Adam Port

Punk, turntables, then house

Adam Polaszek was born on 25 August 1979 and arrived at dance music by a route that had little to do with it. His first scene was hardcore punk. From there he moved through hip-hop and turntablism, and only after that into techno and house. The turntablist years are the ones that show up in his work now: the habit of treating two records as raw material to be cut against each other rather than two songs to be politely joined.

He built the rest of his apprenticeship in Berlin clubs as a resident, which is also where the people he still works with came from. In 2009 he set up Keinemusik in the city with Rampa, &ME and Reznik, alongside Monja Gentschow. The name is German for "no music", which reads as a joke about a label that is in fact extremely busy making it.

The label as the apparatus

For most of its first decade Keinemusik functioned as a label, a graphic identity and a party crew in roughly equal measure, with four DJs sharing the brand rather than one name carrying it. Two collective albums anchor the catalogue. "You Are Safe" came in 2017 with Chiara Noriko, Nomi Ruiz and Jennifer Touch among the guest vocalists; "Send Return" followed in 2021 and brought in Solomun, RY X and Little Dragon. Around those sit more than sixty catalogue tracks.

The visibility arrived in steps rather than in one jump. Boiler Room Berlin and Fusion in 2019, Tomorrowland and a BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix in 2021. In December 2020 Keinemusik got its own radio station inside Grand Theft Auto Online, which placed the sound in front of an audience that had not gone looking for it. Port's own festival history runs through Coachella, Burning Man, Tomorrowland and Time Warp.

His production settled into Afro house — house architecture with African rhythmic material underneath it — with jazz, soul and funk colouring the deeper, slower tracks. That is the lane he was working in when the label released "Thandaza" in March 2024, three months before everything changed.

"Move", and what it actually did

"Move" came out on Keinemusik on 7 June 2024, credited to Port and Stryv with a vocal from Malachiii, and running two minutes and fifty-seven seconds. It had already been played at Keinemusik events before release, which is why the demand existed on day one: it went to number one on the Beatport Top 100 within twenty-four hours.

The numbers after that were not club numbers. It passed a hundred million streams inside four weeks and spent 110 days on Spotify's Global Top 50. It reached number one in Switzerland, Portugal, Flanders, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, Moldova and Bulgaria, and the top ten in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. France certified it diamond, which there means 333,333 certified units; Greece gave it a diamond streaming award for passing ten million plays. It closed the year on Billboard's Global 200 year-end list. The critic Rebecca Besnos put the appeal down to an "irresistible, lilting Afrobeats meets melodic house feel", which is about as close as anyone got to explaining why a track with no obvious pop scaffolding behaved like a pop single.

A rework with Camila Cabello followed on 11 October 2024 and pushed the UK position higher. Its video is instructive about how Port's world works: rather than a studio set-up, it shows Port, Stryv and Cabello together behind the decks at a DJ set, with Cabello taking the chorus out into the crowd. Stryv, for context, is Hamid Bashir, Pakistani-born and based in Los Angeles, with earlier credits on records for Ty Dolla $ign and Jason Derulo.

The follow-ups

Port did not try to repeat "Move" with a solo album. He went back to collaborations with singers. "Positions" arrived in 2025, again with Stryv and Malachiii. "See You Again", also 2025, put him alongside &ME and Rampa with Sevdaliza on vocals — a darker, less immediately commercial record than "Move", and one that sits closer to the Keinemusik house style.

His most recent release is "Be The One" with SG Lewis, out on Keinemusik in 2026. The pairing is logical: Lewis works the same territory of dance records with actual songs inside them, and the track had been circulating in sets before it was released, the same route "Move" took. The working method across all four records is consistent — a vocalist, a hook that survives being played at half volume on a phone, and a structure that still functions at four in the morning.

Where he stands in late 2026

The touring pattern now splits into three kinds of booking. There are Keinemusik shows with Rampa and &ME, including the collective's trip to Nairobi in November 2026. There are back-to-backs with &ME, such as Valbyparken in Copenhagen on 11 September 2026. And there is a growing number of solo bookings under his own name, which is the real measure of what "Move" bought him — Stockholm on 12 September 2026 was billed as his first solo appearance in the city.

Through 2026 that diary ran from The Loft in Amsterdam on 25 April to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris on 1 October, with Erfurt on 29 November advertised as his only German show of the year. He closes the season at Zamna in Tulum on 10 January 2027 with a sunrise set. The scarcity of German dates for a Berlin producer is the clearest signal of where the demand now sits: outside the country that made him.