The 2026 edition of International Music Summit Ibiza was a magnificent event, not only because of the high number of participants, but also because of its multicultural atmosphere. A special energy flowed through all three days of the conference, filled with emotion as the next generation actively took part in the intensive days of the Pete Tong DJ Academy, and their love for music was truly contagious for everyone attending. The strong presence of the younger generation was also reflected in the residency lineups of Ibiza’s club events during the season. One of the most inspiring panel discussions of the conference featured Sister Bliss. Who, as a female DJ, not only created a new visual identity within the electronic music scene, but also demonstrated that authenticity and individuality can be more important than the traditional pop-star image. This mindset later influenced many female artists as well as festival fashion culture. In the electronic music world of the 1990s and 2000s, the iconic image of Faithless also helped transform underground club fashion into a mainstream trend.

Sister Bliss played a key role in the point where electronic music and fashion began to emerge from the 1990s onward. Her minimalist yet distinctive style—combining black leather, futuristic elements, and streetwear—became part of a new visual language within club culture. Through this aesthetic, she helped blur the boundaries between music and fashion, turning DJ culture into a space where sound and style evolved together.

Her aesthetic sensibility was strongly influenced by the work of Jean Paul Gaultier, as well as the punk aesthetic represented in London by Vivienne Westwood. Today, she is particularly drawn to the futuristic and innovative fashion world of Iris van Herpen. Through this perspective, she contributed to blurring the boundaries between music and fashion, turning DJ culture into a space where sound and style evolve together.

I’m wondering, how many instruments do you play?

Well, kind of only just keyboards now. But I used to play about five.

What do you think made Faithless stand out in the crowded electronic music landscape in the 90s?

Well, lots of different reasons, I think. Because we felt dance music was becoming very disposable and a bit banal. Maxie brought this gravitas with his philosophy to the lyrics, and we wanted to have this feeling that took you somewhere else — not just the party feeling, but a deeper feeling, because dance music, for me, always had a higher message, a higher purpose, a higher meaning.

When we got together to make our first track, it was about frustration. So Rollo asked Maxie to write lyrics about frustration. The first record we ever made together as Faithless was called “Salva Mea”, and the main hook is “Just below my skin, I’m screaming,” which I know a lot of people can relate to, but it’s not something you usually hear in a club. So we wanted our music to have a message and go deeper, and maybe it was quite uncompromising at the time. Even “Insomnia” has a darker message than the usual “throw your hands in the air and party” kind of music. I think something about the music as well was quite melancholy and quite cold. People have described it as “happy-sad.” But I also think the way Maxie’s voice sits in electronic music — when that came through the speakers in a club, it just didn’t sound like anything else. It wasn’t kind of hip house, like Doug Lazy “Let It Roll”, you know, or the kind of American Jungle Brothers — that was the first time I kind of heard rap, but in a club, not on a rap song, but on a house beat.

I think those were maybe the ingredients: the spirit of the music, which was darker and more intense; the spirit of the lyrics, which was more like poetry and spoken word than a big diva singing over the top; and the message. All of those things made us unlike the other dance acts in the ’90s, and hopefully there was a lot of emotion there as well. It is emotional, I think.

What does „higher purpose” mean for you in the electronic music scene?

Well, with Faithless, Maxie’s lyrical agenda came from the fact that he was a Buddhist. I’m not a Buddhist myself, personally, but I loved how Maxie put the wisdom he had fought for throughout his life into his lyrics. It wasn’t just songs about a broken heart or how much I love you. He was always trying to impart something special from the heart — the gritty truth of being human, but also with a kind of hopeful message.

I don’t know anybody who has ever come close to the spirit that Maxie had. For us, Faithless was a vehicle for Maxie’s lyrical agenda and philosophy, because there was a lot in it that we agreed with. That was the spirit — that sense of belief that there is a universal consciousness, and that there is a space where, when you are all lost in music, we feel as one. So we wrote songs about it, like “God Is a DJ” and “We Come 1.” That was alluding to a higher message.

“These tracks became part of the cultural landscape of our lives in the 80s and 90s. Did you realize at the time how big these hits would become?” 

Well, they were real hits. They were global hits in the actual pop charts, but they were not made as pop music — they were always made as club music, breaking in the clubs first before they got played on the radio. It took us two attempts to release “Insomnia” before it became successful. We thought it was already successful because we got to around number 27 in the charts the first time around, but then demand for it just grew and grew. There was no Shazam back then, but people would come up to the DJ and say, “Have you got this song that goes, ‘I can’t get no sleep’?”

We were on a tiny independent label, not a major label, so we re-released it a whole year later, after we had first made it and put it out. At that point, it had grown into a huge hit in Europe and on MTV. Radio in the UK told us it wasn’t a hit because it didn’t have a chorus or a hook. But by the second release, there was a huge wave across Europe. Going into the top three in Germany was a very big deal in the ’90s. We were selling a record every two seconds, and then the UK kind of looked like it was missing the boat if it didn’t play it. At that time, all the DJs at Radio 1 — which was the key place to get music to a wider audience and break crossover hits — were crucial. There are millions of stations now, millions of TV shows, but back then there was kind of one.

We had success in the underground, but to enter the mainstream consciousness you had to be on Radio 1. In the year between the first release and the second release, they got rid of all the DJs and brought in a new guard who understood that house music was the music of youth — a youth culture that was not going to go away. It had been powering through from the underground since around 1987–88, and finally broke into the mainstream, I would say, in the mid-’90s, when it became inescapable. Before that, it was so underground you didn’t hear it in the daytime on the normal radio show.

