Bringing together disparate artistic interests and practices from dance and music to psychology and therapy, DJ Elsie AKA DJ Elsie & The Techno Cèilidh just about wrangles them together with an elastic, rhythmic thread: the contagious flow of collective movement and music. Nobody really knows where DJ Elsie came from, but legend has it that she emerged from the sea as a lump of granite off the West Coast of Scotland. Having trained as a pianist from a young age, Elsie became hooked on nuanced harmonic-melodic interplay and energizingly intricate polyrhythm. Thanks to her Scottish lineage, Elsie was lucky enough to fling herself into a few cèilidhs as a child, and this sense of collective rhythmic abandon was later recapitulated through falling headfirst into the legendary Leeds-based ‘techno Mecca’ The Orbit during the early 00’s. With this inferno of inspiration well and truly cooking on gas, Elsie learned to DJ and went on to study electronic music production before taking a hiatus to raise a family and do a load of other stuff. DJ Elsie takes inspiration from techno bangers of yesteryear and mixes these vibes with more recent techno, techno-adjacent-and-beyond styles including from newer and lesser-known artists. Always with soulful intelligence, steeped in the vitality of ‘Proper Techno’ and its Detroit origins, Elsie’s DJ sets inevitably send crowds absolutely rabid for more decibels from the entire 4/4 spectrum (except trance)… In recent years Elsie has played across the UK and Ireland, bringing the noise at TPHQ, Moovin festival, Valleyfest, OneWorld, Festival Sessions, Rave Cadets, Platoon, Bask, High Peak Bass Collective, Cumberland Lodge in the back garden of Windsor castle, and even Hayfield Village Hall. In 2023 DJ Elsie founded High Peak Bass Collective along with other High Peak-affiliated DJs, artists and straight up legends which continues to showcase eclectic creative talent and draws a diverse crowd from as far away as Bristol and Italy! Techno Cèilidh?? Cèilidh dancing is an ancient collective form of community dance originating in Scots-Irish culture. Having started to facilitate cèilidh dancing for private events, one day an idea arrived out of the ether: “Techno + Cèilidh = Techno Cèilidh”. Obviously, it made complete sense. Counteracting the pandemic's deprivation of embodied interaction, and building on traditional Scottish cèilidh formations, the Techno Cèilidh of Elsie’s imagination took living, breathing, 3-dimensional shape in The North, spread like wildfire and last time we checked it had gone intergalactic! Upon request, Elsie can engage the audience in some collective cèilidh dances, taught step by step, and set to techno and house classics. What DJ Elsie finds particularly amusing is witnessing people from age 4 to 84 who say they “don’t like Techno” or “can’t Cèilidh” inevitably losing their minds on the dancefloor, once they dip their toe in (but before they realise what they’ve got themselves into).