Kicking things off for 2026 we have a special mix from ultimate digger and record aficionado C.K. Based in Denmark, he’s spent the better part of a decade quietly assembling one of the most exciting discographies alongside his fellow Aarhus luminaries Central, DJ Sports and Manmade Deejay. Across a huge number of EPs and two albums, Tracking Patience and Power Confusion, his productions have balanced function and feeling with precision, working just as well in reflective settings as they do on the deeper ends of the dancefloor. If there was ever a year that crystallised that ethos, it was 2025. By his own standards, it was one of his busiest yet: four releases on his own PRS label that included Club Styling Vol. 1 & 2, as well as a debut for a new T.E.C alias on Serenity Records. The year also marked a decade of Safe Distribution, a fully DIY operation that has quietly passed the 100-release mark while continuing to question how music can be produced and circulated sustainably, both economically and mentally.
Beyond releases, C.K’s contribution to the Danish underground has always extended further than his own catalogue. From co-founding Regelbau, a defining party and label force between 2015 and 2021, to opening Kin, a volunteer-run record store in Aarhuss last summer, his approach has always had the feeling of prioritising community over visibility. As a DJ, he’s truly one of our favourites, a digger and tastemaker in the truest sense. His Safe Radio mixes have become Soundcloud events in their own right, often five-hour journeys through house, downtempo and ambient, released sparingly but made with months of preparation.
For Truancy Volume 358, C.K delivers a focused two-hour snapshot of what he’d been playing out towards the end of 2025. The mix moves with intent from the opening moments, rolling through a groove-led run of pumping house cuts with lots of big moments throughout. It’s a huge way to begin the year, and a reminder of why C.K remains one of the most dependable selectors in the scene today.
Hey Christoffer! Happy new year! So just to start and as we kick off 2026, how do you look back on 2025? Do you have any particular highlights, be it both personal and professionally? “Hi hi. Happy new year. This turns deep quick I guess – sorry. A personal highlight for me would be that I have tried to figure out what I want to do in my life. I’ve said this before on my Instagram and in other interviews, but I don’t do music full time as I have a daytime job and family on the side of music. This means that I constantly try to juggle how I manage to get food on the table while at the same time working on music, records, mixes and basically creating a sustainable life both for my mental health and economically. I haven’t really gotten anywhere as to what I want, though, but it’s at least a personal highlight of 2025.
If I look at my professional life – at the end of 2024, I decided to try and work with myself a bit more in terms of my own view on my current artistic situation. Earlier I’ve been focused a lot on shows that I wanted but ended up not getting for one reason or the other. Instead, I wanted to be happy about and embrace the shows that I would get in 2025. I feel like I succeeded in that. Therefore, my boring question to this answer is that all shows in 2025 were highlights in their own respective way. I’m fortunate to be able to travel, meet inspiring people and at the same time do what I love the most in this world. I would say, though, that two summer shows were a bit more clear in my head – Horst Festival in Belgium and Kune Festival in Denmark.”
You opened a record store in Århus back in July called Kin, can you tell us a little bit about what went into that and how it’s been going. I remember you saying it had been taking up a lot of your time over the summer! But what a dream bucket list! “Sure. Kin is a voluntarily run record store with some of the same volunteers of Super – a local also voluntarily run venue/space. We took over a big collection of some-3000 records and it’s been a lot of work, but also obviously a lot of fun. A lot of the personal thoughts that I mentioned in your first question stem from starting the record store – basically how you juggle IRL stuff, making music, distributing records and running a record store. All of it run by heart.
We’re based in the same yard as Super just above the old space and only open on Saturdays and by appointment. You’re always welcome if you’re in Århus. We also run a Discogs (and soon a webpage) where we sell releases from local artists as well as 2nd hand records mostly in the dance music sphere.”
What was the Lytteklub event you threw back in October? Is this like an upstairs space you hope to help foster more record and music community in Århus? Do you have a long term goal you’d like to strive for with Kin? “I’m not running lytteklub – I’m therefore not sure if this question would fit. But Lytteklub is basically a way for people interested in music to get to talk about music with each other in a casual manner. As an attendee of Lytteklub you bring some music that you have produced, we sit in a circle and listen to music together and talk about it. It’s a great way for people to meet and also try to expand your vocabulary and knowledge about music. You don’t have to make a certain type of music or style and in that sense I feel it’s such a nice concept where people come from different worlds and ideas are exchanged.”
