Sound Is Ceremony
DJ Adé is a Los Angeles–based selector, cultural historian, and community‑rooted artist tracing underground Black dance music through live sets, archival work, and immersive sound projects. Born in Ayiti and raised in Mattapan, he approaches every dancefloor as ceremony—a way to remember, to move, and to return to ourselves. His practice lives at the crossroads of clubs, reissues, installations, and community initiatives like Ride On! Bike Shop/Co‑Op in South LA.
Roots & Lineage
Adé’s journey begins in Ayiti and unfolds in Mattapan, where immigrant resilience, park jams, and block parties shaped his sense of what music could hold. As a teenager sifting through crates of soul, house, kompa, hip‑hop, and other Afro‑diasporic sounds, he found in records both an education and a lifeline. The dancefloor became his study, a place to learn how people move, heal, and imagine together.
Archives, Reissues & Memory
In the 1990s, working under the name Eric Neff, he curated reissue compilations for labels like Rhino and MCA Records, including Give Your Body Up: Club Classics & House Foundations, Message from Beat Street, and The Best of One Way. One of these releases earned a rare 10/10 review from Spin for its sequencing and historical insight, reflecting his commitment to honoring the roots of club culture while making its stories accessible to new generations.
Sound as Ceremony
Today as DJ Adé, he blends deep house, Afrobeat, gospel, broken beat, soulful edits, late‑night disco, and other global Black rhythms into sets that feel like portals. Each session is a carefully held container—rooted in ancestral memory and oriented toward collective release and future vision. His work extends into projects like CongoSonic, a diasporic collaboration weaving Haitian, Congolese, and Black American soundscapes into immersive environments.
He also co‑creates events such as Utopia, Dirty Disco, and Nũ‑DEI, building nights where dancers can arrive as they are and leave transformed.
Community, Movement & Justice
Off the decks, Adé founded Ride On! Bike Shop/Co‑Op, a social enterprise in South Los Angeles that centers mobility justice, community ownership, and everyday joy. For him, movement is sacred—whether it’s a body in the crowd, a record on the platter, or a bicycle cutting through the city.
At the Heart of It
At his core, DJ Adé moves as a ritualist and a bridge: between past and future, local and global, archive and dancefloor. He believes that when music is held with care, it can do more than entertain—it can open space for healing, remembrance, and collective imagination.
