ and producer. I've been doing this for a long time, but at the same time, it's not really that long. I've just been around for every era of dance music in New York since I moved there in 2003, when things were dwindling after 9/11 and before the recession. When I started making music, I was experimenting, and you could just put whatever on a blog. Nobody was really perfecting anything. Sometimes, I hear some of my old stuff, and I'm like, "Maybe I should've waited to put that out." Then, I joined Mixpak after I had a label called Nightshifters with Jason Forrest. That turned into a whole other crazy music industry world. in a way.

I don't know—I feel like I've kind of not really evolved. If you listen to my music, I've kind of stayed the same. Even if you look at the track list for my Discobelle mix, my track list is kind of the same. I was recently laughing at it, because I was like, "Oh, there's crazy grime on here, then there's Sean Paul—but then there's Florida." I kind of haven't changed, in a weird way. I think I stopped caring. I love my two albums on Mixpak, but even though I had one dancehall single, people put me in this crazy hole that I was only doing Caribbean music, when there's one weird song that a dancehall artist jumped on because I was trying to just do something cool.

But journalists always have to say you're a thing. I think I stopped caring about that, too. If the techno party isn't gonna book me because it doesn't say that I make techno on Resident Advisor, I just don't care.

There's also this notion of past perceptions within ecosystems that kind of don't really exist anymore.
No, they don't. They're not even real.

They were kind of maybe a little imaginary back then too, honestly! I talk to a lot of people about how hard it is to put music out now and make people aware that you've done something. I'm sure that, on the artist side, there's an element of, "Maybe I have to deal with 90% less nonsensical discourse around my music in general."
Well, also, I put out three records this year, and this one is my baby that I was really holding on to. I've been working on these songs for, like, three years—but just little by little, because of exactly what you're saying. The thought of even having to promote a record at this point is just so exhausting. It's expensive if you really want to go in, and then you don't really want to go in, but you're like, "Wait, I really worked hard on this. This is my art. I should go in." Social media is just around everything, too.

Also, this year I was like, "Why am I sitting on this stuff? I'm just gonna put it out." If no one hears it, I don't care. It's funny, because I do have a label, but helping other people out with it doesn't really seem to bother me. For myself, I run out of Instagram captions. I only talk to my front-facing camera if it's about something other than music. I'm really good at posting about things other than music.

It's not necessarily a 1:1, but I identify with that. I've been doing this newsletter for five years now, and I see how other people promote their stuff. They're very good at being aggressive about it. I'm just kind of like, honestly, if I post a link and you click on it, that's great. I don't know if posting it four more times is gonna make me feel better about that.
But, also, you have to think that a lot of people miss things and they're missing it in the algorithm—and they don't know, and they need to be told. We're not really overdoing it. It's just a weird time, and it's really funny—what pops off, and what doesn't. It's funny, especially because when I'm here, I'll post something, and because of the time difference, I'll go to bed and wake up to, like, 400 replies, like at the same time. [Laughs] And I'm like, "Oh, that went crazy while I was sleeping." But then, other important things will just get buried.

For this specific EP, I had a release party. Instead of having like a big party—which is something I'd normally do—I had a small gathering at the Lot and a small gathering in a record store in Osaka with, like, 20 people. Especially in 2025, there's so much shitty things going on that I'm like, "I don't want to have a party revolved around myself anymore." Let's just have a cute get-together, and we can talk. If you want to meet me, cool. I've had a few strangers come and talk to me, and I'm like, "Oh, people care." It's really nice to have another one in Miami during Art Basel—that's my hometown. I'm having it at Technique Records, and the guy that runs the shop, I've known since high school, so it's full-circle. When I texted him, he was like, "Say no more, it's blocked off, you're good, whatever you want, we don't even need to plan this." There's a few people that have been with me this whole time, and I just want it to be that way.