You’ve been part of the Århus scene for a long time now and a key player in making Århus one of the most vibrant cities in Europe when it comes to grassroot, underground music. Do you feel a stronger sense of responsibility toward nurturing younger DJs, producers, or listeners coming up in Århus and in Denmark? What kind of guidance do you think is most valuable early on? “It’s funny that you mention Århus and vibrant in the same sentence. We have a long history of band music and small(er) acts coming out of the city which we (not me necessarily, but as a city) are proud of. Therefore I understand why you’d call the city vibrant, but I’m not sure I see it that way.
On one hand, the city – like many other small cities all over the world – suffer from being small in a sense where people who care about a certain scene (whether it be music, arts, +++) leave to bigger cities when they have the chance. I’ve been deejaying for more than 15 years and most of the people in our tiny scene (besides the most important ones of course) left for Copenhagen at one point or the other. Whenever people had built up something strong, it would immediately be torn up by the people behind it moving away from the city.
On the other hand, we don’t have competition here and we support each other in a way that you don’t see in other (big) cities. I guess that’s where people picture Århus as being this “little gem” or as you say, vibrant – but honestly, we’re just doing stuff that we like because no one else does it for us. There is more room for us to experiment with things – whether it be parties, concerts, music production or whatever – because we are not fighting with other people to bring the same individuals to discover us. In that sense we have more wiggle room for failure and I think that helps people quite a lot here – learning from the failures and mistakes without too big of a punishment. A completely other thing is the economic aspect – Also, a thing that I really value in a city like Århus is that, because of the above, there is not really a need of networking. It is a part of my music life that I despise quite a bit and find quite repulsive.
I think people in bigger cities are quite spoiled in many ways – you can choose between different types of record stores you want to go to. You can go out on Sundays. You meet like-minded people in other spaces than just the club. You have got more alternatives every weekend for going out etc. In a small city like Århus, we are just hyped when “something” is happening and we try and support it the best way we can. I think that is why the sense of community is often better in our city – simply because we rely on each other to make dope things happen here. This is a very important thing to remember when we’re talking about cities and culture.
I feel a strong sense of telling about the smaller cities in general. Not only Århus, but try to force people out of the capitals to see that there is actually something cool going on here and maybe even cooler compared to big cities, because it is definitely different in terms of crowds, the way people do events, spaces etc.
And to your question – what kind of guidance? Stay.”
In terms of your own productions, 2025 looked like it was your busiest output years since you started putting out music. Did it feel like that to you? Have you been in a more productive mood or did logistics just line up more smoothly this year? “Oh yeah for sure. I focus my releases around the production of vinyl records. This means I can’t just release whenever I want due to turnaround times at pressing plants etc. In the beginning of last year, I wanted to have a record in production throughout the year. This means that I accepted the test pressings of PRS015 when I got the final copies of PRS014. I did the same thing for my following PRS releases. It was a way for me to push myself to make music because I work well on deadlines. If I don’t have any deadlines, things will just fade away. It felt good but also a bit stressful at times if things weren’t ready by the time I had to hand in pre-masters.”
Busiest C.K year and also 10 years of Safe distribution with over 100 records released, congratulations! Do you feel like you’ve achieved what you set out to do since you all started Safe? How do you look back on these 10 years? What’s been your biggest life takeaway from it? I’d like to think it really was about the friends you made along the way with something like this. “It’s quite wild to think about how we knew nothing in the beginning and how steep the learning curve has been. For us it has always been about trying out things and embracing and learning from the mistakes that you make along the way.
In the beginning I think Safe was a way for us to release music and not many thoughts were put behind it. From the beginning we have, figuratively speaking, been changing the tire while the car was still moving. It’s been a long process not only learning about the record production process and distribution processes but also internally developing a language for what we do, how we do it and maybe most importantly why we do it. By time it has become clear that Safe is a way for us to release our music in a DIY-manner where we oversee all processes in the music making processes – from music making to the physical production to distribution.
An important question has popped up recently – how can we create a sustainable distribution that nurtures the interests of the artists and labels associated with the distribution? Here we’re not only talking about the economic aspects of music production, but also questions about workload, our mental wellbeing etc.
Besides that, I have always been quite tired of people telling me how things should be and how things should be made. It has therefore become quite clear, for me at least, how important it is that we challenge the norms or conventions set up by a big capitalistic industry trying to show that you can do things differently both as a distribution, label and artist. Hopefully through our work we can inspire other people to do the same. In many ways we’re still the same but in a lot of other ways we’ve changed over the years. We’ve also become older, maybe more pragmatic and less dogmatic. I guess that calls for another interview 😊
And lastly, I have said it before, but I think it’s such a privilege to be able to do what you love the most while at the same time meet inspiring people, make friends along the way, nurture your hobby and refine your skills both artistically and as a human being.”
