DJ Plead
Please
Smalltown Supersound
This might be the first time I’m writing about DJ Plead, but Please is far from being my first introduction to him. In Berlin, where I am based, you don’t have to try too hard to find his name—it’s frequently plastered across the kind of party posters clubgoers would categorize as “sick line-ups,” and the Melbourne / Naarm-based, Lebanese-Australian artist (real name: Jarred Beeler) is well known for his bass-heavy, Levantine-laced throwdowns.
Beeler’s work has long been tied up in his heritage, and his multicultural identity directly interacts with his musical output. Digging through a lifetime of nostalgic sounds, his palette runs wild for the sake of serious authenticity. Lebanese flutes and elements of dabke appear in his compositions, but so do traces of dancehall; yet all of them are filtered through a percussive language that is uniquely his and tastes fondly of memory.
While Beeler’s current artistic persona does include the “DJ” prefix—and rightly so, given the way his selections can raise the temperature of any sound room—his productions often have an equally hair-raising quality. Employing Middle Eastern drum patterns and sun-bleached instrumentation, he creates something close to an elixir, one that was particularly potent on 2020’s Going for It EP on Livity Sound. In recent years, Beeler has also become a more active collaborator, carefully searching out his own like-minded tribe of music-makers. He’s found real alchemy with rRoxymore—proven by their Read Round City EP (2024) and the corresponding set of club tours that set dancefloors ablaze across three continents—and has tapped into a similar synergy as part of PPP, a shapeshifting endeavor with fellow bass music explorers DJ Python and Piezo.
His latest album, Please, is a solo effort, yet it stands out, possibly because its songs weren’t necessarily meant to be heard. Assembled with the help of Smalltown Supersound’s Joakim Haugland, the LP was pulled from a folder of 120 demos and sketches Beeler made between 2023 and 2025—after he’d already written and entirely scrapped a different album. Reminiscent of his 2020 full-length Relentless Trills, the record looks beyond the dancefloor, instead offering a window to a more intimate and provocative innerworld. Its emotive strains of Arabesque synths carry traces of history, connecting distant lands from the artist’s origin with a sense of longing for places half-remembered and half-inherited.
Though LP cut “Stucco” still carries Beeler’s percussive signature, pieces like “Seven Eight, Too Late” and “Traffic” lean into mournful downtempo and organic decay, their strings, bass and keys left to trail off the edge of a cliff. Please is tense, evocative and atmospheric, but it’s also vacant in certain places, and the solitude of those moments is amplified by reverb. The cover sums it up: a cropped photo of Beeler holding a coffee, keys, phone, a half-empty strip of perhaps some acetaminophen and a bottle of Tiger Balm, it depicts the ordinary debris of a life. This is an album that makes you look at Beeler in the eyes, and that is perhaps why he was hesitant to share its contents in the first place.
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