JAEL

Moluccan Amsterdam, and a DJ at fourteen

JAEL is the working name of Giovanni Jaël Jano, a Moluccan-Dutch artist based in Amsterdam. The Moluccan community in the Netherlands is a product of post-colonial displacement, and the music that travelled with it — folk, gospel, church singing — is the first layer of what he does. The second layer came from his parents' records: funk and soul, plus the Japanese funk that shows up in his sets as a tell of how deep the digging goes.

He started DJing at fourteen, which matters less as a precocity story than as an explanation of why the two halves of his career sit together at all. He was a club selector before he was a recording artist, so the move he made later was not a reinvention so much as a return.

The professional debut came in 2021. By then he had already been absorbed into Soulection, the Los Angeles label and collective that spent the 2010s building a transatlantic audience for soul-adjacent electronic music, and he remains a long-standing member. That affiliation is the reason a Dutch artist with a Moluccan gospel background ended up with a touring map that runs through the United States, South Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand rather than only the European festival belt.

Half As Much, and the decision to stop singing so much

The solo debut album Half As Much arrived in 2021 on Studio KOTO, and it is the record that establishes him as more than a DJ with a laptop: he produced it, wrote it, played on it and sang on it. It is a multi-instrumentalist's album, closer to R&B and soul than to anything that would work at four in the morning in a basement.

The same year brought Close to Me, a collaboration with the Ghanaian-British producer Juls, which widened his audience considerably and pulled him further into the Afro-diasporic production circuit. Work with Wizkid followed. On paper, this was a songwriter's trajectory.

He turned away from it. The soulful element never left — it is still audible in the vocal fragments and chord choices — but from roughly 2022 onwards the centre of gravity shifted to bass-driven club music: UK garage, 2step, 140, bassline, jungle. Part of that was infrastructure. He took a monthly show, Carousel JAEL, on London's Rinse FM across 2022 and 2023, which is a specific kind of commitment: a Rinse residency requires a new hour of club records every month, and it pushes a selector towards the music the station exists to carry. Appearances on BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra followed, and in 2023 Mixmag placed him in its Top 25 DJs Who Defined The Year.

Motion Sickness: four tracks, no hedging

The clearest statement of the new direction is Motion Sickness, a four-track EP released on 31 January 2025. He described it as a return to his roots and a journey into UK bass and garage, and the running order does the work: the title track is sub-heavy garage with a verse from the Ghanaian-born rapper Michael Ekow, You Be There is straight garage, Rude Boy leans on bassline, and D33P is choppy dubstep. Eighteen minutes, self-released, produced and mixed by JAEL, mastered by Killing Skills.

It is worth noting what the EP is not. There is no attempt to split the difference with the album audience, no soul ballad at the end. For an artist whose streaming numbers were built partly on Close to Me, releasing eighteen minutes of UK club music under his own name was a deliberate narrowing.

He debuted it live in early February 2025 at the Break the Block party at Expo City in Dubai, which is characteristic — the records tend to arrive in sets before they arrive on shelves.

Swing Theory, and remixes as the main output

Since the EP, the bulk of his released work has been edits and remixes rather than original songs, and he has been open about why. SWING THEORY VOL. I, released on 19 November 2025, collects three remixes he had been refining across a year of touring — Snoop Dogg's Sensual Seduction, Sam Gellaitry's Assumptions, and Armand Van Helden's You Don't Even Know Me — presented, by his own account, exactly as they evolved on the dancefloor. A Robin S Show Me Love remix and a Brazilian-facing collaboration with MC GW sit alongside them, and an original, Fix Your Mind, followed in 2026, pulling garage and jungle into drum and bass tempo.

Speaking to Beatportal in May 2025, he put the method plainly: he gets inspired by travelling and digging through new music while on the move, and most of the tracks he was recommending had been found between gigs and had changed his sets. He named Bushbaby and Champion as producers he keeps returning to, and admitted a fondness for early-2000s speed garage.

That is the honest shape of his 2025 and 2026 output — a touring DJ's workbench, published. Two earlier volumes of Remixes & Club Edits and two Short Covers collections sit behind it, so the pattern predates the current run.

Where he stands in October 2026

The most recent verified developments are live and broadcast rather than recorded. In May 2026 he toured Australia and New Zealand, and on 2 May triple j broadcast a 57-minute Mix Up set built around garage, bassline and house; the same week took in Misfits in Melbourne on 2 May, Ice Cream Factory in Perth on 8 May and Neck Of The Woods in Auckland on 9 May. The Rinse FM relationship continues with a current show spanning bass, garage, 140 and jungle.

His home run comes immediately. The Amsterdam Dance Event's 30th edition takes place from 21 to 25 October 2026, and he is billed twice: P-rallel Presents Nevermind on Thursday 22 October, and Sissi's Saturday on Saturday 24 October. For an artist whose Amsterdam history includes two Paradiso shows for the debut album in 2021, a JAEL & Friends night at the same venue, and a late-night billing at Parallel in Amsterdam North on 9 November 2024 alongside Lady Shaka and Jerrau, playing twice across a single ADE week is the clearest available measure of where he sits domestically.

He also runs an annual event series of his own, JAEL Invites, which fits the broader pattern: the curation and the selecting are the career now, and the records document them.

The venues tell the story better than the discography

The rooms he has played do not resolve into a single scene, which is the point. Boiler Room Festival in both Amsterdam and London, the O2 Academy Brixton, the Brooklyn Mirage in New York, Bass Coast in Canada, Glastonbury, Lowlands — that list spans a soul-leaning streaming audience, a UK bass audience and a European festival audience, and he has kept all three without obviously choosing between them.

What holds it together is that he is one of the few people on the UK bass circuit who can sing on his own records and play his own instruments, and who came to garage from gospel rather than from dubstep. It makes his sets harder to place than a straightforward selector's, and it is why the official descriptions keep reaching for the same formulation: DJing, vocals and live instrumentation in the same performance.