Welcome Maflada
We are thrilled to welcome the sunny and warmest Mafalda to the Pool roster! 🌞
Mafalda has a motto: only play the records you really, really love. You can see that ethos in action when she’s behind the decks, as the beginning of a track makes her smile, or as she sings along the whole way through.
Over the past 10 years, she’s become a celebrated selector, guided by the search for songs that feel like a warm hug. It’s why she was called upon to open for Madlib for a Boiler Room session in Madrid, and invited by Four Tet to play on his curated bill for Nuits Sonores festival in Lyon, and is a standout name on European festivals like Field Day, Glastonbury, We Out Here and Primavera Sound. Her guest mixes for Dekmantel, Gilles Peterson’s 6 Music show, RA and beyond are thoughtful, inventive and laced with the occasional what-the-hell rarity.
Jazz was the seed for Mafalda’s DJ journey, specifically hearing Sadar Bahar play a jazz tune in the early hours at Corsica Studios in 2014. It also inspired her to relocate from Lisbon to London, where she found a home on the UK capital’s dancefloors. She soon got the record bug, and landed a job at London record shop Cosmos. Until it shut in 2015, you could also find her at storied basement club Plastic People, the pitch-black boom room where she met Floating Points. Mafalda was instrumental in the early days of his reissues label, Melodies International, going on to co-run the label and programme the events until 2019. She continues to put together the fanzines that accompany the releases, providing artwork as well as being a resident at their parties.
Since then, Mafalda’s monthly NTS show Tropic of Love has built a dedicated following and turned into a label, “guided by mood rather than genre”, she says. It was named for a Shirley Nanette song, which sprung out of Mafalda’s cult DJ residency at a pub in east London and originally started on Red Bull Radio in 2018. She’s a passionate record collector, but not elitist, and her own imprint is her way of sharing the music she loves even further.
Contact Ryan@thepool-london.com for enquiries
