November 6, 2026 |
If you’ve spent any time in Europe’s most beloved clubs, it’s likely you’ve already enjoyed the excellent stylings of BASHKKA. The DJ and producer has been a mainstay on the club and festival circuit for over a decade, from her eclectic sets at Amsterdam’s Dekmantel Festival and Portugal’s Waking Life, to her regular slots at Panorama Bar, Blitz and K41 in Kyiv. Known for weaving hypnotic house cuts with powerhouse techno that carries her crowd well into the early hours, the Munich-born artist is adding another peg on her production belt with Core, her latest EP via Fabric Originals, the label offshoot of London’s famed club.
For BASHKKA, the four-track release is an excavation. It dispels the expectations spawned from her debut solo EP Maktub and goes back to her own musical DNA. Inspired by a Turkey-bound sunrise and crystallised over a winter of heartbreak, it moves from uncertainty to optimism, between clarity and joy, sliding house, techno and experimental club sounds together to pay homage to the decade she spent living in New York.
Here, BASHKKA talks self-therapy, her days in the Big Apple and her favourite tracks from the EP.
1. How would you describe Core in three words?
A personal breakthrough. An invigorating experience. A painful, but ultimately beautiful, process.
2. You’ve called the EP an “excavation”. What did you have to dig through to get to the core?
I had to get comfortable asking myself the difficult questions and, more importantly, not looking away when the answers came. Somewhere in that process, I also had to rediscover the joy, curiosity and sense of inspiration that made me fall in love with creating music in the first place. It was less about finding something new than reconnecting with something I had lost sight of.
3. It all started with a sunrise in Turkey in summer 2025. What happened that morning?
I was alone, floating in the most impossibly azure water, on psychedelics, just as the first rays of sunlight touched my skin, the water and the mountains around me. Something shifted in that moment. It felt as though a portal had opened: a chance to finally release a lot of what I had been carrying and make room for something lighter to come in. It was one of those rare moments when you don’t need to understand what’s happening to know that something profound is.
4. You’ve described Core as your self-therapy. Did making it change how you feel about that difficult period?
Without wanting to romanticise pain, making this EP helped me immensely in healing from one of the most heartbreaking periods of my life. It changed my relationship with that experience, not necessarily by making it disappear, but by giving me a way to process it and turn it into something meaningful. Music has always been a form of medicine for me, but making music is where its healing power becomes most tangible.
5. You’ve had a relationship with fabric for over a decade, from your Fabric 028 mix to now. What does releasing on Fabric Originals mean to you?
It’s a real honour. To have a musical thread running through an institution that has played such a defining role in club culture, and to now become part of its story as an artist, feels incredibly special. There’s something quite beautiful about a relationship with a place evolving over more than a decade and eventually finding its way into a release. I’m honoured to have that connection embedded in my musical history.
6. You spent ten years in New York. What’s the best thing the city taught you about music?
That music is a language through which souls communicate. New York taught me that it doesn’t matter where someone comes from, what language they speak or what their story is. Put the right record on, and suddenly there’s a shared understanding that needs no translation.
7. And the worst habit it gave you?
Impatience, probably. New York has a way of making everything feel urgent, and I definitely absorbed some of that fast-paced mentality. You start feeling like every move needs to happen immediately. With time, I’ve realised that some of the most meaningful things in life, and certainly in music, require the opposite: patience, space and the ability to let things unfold at their own pace.
8. If you had to save one track off the EP from a burning building, which would it be and why?
Haha. Activate Your Love. Simply because it took me the longest to find the right chords. After all that emotional and harmonic labour, I couldn’t possibly leave it behind.
9. You’ve played everywhere from Panorama Bar and Blitz to K41 in Kyiv. Which crowd has surprised you the most?
That’s almost impossible to answer because those three places are so different, yet deeply interconnected in my personal and professional journey. Each has shaped a different part of my growth, and each brings something to the table that the others don’t. I wouldn’t want to single one out. Perhaps the most interesting thing is precisely how different they are, and how much they all mean to me.
10. So what comes next for you?
I’m already deep into making new music for another EP and my first album. And somewhere on the horizon is another long-held ambition: giving birth to my own label and the b2b of my dreams with Mike Servito at Primavera Sound next Summer.
Photography courtesy of BASHKKA. ‘Core’ is available on all major platforms now.
