Kyle Starkey remixes "Through the Heart" by fka.m4a / Out now on CONTR4ST 

through the heart - Kyle Starkey Remix

Berlin-based, London born DJ & CONTR4ST Label owner, fka.m4a has become a stalwart of underground music with a heady blend of Italo, high NRG and House. With several Boiler Room appearances under his belt - clocking up over half a million streams combined - plus shows everywhere from Berghain / Panormar Bar, Timewarp, Tomorrowland to Awakenings, features in Mixmag and Electronic Beats, plus Peggy Gou in his corner as a mentor, his stock is firmly on the rise. 

Born in London, music was always front and centre in his family home, his mother playing music to him through headphones while he was still in the womb. Citing acts whose USP was female empowerment as the first music he found for himself, the likes of Spice Girls and Lil Kim were early musical influences, eventually leading him to start DJing on the queer scene in London. 

“I was working on the Soho & East London circuit” he says. “I was mainly doing guestlist and hosting but eventually they asked me to DJ and I spent a few years cutting my teeth on that scene.” 

Learning how to work a crowd as a pop DJ, seeing Honey Dijon DJ on his first trip to Berlin in 2016 led him down the rabbit hole of electronic music and led to a shift in his focus. 

“I completely fell in love with the storytelling element of her set,” he says. “I spent the next year immersed in dance music culture and started playing the electronic room at gay nights.” 

Moving to Berlin in 2019, the pandemic quickly put a stop to his burgeoning DJ career before a switch to recording streams from his apartment during covid saw his profile blow up, leading to signing with an agency and bagging his first Panorama Bar set when lockdown lifted. 

With Peggy Gou taking him under her wing and asking him to regularly open for her (“She’s helped me out so much and we have a really strong relationship,” he says. “She calls me her daughter and I call her my mother,” he laughs.), fka.m4a’s schedule got hectic with sets everywhere from Warehouse Project to Sonar and a focus on producing their own music. 

“It’s important for me to make music that works in the club,” he says. ‘But most importantly, it’s about making something that comes straight from the heart. I think I’ve achieved that on my first EP and I can’t wait for people to connect with it.” 

With an event series in the pipeline and a summer stacked with festival shows from Hï Ibiza to Terminal V, fka.m4a has firmly cemented himself as one of the leading artists in the underground space.