Michelle Manetti Turns Precision Into Pure Elation

Mother of Fèmmme Fraîche, Michelle Manetti has dedicated their career to fostering spaces and creating platforms for marginalised and underrepresented artists in the music scene. They are also a revered DJ in their own right, and a well-loved and well-respected stalwart of East London's queer scene.

For Manetti, the work begins in the archive. Asked to sum up their work in three words, they land on "unapologetically queer euphoria," a phrase that doubles as mission statement and dance floor promise.

That euphoria is engineered, not improvised. "With great precision and obsession," Manetti says of how they prepare their music. It's a never-ending, ongoing task, digging for new (and mostly old) music, listening to promos, editing the metadata, putting tracks into genre folders and folders within folders, prepping playlists for each gig, and then condensing those playlists down into bigger playlists and filtering out the not-so-good bits. Rinse and repeat. It's a consistent hyper-focus, and one Manetti has clearly made peace with as a permanent condition of the work rather than a phase before it.

That meticulousness is exactly what they love most about the process. Knowing that when they get behind the decks at a gig, they'll know where to find what they want to find changes the nature of the set itself. The intense preparation means the musical journey they're creating while playing becomes a far more sentient process, one that lets them feel more connected to both the music and the crowd in front of them.

What they're reaching for once that connection is made shifts from night to night. It depends on multiple variables: the party they're playing, their set time, whether it's peak time or warm-up or closing, whether it's a late-night club or a daytime terrace, and — most importantly — the audience in front of them. It's a symbiotic relationship, Manetti says, but if there's a constant thread running through it, it's a heavy lean towards conjuring euphoria, joy, and elation.

Ask what their deadliest weapon is, and the answer loops straight back to where it started: their obsessive preparation. For all the reasons above, it's the thing that makes everything else possible.