A Soft Guide to Chill: ADE

During Amsterdam Dance Event A Soft Guide to Chill invites numerous artists to activate the Para-siting space.

The programme opens with LNR, the DJ alias of El Bickers, a UK-born, Amsterdam-based writer, researcher, and DJ whose practice bridges archival research with the energy of the dance floor. Through deep investigations into underground music histories and 90s rave countercultures, LNR explores the connections between past movements and contemporary electronic landscapes. Their sets draw from decades of musical experimentation, weaving together forgotten sounds, countercultural histories, and the evolving language of the club.

During Amsterdam Dance Event, A Soft Guide to Chill invites Archetype to perform his new album Nothing New Under The Sun, a critical reflection on how contemporary individual experiences—despite being more connected than ever—are increasingly shaped by feelings of isolation, anxiety, and fragmentation.

The evening also features a live performance by Gizem Öz, an Amsterdam-based composer, sound artist, and contemporary artist working at the intersections of club and gallery, ritual and technology, emotion and abstraction.

The evening closes with Sarah Saleh, an interdisciplinary artist, DJ, and co-founder of BBTCOR, whose sonic practice explores the emotional and spatial qualities of electronic music. Through her research into the 1990s chill-out room, she brings together ambient, dub, downtempo, and psychedelic influences to create spaces for collective listening, reflection, and connection.

Together, Claartje Barkof and Sarah Saleh in collaboration with El Bickers translate the research of A Soft Guide to Chill into an immersive sonic journey, revisiting the chill-out room as a space for memory, experimentation, and communal experience.

BBTCOR (Bring Back The Chill Out Room) is an artistic and curatorial platform that revives and reimagines the culture of the 1990s chill-out room within contemporary spaces.

Rather than focusing on the dance floor, BBTCOR explores the spaces of rest, reflection, intimacy, and listening that historically existed alongside club culture. Through events, radio broadcasts, scenography, research, and public programs, the project investigates how chill-out rooms functioned as environments for recovery, connection, experimentation, and alternative ways of experiencing music.

At its core, BBTCOR asks how these spaces can be reinterpreted today through a critical and inclusive lens. The project combines musical programming (ambient, downtempo, dub, IDM, psychedelic and experimental sounds) with archival research, storytelling, and artistic interventions