As somebody who's really familiar with Numbers' catalog, it makes a lot of sense for you to be putting music out with them in terms of what I sonically expect from their releases.
Numbers has always been one of my favorite labels. It's not a secret that it's one of the best, forward-thinking, cool dance labels right now. A long time ago, I'd have been terrified to send them music, because it was a separate world. But I've always been in touch with them, and especially [co-founder Calum Morton]. They've always been super nice and supportive. It was really weird—I wasn't trying to send my music out to people, because I put everything out on my own label anyways. But I wanted to try something new and build a friendship over music, so it was kind of my first choice. I was like, "Hey, maybe they'll like this."

But even from like back in the day—and, this is such an annoying topic—but music has always been a boys' club. You still have that hesitation to even hit up any labels in that world without a liaison or middleman having to big you up. I know it's gotten "better," but it still has not gotten better. I've had to have a man's cosign on so many things—even recently, with booking agents and looking for management. I'll be like, "Oh, maybe this'll be a good fit," and I'll literally hit up a male friend that knows them and be like, "What do you think? Do you know them?" So for them to answer and be like, "Wow, we really like this"—and for me to be brave enough to hit them up just because I came up at a certain time.

It's so much more friendly to not-men now. But like, I come from drum and bass, you know what I mean? Hitting up men and wanting them to listen to your music—it's still scary.

I mean—drum and bass, culturally, I feel like it has that vibe, too.
Totally. And I don't want to get too into this topic, because it's annoying, and I hate it—but, like, it's still there. So I was scared to hit certain people up because of that stigma—and [Numbers] were just like, "Oh, we're down, we love it." I was like, "What?" The more I thought about it, and the more people said, "Oh my God, this link-up makes so much sense," I'm like, "Actually, that's so true." What was I doing being scared hitting them up? They're friends! The music fits, I've they've always been in my radio shows. Of course we're linking up.

I'm also old enough where rejection doesn't bother me anymore, because you spend 80% of this job getting rejected. I've become very "Shoot your shot"—and, like, "Shoot your shot and don't be annoying." Send the email once, and if they don't answer, don't even get upset about it. I see people online being like, "This person never answered me," and I'm like, "Babe, that's going to be half your job." If you're mad about this club that won't answer you, good luck, because that's 80% of the clubs.

Talk to me about the label.
When I started Magic City, it was a compilation series. This was 10 years ago. I was putting an album out on Mixpak, we were doing a lot of big things—but I also wanted to do my own thing. It was actually Dre from Mixpak that suggested I do it. He was like, "You're part of this crew, but you should also have your own thing, because it's different from what we're all doing."

Weirdly, nobody was doing compilations then, really—nowhere near like it is now. A lot of people had stray music that they really liked but didn't fit into what they do. I had radio, and people were sending me demos being like, "What do you think of this?" "I have this, but it's kind of breaks-y, and I usually put out techno." I was like, "Maybe I'll make this compilation and make it Miami-themed."

At the time, I was doing a lot of events with Opening Ceremony, who are legendary in New York and always had a cool blog. Dre was like, "You should do it in collaboration with a platform," and they were always really supportive of me, so I did the four compilations with them, which is kind of crazy. I reached out to people and told them about it, and there were so many people that were like, "Oh, I have the perfect song in my archive." Then there were people like DJ Icey, who's my hero in life. I think he had been playing one of my remixes, and we had a mutual friend, and I was like, "I'm just gonna ask him"—and he made a song for the compilation, which, to me, was insane. I was like, "How did this even happen?"

It's crazy how much the music industry has changed. Those were all on Soundcloud and did pretty well, and eventually I was like, "I have to put this on Spotify? What? This was not what this was for." But, like, these songs are good, and if I don't have them on there, that's stupid. The whole point was it for it to be free music, so I put it all on Bandcamp for free. Then, during lockdown, I had plenty of time and plenty of music I was working on, and I was like, "Well, let me just like flip this to a label."

I still don't know what I'm doing to this day—and I don't think anybody does. I hit up Nina Vegas, who started her NLV records label and is a total G, and I remember being like, "Hey, how do you do this?" She was just like, "I just wing it. Some situation comes up, I research it and figure out the contract. Everything's different, there's no rules." And, by the way, Nina's label just won three ARIAs in Australia, so she's done a good job. I've been working with this friend Natasha, who used to work for a management company I was on. She's really thorough and way better at reading than me—at being meticulous about important things, because I'm the creative side here.

