Listen to Violet’s “silver-plated dancefloor moments” playlist

Welcome back to Selections, a series of artist-curated playlists from those in the know.

“For this playlist, I tried to tackle the feeling I get when I play metallic-sounding, sci-fi referencing or simply shimmery music in my sets,” says Inês Borges Coutinho, otherwise known as Violet, on her entry into our Selections series.

The Portuguese artist – whose third album, Transparências, offered a gorgeous sonic accompaniment to day-to-day activities – is a key contributor to the electronic music scene in her native Lisbon. Since 2015, she’s been running the online radio station Rádio Quântica (now a label and event series, too) with fellow DJ and producer Photonz. Then there are her Naive and Naivety imprints, which are home to releases from the likes of Eris Drew and Octo Octa, Almaty and ELLES, as well as her role within Lisbon “queer feminist rave collective” mina.

Taken as a whole, Coutinho’s work within the community and her own creative practice is an exercise in leading by example, alongside like-minded peers, to forge the kind of networks needed to better promote underground Portuguese music and marginalised artists. It’s an approach she brings to her sets, which also showcase her intuition and dexterity as a DJ. Here, Coutinho dips into selector mode as she curates a list of club-ready tracks themed around ‘silver-plated dancefloor moments’.

Speaking more on the playlist, she says: “From electro to club to wonky techno, I recognise an imaginary lineage of tracks that evoke this idea through robotic voices, deranged synths, flanger, delay or other FX that give them a somewhat alien – and extremely enticing to my ears – texture. Each of these tracks reveals its silver-plated quality in a different element or through a different approach. A beautiful melodic mantra, however simple, is another transversal feature in this small collection.”