TDJ is the pseudonym of Montreal-based producer and artist Geneviève Ryan-Martel. Specializing in a retro brand of Eurodance and trance, her music is glossy but nostalgic in a sort of eerie, hypnagogic way. 

Despite the music’s high tempos and rave-friendly structure, there’s a throughline of real melancholy. She cites the influence of Tiësto and Taking Back Sunday in the same breath, if you catch my drift. 

To my mind, TDJ is part of the long lineage of internet-y electronic music that explores how the information age has flattened time and genre boundaries, leaving us in an eternal state of nostalgia for pasts that never existed, and free to combine influence in idiosyncratic ways. 

Recently, TDJ has worked in series. First, in her numbered self-titled EPs, recently collected as TDJ123, and now with her second audio/visual DJ mix in the SPF INFINI series. 

It’s a summery title evoking endless time under the sun, but one that has a strange connotation when applied to this mix. 

The set itself is an intoxicating, high energy, nocturnal assortment that runs the gamut from trance to Italo-tinted hyperpop, to downtempo balladry to sharp techno. The bulk of the material consists of tracks and collaborations from TDJ herself, alongside mixed tracks from artists from around the world.

The visualizer meanwhile is a grotesque parody of a social media collab house. Set in Tulum, Mexico, we see TDJ performing for and hanging out with a group of comedically disfigured plastic surgery victims who constantly film themselves pouting and posing for their phone cameras. 

It’s a sweaty, gross, hyperreal spectacle — like watching Love Island while having a terrible acid trip. 

The film mixes the twisted aesthetics of TikTok-reality with a hip y2k retrofuturism — a motif that I think is often misappropriated these days — but one that TDJ nails in her music. It conjures a lost, shiny future of endless parties and pre-9/11 American innocence. 

Standout tracks like the fknsyd collab “Blow Away (In My Arms)” and “Sway (The Places She Goes) (Vocal Trance Mix)” have a weightlessness to them, with airy synths floating above the pounding trance beats. 

Other tracks like “Saw Love” and “Future4000” have a hyper, semi-ironic Eurodance sleaze factor. The mix is remarkably consistent while remaining engaging and emotional throughout, navigating BPM and vibe shifts with ease.

TDJ’s SPF INFINI 2 is available on major streaming services. The video can be viewed on Youtube, or purchased as a DVD at tdjmusic.bandcamp.com