Samatha Taylor wants to take you to BUNTOPIA. The New York-via-Texas-via-New York DJ, who whips up dancefloor frenzies as Honey Bun, smiles as she describes her brainchild, a radio show that has since turned into a proper party. It’s about “creating my own planet — my own club — where all my utopic ideas can be met, and I can bring all my favourite DJs and dancers, and all the queer, beautiful Black women. We can all meet at this club and shake our asses, feel comfortable, and feel safe.”

Taylor, in other words, is not just interested in escapism, but hard-earned celebration — music as a launchpad to an entirely new universe. This is hardly new for Taylor. As a teenager growing up in North Texas, where she’d moved with her family at the age of five, she was “pretty isolated”. Splitting her time between running track and cruising through the DatPiff mixtape archive, she wore out her shoes to a soundtrack of Santigold, Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean, artists who were making “punk, alt and weird music that I had never heard before” — a veritable lifeline for the first girl in her school to show up in Doc Martens.

Speaking of her time running, Taylor pulls out the skeleton key to her current musical MO. “The long-distance people were totally against sprints, and vice versa. I was like, ‘I can do it all’.” Her work bears this out. Tune into a Honey Bun set on The Lot Radio and you’re bound to find a pointedly deep grab-bag of styles: steely eyed drum & bass and soulful house, lighters-up pop records and Texan trunk-rattlers. Taylor speaks proudly of being an open-format DJ. “It’s a very Black American style of DJing. There are so many sounds that we have in our repertoire,” she beams. “I enjoy so many different sounds, and I just want to share that and try things out. Also, I’m still learning — I just started DJing four or five years ago!”

Learning, it turns out, is critical to Taylor’s process. She studied Afrofuturism at NYU — drawing lines between Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, and Drexciya — and grew to see DJing as a logical next step. “When you look at CDJs,” she says, “it’s like a command centre. You can launch into the universe through the decks.” Since going full-time last year, she’s leaned into BUNTOPIA and co-founded Soul Connection, a party dedicated to house music as a joyous, femme, and Black thing. In each of these projects, as well as her DJ sets around the city, her goal holds steady: using dance music as a way to both nurture and find community, stretching histories towards the stars in the process. MICHAEL MCKINNEY

For fans of: livwutang, JADALAREIGN, Soul Summit