Do you have any logistical advice for anyone that might want to start a label? We’ve always wanted to start one but have always been a bit scared about the logistical side of things. “Ask questions (also the ones you think sound stupid!), be curious and avoid people telling you how to do things in a certain way.”
I asked this question to Alex Albrecht recently and thought it fit you too. When you’re making music, how often do you think about that balance between feeling and function? There’s a lot of overlap of both in your music so keen to know if that’s something you’re conscious about at all? “I really like that you’ve noticed the balance between feeling and function in my music. The balance is not something that I implement in the music making process, but I definitely see why you’ve noticed it. I think about function a lot. In the music making process I think about how and when a DJ (including myself) would use my music. Function definitely is a big part of my music making process. As to feelings I think I’m just very inspired by other music that somehow revokes feelings – whether it’s sad, happy, euphoric or whatever – and therefore it’s quite natural for me, when making non-rhythmic stuff, to look for elements that achieve some sort of feeling.”
What went into making records like Club Styling Vol. 1 & 2 then? “The tracks were originally intended for an album, but I felt like they fit better when they were split into two separate releases. For some time, I’ve been a bit interested in making releases that came in parts and in that sense, it was easy for me to choose the Vol 1 and Vol 2 format. Both records hold tracks that can be played at different times during a DJ set – from early downtempo (after)hours to peak-time.”
You’re an amazing producer but you’re an equally as amazing DJ, your Horst Arts & Music 2025 set was one of my fave live recordings of last year. I love DJing as a journey but I feel like DJing should also be about building to moments and Blaze – Lovelee Dae into that Central – Emptyhanded track felt like such a moment. As a DJ, how would you describe your relationship with digging and playing out? “I love records, I love music and I value learning about new music. I’m curious about music and have been since I can remember listening to music. I’m obsessed with figuring out how to stitch music together in certain ways and spaces. Therefore, these things go hand in hand, I think.”
Can you share any tracks or records that really bring you back to a specific time or place? “The A-side of STABLO – No. 9999. Where to start here? I sold my copy back in 2012 or something and I’ve regretted it ever since. I think this is such a good record still and I wish I had never sold it. It brings back a lot of good memories of a time in Århus where I started getting into releasing music and there were quite a few things happening here in town.
Joshua – Let the Spirit on The Foot Therapy EP. Recently I found an old clip of myself playing this classic at a defunct club in Århus called Double Rainbow. I remember this night clearly because I played with an old friend of mine called Torsten aka. Helmuth Kool (RIP!). He was a big inspiration to me and was one of the few ones who really helped me getting shows in Århus when I was too young to even be at the parties. I owe him a lot both in terms of his influence of my taste in music, but also in terms of deejaying. I still find records that I affiliate with him and this was definitely one of them.”
I feel like it’s a bit of an event now whenever a new C.K Safe Radio mix drops and the last two even if they’ve been few and far between have been extra special. How much planning and thought goes into these? Do you end up cutting a lot despite the length of them sometimes? “Yeah, I intended to do 4 a year but it was way too much for me because I prepare these mixes for months. As said above, I’m obsessed with stitching music together in a certain way and I think the Safe series is a good example of that. The mixes could easily be longer even though the last two were more than 5 hours. I always save tracks that are not chosen for the next episodes.
I think the series has also become a bit of a countermovement to short mixes that flood the internet. In my opinion people have become very impatient with all kinds of things nowadays. Not only in terms of constantly scrolling through endless amounts of content on your phone, but also when we listen to music – both at home when listening to mixes but also certainly when you go to the club to dance and see/hear your favorite deejays. It has become a bit harder – I find – to play a long 10-12 minute track out and these Safe episodes allows me to really go deep not only in terms of genre, style but also being able to play a full length track if I want to.
I’m not naive here, though. I don’t really picture people listening to my mixes from start to finish, but at least I can try and show the way for an alternative to short mixes and restlessness when listening to music. My hope is obviously that people put on the mixes and enjoy the ride from the beginning till the end.”
At this point in your journey, what does “progress” mean to you, learning new tools, refining instincts, or deepening emotional impact? “Learning new things about myself or others through the work with music.”
There’s often pressure in electronic music to constantly release, tour, and stay visible. How do you personally manage pacing, knowing when to push and when to step back, especially now with so many different commitments? “Yeah for sure. I think the pressure comes from the presence of social media. You’re constantly bombarded with new DJ sets, new music, people touring and so forth. I would lie if I said I’m not affected by it. But I am really trying to challenge these norms or mindset because it definitely affects my life in one way or the other.