And everything changes so much. GRRL's "Operator" got put in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and they hit us up. They're an independent video game—it's definitely not "video game money"—but we were like, "This video game is sick, let's do it." Apparently, people are obsessed with the OST of that video game, and it did really well. A lot of people might've been like, "Oh, the money's no good," but we were like, "This is fun yeah and independent—let's do it." And it actually wound up being one of the best things that our label could've done.

Working with Numbers has been really interesting, because they've been doing this as a proper label way longer than me. Seeing how they do things, I've been like, "Oh, that's a really good idea." I'm definitely learning a lot from them in general, and with every release as well. Danny Goliger does really well on Bandcamp, whereas GRRL has streams from the video game as well as this internet cult following. Their responses are completely different, and it's both great. Bianca Oblivion, now that she's put out her other records, I'm getting people buying her older stuff because they're diving deep. I can see it on the back end. It's really rewarding, watching some of these artists grow, and watching them sign to bigger labels afterwards. I helped them in some way get there, and that's really cool and the goal. Some of these artists are so talented and just don't have a home for certain records.

Do you play a lot of video games in general?
I don't play that many video games, because I don't have time. But I do love video games. I live with my boyfriend NIGELTHREETIMES, who also makes music, and he stays up later than me—but I just can't get sucked in. But, I mean, I have my Switch. I definitely go through phases—and I love old video game OSTs. They're the best. Those were the first places that were playing jungle where you were like, "Holy shit."

Honestly, that's probably not a problem to have—to be busy enough not to be gaming a lot.
I have, like, no space left in my brain. That's why I come here—because I work all year and travel. If you live in New York, and you don't come from money, no matter what, you are hustling so hard. Constantly. And I don't want to say no to anything, because I'm an adult. But it's really hard to find some time to myself. Luckily, I've had a residency in Miami all year, which has been great, because I'll play in Miami, and then I'll take three or four days off and just go in the ocean after playing a great gig in my hometown. And I love the crew at CLUB SPACE in Miami. It's like home. So I'll clear my brain here and there, but I have no time, which has been very hard.

Let's talk more about Miami. I've talked to Nick León and DJ Python over the last year about growing up in the area as well.
Listen—if I didn't move to New York, I'd probably be dead. Real talk, it was not a great place to grow up, and it's not a great place to go to school. Also, dance music was way different. Back then, it was only degenerates. There was nothing wholesome about it. It was, full-on, every weird outcast—which would normally be a good thing in most other places.

I really had a hard time, but it made me discover good music, because I was a weird kid and I found this thing that nobody in my school wanted to be involved with—and raving wasn't cool or popular at the time. I was like hanging out with 30-year-old dudes when I was, like, 16. It wasn't a normal thing to be doing. I wasn't even doing drugs or being crazy. I just really loved the music that I was hearing, but unfortunately what surrounded most of it was terrible people and terrible experiences. It's funny, because I live in New York, and everyone's like, "New York is so crazy." New York is like a walk in the park. My boyfriend's born and raised in Corona. He's seen it all, but when I tell him Florida stories, he's like "What?" It's like I have a double life.

I have many feelings about Florida. I'd love to move back in theory, but I don't want to live in Florida. It's funny though, because as much as we hate these things that show very normal people living everyday life, I'll find these accounts of some like airboat driver that wrangled gators who is probably a really nice guy. Maybe his politics are very "Florida," but he doesn't know any better, and you're like, "Well, this place is really beautiful." It gets a bad rap. There's so many people trying to live their life there, being punished by the machine. People are like, "Oh, Florida voted for this." I'm like, "Do you know how these votes work?" Everyone's trying there, and people don't understand that there are really great people there, and that it is—it could be—a very beautiful place.

