Dekmantel's intergenerational DJs compare notes

At Dekmantel’s 12th edition in the Amsterdamse Bos, [Dazed paired Carl Craig with Actress, Efdemin with Polygonia, and Eris Drew with CCL](https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/70918/1/dekmantels-intergenerational-djs-compare-notes), then handed the questions to the artists themselves. The Drew–CCL exchange makes the format’s value specific: an older artist receives belief from a younger one, while the younger artist receives permission to keep becoming.

CCL opens with a question about an intergenerational dancefloor. Drew answers with detail rather than a sweeping claim: “Before the late, great Frankie Knuckles passed, he played a daytime party in Millennium Park in Chicago. I went to see him on my lunch break. Dancers who had been there in the 80s showed up with their grandkids, getting down alongside the house heads of my generation and people who were completely new to the music” (Dazed Digital). She adds that some of the older Warehouse dancers were “dressed like they were going to church” and “moved with an energy and dynamism that put people 40 years their junior to shame” (Dazed Digital).

Then the direction reverses. Asked who had an impact on her as an artist, Drew names CCL: “You did. You believed in me at a time when I had almost stopped believing in myself. Booking me for TUF till Dawn in Seattle in 2017 changed my life and set me on a path toward sharing my music with others” (Dazed Digital). The older artist is crediting the younger one with a career-changing validation.

CCL completes the loop. Asked what she has learned from someone younger and someone older, CCL tells Drew: “I’ve learned from you, for example, that there isn’t an expiration date on being yourself, finding your people and your sound, and that it’s a process you will continue throughout your life” (Dazed Digital). What travels from Drew to CCL is not a technique but permission to keep evolving.

Read narrowly, this is one pair of artists saying what they received from each other. The available excerpt from Dazed ends before Carl Craig’s exchange with Actress is complete, so the evidence here stays with Drew and CCL rather than generalizing to every pairing. But within that exchange the direction runs both ways: Drew supplies example, CCL supplies belief. The usual story about intergenerational exchange is one-way mentorship; here the older artist says the younger one changed her life. That reversal is the reason to keep the quotes at the center.