He gave his edits away for free until a major label came knocking: this autumn Dombresky tours under a different name

On Saturday 7 November, Manchester’s Depot Mayfield marks ten years of LA DISCOTHÈQUE, and the main-room billing — between Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada and Annie Mac — carries the line «Dombresky Presents Disco Dom». It is not a promoter’s typo: Dombresky is taking the biggest stages of the season with something other than the project that made his name.

The line-up was published by The Warehouse Project, which runs the series in Manchester. His appearances at Nocturnal Wonderland in California on 19–20 September and at the debut Colombian edition of EDC on 10–11 October are confirmed by the press office of Insomniac, the promoter behind both festivals.

Disco Dom is the disco guise of a Frenchman whose real name is Quentin Dombres. Instead of the tech house he arrived in club music with, the sets are built on soul, funk and disco of the seventies and eighties, and the party itself comes wrapped in mirror balls, photo booths and its own drinks menu.

The set nobody had asked for

Before he stood behind a pair of decks he spent ten years as a drummer, and he walked away from it after a night at a rave in a French forest. What he saw in the DJ booth settled the rest of his life in a single evening.

«I was like, what is this? What is this? When I saw this guy playing, I realised that that would be my future for sure» — Dombresky, in an interview with Nylon

The alter ego itself was born at EDC Las Vegas in 2021, when he stepped up and played disco instead of house — on the spot, with nothing agreed in advance. The project then grew its own format of reworks, which the producer calls a «refunk»: Cher, MK, Empire Of The Sun, PinkPantheress and Drake have all gone through it, and almost all of it was given away. His rework of Believe, out in March, is the version of the song that plays on our air: the 1998 original has just passed a billion streams on Spotify.

This summer the Motown catalogue’s turn came. By the producer’s own account, Universal approached him first and offered him ABC — the Jackson 5 song released in 1970. The record came out on 17 July, and the credits read as a shared line: Jackson 5, Disco Dom and Dombresky.

«I believe when you do good things, good things come back to you, and this one is proof» — Dombresky on the offer from Universal

His own label and his own radio

Alongside the alter ego, Dombresky has been building his own infrastructure. In 2024 he founded the label Process Records and opened it with the club series PRX — records aimed at the floor rather than at streaming: Heads High, It’s A Party, Casablanca with Crusy, The Apex with KRESPO.

The second pillar is the radio show Process Radio, which goes out every fortnight: episode 122 appeared on 24 August. In early August the producer played Lollapalooza in Chicago.

The autumn billing shows where all of that led. A project that started as an optional bit of fun between tours now gets its own line on the poster — next to names that disco has rested on for decades.

We looked earlier at who pays for the dancefloor this season — from Berlin percentages to Rotterdam invoices.