I had DEBONAIR play the last residency I did, and she'd never been to Miami. We went on an airboat in the Everglades—an hour-and-a-half drive, run by the Miccosukee tribe, who got the Alligator Alcatraz shut down. There was this guy wearing no shoes, talking to alligators. She got to see this crazy side of this place that is super beautiful. That's my goal when people come there. They're like, "Oh, Miami is so weird, everybody's gross." And I'm like, "No, I will make you like it there." I've invited people to things, and then they bought a house there.

In terms of New York City club stuff, you've obviously been doing this for quite a while at this point. You've seen a lot of different eras of nightlife, and that past is obviously being romanticized now by a younger generation—some of who are in New York, some of whom are not. Some of them are just online! No matter where they're from, I do think people would like to create an echo of that time now, which is obviously impossible.
First of all, they're never gonna create an echo, because there wasn't as much internet then. It was very real. When I moved to New York, I did not know anybody. Now you can move, and you know people from Twitter and Instagram. You're already in this online scene and you immediately start hitting people up. I had to go out and be like, "Someone please talk to me." So when I moved to New York, I was on drum and bass message boards—Breakbeat Science, mostly. I was going to jungle stuff and was like, "Can somebody please be my friend?" I met really good people through a cute little jungle scene that I'm still friends with to this day. D

rum and bass was also kind of fizzling out, and I was still looking for cool, weird underground dance music. I stumbled on the Hollerboard, which was Diplo and Low Budget's message board. At the same time, Justice was coming out. I remember seeing that Justice promo video with DJ Funk and being like, "Oh my God, I have to go to Montreal, because they're never going to come to America." So I fucking drove to Montreal with two of my friends and met Teki Latex there. Around the same time, I saw Soulwax live at Studio B, and I was like, "This is the best thing I've ever seen in my life." The Klaxons opened for them and it blew my fucking mind. I left there thinking I needed to get a job at one of these record labels.

I wound up somehow finding Modular Records and interviewing there, and the person I got the job with was Jen Amadio, who's still a very good friend of mine. Her husband Josh, who threw that [Soulwax] party, runs Good Room now. I wound up working for her and working the door at Studio B. Then, I started DJ'ing for Modular, and through the Hollerboard I started meeting Nick Catchdubs. Me and him were instantly friends. There's something about him that is, like, bestie levels. This was back when Williamsburg was affordable, so I lived on South 2nd and he lived on South 4th, and we'd wind up at the same parties and take a cab home together all the time, which is very New York. "When you leave, let me know."

So it was very online, but in New York it was also very realized. There was Sway on Mondays, there was Webster Hall, there was Studio B. There was this kickball team called Never Scared, which is also very "Williamsburg, early 2000s," that got people who weren't that deep in the music scene but like all met on the message board, so they came to every single thing. It was a very "in real life" scene. It's much more internet-based now. Miami was having its own thing too—they had Poplife and Revolver—and there was this crossover of Misshapes and the DFA world within the Fool's Gold world. We were all sharing our drafts and mp3s. In the Air Horns section of the Hollerboard, I met Eli Escobar because I was like, "I heard you play this remix." Ever since then, we were friends. A lot of us became friends through trading mp3s in DMs.

Nobody can really replicate that. We can be nostalgic and book these acts, and it'll do really well and be really fun. I've gone and seen a couple throwback acts in the past year. I was like, "Well, I have to see LCD Soundsystem, obviously." I went and saw Ladytron. I saw Le Tigre this year. I love diving back into that time, because it was just so pure and new, and I was meeting new people that had this interest in blog music—which, there wasn't many people interested in finding an mp3 in a DM—and some of those people became friends for life. If I didn't meet Teki, I probably wouldn't have met any of these people. Catchdubs did my logo for my label rebrand—he did the gator.

How was the Ladytron show?
It was kind of funny. There's only two albums of theirs that I've religiously had on repeat. They did a ton of their newer shit and none of their older shit at all. That's my fault for not keeping up with them. But also, the crowd was very funny. It was all men in their late 30s and 40s in, like, band t-shirts. They looked like sound men, and it was almost the whole crowd. I was like, "This is not what I thought the crowd was." They must've put some weird rock record out that resonated with a certain demographic, because me and my friend James were looking around and being like, "Everybody here looks like they do the sound at a club."

