DJ Mag's "Recognise" series profiles Gideon Berger, known as GIDEÖN, a South London-based DJ, producer, curator and activist whose work fuses dance music with political organising. The piece matters as a portrait of a figure who has occupied a singular, long-standing place in UK club culture, treating house music as a tradition with a lineage worth protecting and using sound systems as a tool of protest and resistance.

Berger's roots run deep: in 1994, aged 17, he played the first track at the Anti-Criminal Justice Bill protest in Trafalgar Square, later spending around 20 years living on the road with New Age Travellers. He co-founded Glastonbury's NYC Downlow in 2007 and its late-night area Block9 with Stephen Gallagher, runs the R3 Soundsystem behind demos such as Stop Brexit and March's 50,000-strong House Against Hate protest, and has collaborated with artists including Dua Lipa, Skrillex, Honey Dijon and Banksy. He creative-directed the Together For Palestine concert at OVO Arena Wembley, which drew 12,500 people and raised over £2 million, launched his HOMO-CENTRIC label in 2022 (17 records in under four years), and is five years into an opera about climate change and AI with English National Opera and ANOHNI.