The adjective “mischievious” describes no one if not the Berlin-based Brit Steven Warwick, known to many as Heatsick, who graced this festival in 2012 with his own brand of Casio house. That considered, the tone of his new PAN-released album Nadir, meaning “foot” or “base” in Arabic, is all the more surprising. A foot is the opposite of a zenith—a foot is all the way at the bottom. It was a death that brought Steven Warwick out of his rhythm, so to speak, and led him to take a break from Berlin and undergo an artistic and personal reboot and what became a conceptual merging of the two personas of Heatsick and Steven Warwick. His new songs are permeated by gloom: in “CTFO” (short for “Chill the Fuck Out”), he sings “Why so sad? / Don’t feel so bad” in a spartan internet lingo that coats despondency in a shell of bitterness and humor. But Nadir functions mainly as a catalyst via which to transform tragedy into action and life-affirmation—at the end of the day, Warwick stays true to the dancefloor and to the lurching grooves and mischevious wit of his former unscathed persona. 

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