I briefly talked about it earlier, but I think there’s a certain notion (and imo a misconception) of what an artist in 2026 should be like, how big of an output the artist should have, should you DJ and produce or is it enough to just do one of them etc.
For me the most important thing is to constantly be aware of the above and repeatedly ask myself what feels right for me and not mind what other people would want me to do. You can of course listen to criticism or whatever, but I’ve become allergic to talks where people would want me to change the way I work because “that is how you do it”. It’s important for me to feel grounded in the decisions that I make believing if it feels right for me, then it is the right thing for me. That works for me at least.”
What sort of other hobbies or interests do you have outside of electronic music? Are there any books, films, shows or other things you’ve seen or been reading/watching that you might want to share? “I have a big pile of books that I need to read here at home, but honestly, I wish I prioritized reading more. It’s a big “to do” in 2026 for me (and has been for the past years lol). It’s a great mix of (modern-ish) philosophical stuff and classics like Dune etc. Besides that, I’m really much into gaming and have been since I was little. I wouldn’t say gaming is an inspiration in my music, but some of my titles are definitely inspired by elements in the different games that I play!”
Can you tell us about three albums that a) define you getting into electronic music in general, b) maybe a midway album when you were fully invested in DJing and and c) a more recent one.
a) St Germain – Boulevard
I don’t know, I mean everyone know this one I guess. It’s such a classic. Ludovic Navarre might be one of my favorite producers out there. This album gave me a brief view into dance music although this album has quite a bit of laid back tracks, but also a bit too much cheese (read: soul/jazz vibes with guitar, rhodes, trumpet and sax and so forth). I still remember when I heard “What’s new?”. Great times! For a while I didn’t know Ludovic had made other music than St. Germain, but years later I discovered that he was behind other great aliases like Hexagone and Modus Vivendi – both of which much less jazzy and more the type of music that I look for.
He was even in groups that also released crazy good music and yes, I guess I’m just a big fan of his.
b) 154 – Strike
I really got into DJ’ing when minimal was at it’s peak and then I got into house music that I guess people would call “deep” – I honestly don’t know how I could describe it any better. I guess it was the newer wave of mainly US producers from the east coast / Midwest who made their take on deep house (I’m thinking about Fred P, Hakim Murphy, Amir Alexander, Jus-Ed, Dj Qu etc.). A lot of European producers joined forces in this era (here I’m thinking about Stephan Laubner aka STL, the Smallpeople crew, Lawrence etc.).
And then when I heard this Newworldaquarium album it all made total sense for me. It’s deep, has a lot of emotion and is such a beautiful record that I’ll carry with me forever – both physically and emotionally. I guess now it’s become a classic as well. Sun is my favorite track on this one. Over 10 minutes of just one simple loop with very few elements and I think I could listen to this forever. Magical stuff. And of course, Apricot is also the star of this album too. If I could only make this type of music. Wow.
c) Dub Tractor – More Or Less Mono
Not much to say here. Danish IDM legend Anders Remmer. I love his Jet alias too. I can’t imagine such good music coming out of this little country. Big recommendations if you don’t know his stuff.
What was your approach to crafting your Truancy Volume mix, and are there any particular tracks that hold special significance for you? “I wanted to create a two hour mix with music that I’ve played out the last part of the year in 2025. The music in the mix is therefore pretty “full on” from the get-go. There are a few unreleased bits by Track & Trace, DJ Popup, Martinez, Central, Mandee and S.A.M. that I’d like to highlight.”
Looking ahead, what territories, musical or otherwise, are you eager to explore in your upcoming work? What are you looking forward to most now in 2026? “I hope to be able to produce another album sometime during 2026 and I’d love to get more into my outboard gear here in my home-studio. Force myself to work with certain synths or effect processors and see what comes out of it.
Also, I’d love to collaborate more with my friends here in town. It’s been a while since I’ve made music with them and it’s a big one on my to-do list this year.”
Last, usual question from us, what was the last thing to put a big smile on your face and when was the last time you had a proper dance?
“When I woke up this morning and I realized that today is my weekly day off from work.
Last dance: November 2025. Already almost two months ago – I should go out more I guess.”
C.K: Soundcloud, Instagram, Bandcamp, Resident Advisor
You can download Truancy Volume 358: C.K in 320 kbps here. No submitted tracklist for this one but we’ll do our best to dig and put one together! Your support helps cover all our costs and allows Truants to continue running as a non-profit and ad-free platform. We urge you to support the future of independent music journalism—a little goes a long way. If you need any IDs though, please leave us a comment on the Soundcloud link and us or C.K will get back to you with the track :)
