Palms Trax Has a Life Now
a.k.a. An interview with the always quotable and perpetually self-effacing artist about life, death, anxiety, fame and his newfound "uncle on Facebook" era.
It’s funny to think of Palms Trax (a.k.a. Jay Donaldson) as a “veteran” figure, especially considering that he’s only 33 years old. Yet more than a decade has passed since the Equation EP first put the Berlin-based Brit on the global dance music radar, and in the years since, he’s amassed quite the resume. Aside from DJing all around the world, he also became one of Dekmantel’s go-to talents, releasing several records on the label and appearing at multiple editions of the landmark festival. In 2021, however, Donaldson branched out on his own, building upon his long-running radio show, Cooking with Palms Trax, by launching the CWPT label. Home to choice reissues, hypnotic mixtapes and new releases from a myriad of artists, including Palms Trax himself, it’s quietly become a reliable outlet, although Donaldson jokes that it’s both a “money incinerator” and a way to regularly meet up with his two friends that help run it “under the guise of business lunches.”
These kinds of self-deprecating statements have long been a staple of just about any conversation with Donaldson, and when he was getting started as Palms Trax, they were inadvertently something of an early calling card. (Never before have the words “bed linen” played such a key role in introducing a DJ to the world.) In a dance music sphere that even then was full of larger-than-life personalities and mindless excess, Donaldson was the rare figure willing to poke fun not only at the ridiculousness of it all, but also his own desire to be a part of it. This endeared him to journalists, promoters and fans alike, though it certainly helped that the music he was making—bright and bouncy house that took liberal cues from late-’80s / early-’90s greats like The Burrell Brothers and the wider Nu Groove catalog—was superb in its own right.
As the years went on, Donaldson of course evolved, particularly in the DJ booth. Even as the gigs got bigger and bigger, he gradually embraced deeper and more soulful sounds, and by the time he closed out the final night of Dekmantel’s main stage in 2019, he was more likely to play Italo, zouk and disco than anything that might be described as “lo-fi house.” (He’d often been saddled with that descriptor during the earliest days of his career.) On the production front, his output slowed, but the scattered tunes he’s released in recent years, especially during the 2020s, have often prioritized groove above all else. It doesn’t matter that much of the dance music sphere has spent the past few years clamoring for bangers—Donaldson appears to be interested in other things.
Many of those things appear on The Sound of Love International 006, a newly released compilation that the Love International label—an offshoot of the annual festival in Croatia—asked Palms Trax to curate. The record contains no house music, and very little that might even be described as proper dance music (at least not in the DJ-centric sense of the term), which prompts questions of just what Donaldson had in mind. A quick look at his Instagram makes clear that his DJ career is going very well, and though he might have once been a plucky young upstart, he’s now someone who routinely gets booked for big rooms and massive festival stages. Moreover, he’s doing it while shunning many of dance music’s contemporary trends.
Curious to see where his head was at, I asked Donaldson if he’d be up for a chat here in the newsletter, and he accepted the invitation. It wasn’t the first time I’d interviewed him—and in the interest of full disclosure, I should also mention that Donaldson at one point briefly worked for me, moonlighting as a music journalist back when I was the editor at XLR8R. He wisely got out of that racket once his DJ calendar began to pick up, but we’ve remained friendly ever since, which is perhaps why our conversation last weekend took such a personal turn.
We talked about DJing, dance music, social media and other topics you’d expect, but Donaldson actually spent much of the time reflecting on his own anxieties, and how much they’ve impacted both his personal life and the course of his professional career. It wasn’t dour by any means—Palms Trax is as funny and quotable as ever—but it was very real, whether he was talking about the death of his father, calling himself a “dinosaur” or discussing what kinds of events he is (and isn’t) getting booked at these days. That said, it was also hopeful, and in a time when it often feels like the dance music discourse has become hopelessly grim, that might have been the biggest surprise of all.