The experience of an SPFDJ (Lina Jonsson) set is to be drawn into ecstatic, insurgent release. Her sound is an accelerated cocktail of acid techno, EBM, hardcore, trance, and occasionally breakbeat, which doesn't aim to please. Instead, it seeks to upend, delights in excess and pushes dancefloors into a state that borders the hysterically sublime. One of these dancefloors will be Control Club when SPFDJ touches down on April 12.
In this sense, Jonsson's sets are more about transformations than transitions. They are experiments in what theorist Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) once described as "bass materialism": sound as a force that acts on bodies before it acts on minds. In an era of whitewashed, monetised, and increasingly gentrified techno, SPFDJ's work remains defiantly unmarketable. You don't stream it casually. You survive it.
Raised in a remote village in northern Sweden, Jonsson was drawn to music through the ecstatic monotony of Eurotrance and snowbound boredom. She would later trade in the cold of Lappland for the fluorescence of astrophysics, studying in Berlin with ambitions of a PhD. But the pull of the rave proved stronger than the orbital pull of the stars. So she left the lab behind and entered the club.
Her early experiments were shaped within the infrastructures of resistance: DIY collectives, squat parties, queer raves. In London, for example, she joined Universe of Tang, a warehouse night that blended aggressive music with immersive art, psychosexual aesthetics, and a deliberately female-led booking policy. From these early years, Jonsson developed a sensibility rooted in the material conditions of sound, learning how to build a system, manipulate frequency, and conjure an atmosphere out of nothing but fog, lights, and a few thousand watts of low-end pressure.
In this context, it's no surprise that her eventual embrace by Berlin's infamous and globally mythologised Herrensauna collective felt inevitable. At Herrensauna, her style evolved into a full-frontal assault on sonic conservatism: 145+ BPM, gear-shifting genre blends, and distorted kick drums thick enough to trip over. But while her tempos are fast, they're not soulless. An SPFDJ set is neither nihilistic nor detached. It's often warm, even joyous, pulsing with eroticism and sensory excess. Hers is not a cold futurism. It is an anti-purist, body-first rave ethic that owes more to the camp theatrics of early gabber or post-feminist noise performance than minimal techno's grayscale traditions.
Within this architecture of affect and refusal lies Intrepid Skin, the record label she launched in 2018. The imprint was born from a desire to release tracks that otherwise had no home in the increasingly homogenised techno landscape, with its first release featuring VTSS's Self Will. Its releases chart a similar world of polyrhythmic warfare, from VTSS's chaos to Schacke's hyper-emotional rave, Nene H's hybridised experiments, and beyond. Intrepid Skin has no "sound" per se but an urgent, unyielding, fiercely personal attitude.
And there's politics beneath that aggression. Jonsson has consistently framed Intrepid Skin not as a women-only project but as refusing genre orthodoxy, industry gatekeeping, and algorithmic predictability. In her curation, artists working through the trauma and ecstasy of marginality engage in a transnational dialogue that emerges from disobedient tempos and non-narrative structures. In this sense, Intrepid Skin operates as an anti-archive. Instead of bowing to techno's lineage, it disrupts it with mutant strains from outside its institutional core.
This curatorial instinct also found its way into a monthly Rinse FM residency, which has featured fellow outsiders from queer, fetish, and experimental collectives. Launched in 2019, the show presented mixes from SPFDJ and guests such as Akua, VTSS, and other Herrensauna affiliates.
But, her sound, scene, label, and radio presence should not be seen as separate practices. They form a praxis, and queerness is its throughline—not queerness as identity alone, but queerness as form: non-linearity, excess, refusal of resolution. They elide beginnings and endings, working in loops, ruptures, and plateaus, Deleuzian becomings rather than traditional peaks and valleys.
The result is nothing short of transformation. Where the mainstream avenues of techno demand a cool detachment, SPFDJ revels in catharsis as its currency, an impolite urgency at odds with the commercial logic of the DJ-industrial complex. And despite her global bookings—Berghain, Bassiani, De School, Dekmantel, Reaktor, Dimensions—she continues to operate within the codes of DIY: running sound with Berlin's System.out collective, self-releasing, eschewing spectacle, performing at festivals like No Bounds and Unpolished, where unbridled energy is prized over pristine production.
In one now-mythologised moment from her Boiler Room appearance at Tresor, Jonsson stands motionless in black, razor-focused, while the crowd behind her descends into ecstatic chaos. Strobes cut the room into spasms. A breakbeat kicks in, then folds into acid. Half-naked bodies envelop the room, gradually moving as one. At that moment, Jonsson's control is total. But, more importantly, her trust is total. She's successfully surrendered the floor to the collective.
In SPFDJ's hands, techno achieves transcendence by going deeper into its dirt, desire, and dissonance. Its future is rooted in the obscene, unstable, and intensely alive. With this in mind, perhaps "SP" stands for "severe punishment" (in truth, she has never disclosed its official meaning). But in her world, punishment is pleasure. And the dancefloor is where both meet, as proof that freedom hurts just enough to feel real.