I will say, I love the 2000s Ladytron stuff. The Witching Hour is a classic record. I've kept up with them since, and I think they're still putting out really good music—but they've definitely become more of a goth-shoegaze band.
That's what it was like—more of that stuff. Which, it was good. But they haven't played in so long, so I was like, "Maybe they'll do everything." I'm kind of
waiting for Gen Z to discover Ladytron. They all love shoegaze, and they have this idea of what they think indie sleaze is, and it's like, "Well, Ladytron's right here." Every once in a while, me and Eli Escobar will do our version of indie sleaze at Gabriela. These kids come out and they're all, like, 30, losing their fucking shit. One of them will be like, "This was my favorite song when I was in high school," and we're like, "Oh, okay." We play a lot more electroclash and DFA remixes.

I actually almost did this [kind of] party in L.A., and then I realized it would be like Steve Aoki. They didn't have the same indie sleaze that we did—it was a totally different version. I was like, "What am I doing? This is going to fail miserably." So I called it off. I did an indie sleaze special on the Lot Radio earlier in the year, and it did better than anything I've done there. If you bring it back, they'll be down. I booked Tiga in April at House of Yes, and once he played "Pleasure from the Bass," everyone freaked out.

I made this joke on Twitter a few years ago, but I feel like the only way you can separate the real bloghouse heads from the indie sleaze bandwagon jumpers is by seeing who knows the Fred Falke remix of "Golden Cage."
Oh yeah, totally. Last night, in Kyoto, I played the DFA Gorillaz remix, and someone I knew from New York was there and was like, "Are you just playing throwbacks?" I was like, "No, this sounds really fucking good, I play it all the time." It sounds brand new! No one doesn't want to hear this. I'm not playing throwbacks—this is a good song.

Alongside the rest of your career, I've always really appreciated your perspective on the state of DJ'ing via social media. Talk to me about what DJ'ing has been like for you over the last few years.
DJ discourse has just become people on TikTok. Why are there entire viral TikToks about two buttons? Who fucking cares! "Check out my transition"—people live on that, and I'm like, "You don't know if that transition is gonna do well in the club." You can do this on TikTok, but the biggest part of holding a crowd down is that a transition will go off somewhere and totally bomb somewhere else. So I don't give a fuck about your TikTok transition.

There's so many levels of DJ things right now. There's all these articles that are like, "Nightlife is dying." A new club opens up in New York every five minutes—what the fuck are you talking about? I'll play a night in New York where there's
ten other giant events going on, and every single one will be packed. Have you ventured out of your bubble at all? That goes for DJ'ing too.There are some DJs that'll go off about some shit where they only play giant festivals. What do they know about a 200-person room?

There's just so much of, "My experience is the only experience," and I'm like, "Yo, will you please go to something outside your world?" Go to a reggaeton party. If you're straight, go to a queer party. Go to a party with kids 15 years younger than you—just go stand in the corner. There's so much going on that you can learn from, because it will hit your world at some point. These might not be your people, and maybe somebody will bother you—but, it's nightlife. People are getting fucked up, someone's gonna bother you. Everything is not going to be your magical musical haven. You can go to so many things in one night if you want. You can start your night at 5 p.m, end it at 6 a.m., and go to 20 different things. You can't do that anywhere else.

One thing I really respect about A-Trak is, when he has a night off, he'll stop by my gig and then stop by a completely different club, because he wants to see what's going on—and guess who's still working and popular? A-Trak.

It's funny you say that about him specifically, because I've had the experience of seeing A-Trak at random shows. I saw him at a Panda Bear show in 2014, just standing in the audience. He does seem like someone who actually really likes music.
Yeah, that's his life, and he really takes advantage of New York and seeing what's cool and good. He's nice to everybody, and he's going to be working for the rest of his life and admired. Me and Nigel, if you invite us and we're off, then we will most likely go because I want to see what my friend is playing at the bottle service Midtown club just as badly as I want to see what my friend is playing in the weird ambient venue where you lie on the floor. If you're not doing all these things in New York, what are you doing?