At the time, we got sent all the chart positions. And again, when we released “We Come 1” — I think that was in 2000, 2001, or even 2002 — I can’t even remember now — by then we knew we had an audience. So in fact, it became more and more stressful, because we wanted to make each record have its own space, but still feel like Faithless, and still have DJs playing it. I remember by the time we came to release “We Come 1” on the third album, Outrospective, everybody was playing really fast music, like 136 BPM, very speedy-sounding tracks. And it was like, “How are we going to make records that fit what DJs are playing at the moment?” “We Come 1” was kind of a response to that. It’s probably one of the fastest pieces of music we’ve recorded — although maybe “Mass Destruction” has more BPM — but that was never meant as a pure club, club, club tune. For us, the clubs were so important in the progress of the music. Perhaps that’s why it’s still enduring now, because it wasn’t made as pop music — it was made to move the feet and the heart in the disco first.

How do you see the Faithless legacy today? How do you keep it?

Well, we’re touring again, so for me, legacy is not something that gathers dust in a cupboard, something you never look at. To keep it alive, we put the band back together after eight years to honor Maxie, because we lost him. I still feel his message is as important as ever. We started performing live again in 2024, and the reaction was so amazing that it made me want to carry on. The legacy is that other people still love our music. There’s a whole new generation coming to the shows. I still DJ, I still play our music, and we also make a lot of new music.

We had a new album out last year, “Champion Sound”. So for me, the legacy is always about creating new music that sits alongside the old music. The live band is a great context where you can hear “Insomnia” next to a new song from Champion Sound, like “In Your Own Groove” or “Fugitive”, or a bunch of other dance floor focused tunes that I’m also really, really proud of from the new album. So for me, it’s one long continuum. Legacy feels meaningless unless you’re actively doing something in the present day. If I get incredibly old and ill, then I’ll probably stop, and then the legacy will be something that other people continue.

Collaborating is also part of the legacy — meeting young artists who have a voice, who have a lyrical agenda, who have something to say. For me, that is also Maxie’s legacy: that the platform of Faithless is open for people to express themselves. So we love collaborating with new artists in the studio who have that spirit of Maxie — whether it’s spoken word or rappers and artists like Sully Breaks, Caleb Femi, who we worked with on the last album, or Jazzie B from Soul II Soul — a true legend. Artists like him made it clear that we wouldn’t have been Faithless without influences like Soul II Soul, who were so important in the ’80s. So for us, Faithless is a way of meeting our heroes and also, I guess, the heroes of the future.

You started to Dj-ing in the beginning of the 90s and not too many women were at that moment in that scene. How you find your way? How could you keep your feminine attitude in this man’s world?

I don’t know. That’s a really good question. I don’t think I had quite a masculine attitude when it came to it, because it was just all men, all the time. It was very sexist in lots of ways, but I worked really hard. I think I’m good at what I do. It’s actually quite difficult to say that as a woman, because people want to put you down or assume you’re only there because you look a certain way. I think there was a slightly patronizing attitude towards female DJs in the early days, so I practiced very hard to become a really great DJ. Back then, with vinyl — before CDJs and the digital world we live in now — you really had to learn how to mix, scratch, cut from one record to another, and understand how to create a flow throughout the night. I watched other people, and I found the female DJs who came before me really inspiring. I wasn’t the first. I was just so crazy about house music and clubbing — it was my life. Still is. It sounds a bit sad, but it gave me a community. I also think electronic music is such a rich space to express yourself as an artist, because a lot of people in that world also come from visual arts backgrounds — graphic designers, animators, photographers. There’s something about the way electronic music and visual aesthetics come together. I’ve loved all of that: making albums, videos, covers, artwork, photo shoots. It’s been an education.

I was just thinking about DJs now needing to become a brand. I mentor young people, and they ask me, ‘How do I become a brand?’ And I’m kind of like, ‘I don’t know… I guess you have to stick around long enough.’ That’s the mad thing now. Instead of thinking, ‘I’ve just got to become really, really good at what I do,’ people are focused on building a profile. For me, making music was always connected to getting bookings. Before I met Maxie or Rollo, I was already making my own music because I needed people to understand why they should book me, why my name should be on the flyer. I also had lots of friends who loved music, so I’d bring them with me. Then suddenly you become the DJ who brings a crowd. There was a kind of format to it early on. In one way there were no rules, but those were the rules I understood: if people came specially to see me, the club would book me again.

Now it’s all about followers and social media — a completely different energy. DJs have huge teams around them to help create their image and make their mark on the world. It’s a very different environment now. I guess, for me, I had to become quite tough — maybe even quite masculine, if you want to gender that attitude. Because it’s a lonely job. The hours are long and crazy. Unless you bring your friends with you, you’re constantly missing birthdays, weddings, parties — other people’s lives — because you’re on a plane, in a hotel room, or asleep during the day because you’ve been up all night. It’s an upside-down, crazy kind of life, so I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone. I think you have to be tough, whether you’re male or female.

You have also been producing for a longtime, not just nowadays. When you remixed Moby in the early period of your career, how did this change your producing style?

We did lots of remixes, so I wouldn’t say that particular one changed everything. But we did a Moby remix back in the day that kind of opened the door for us to make “God Is a DJ,” because we felt very stuck with everybody wanting more “Insomnia”-type music. With the second album, Sunday 8PM, we wanted to change our sound, because we wanted to develop as a band while still sounding like Faithless. Sometimes doing remixes for another artist helps unlock the pressure you put on yourself — that feeling of, ‘It’s got to be this, it’s got to be that.’ When you’re working on somebody else’s music, the stakes aren’t quite so high. You relax a bit more, and then the inspiration comes.

In a strange twist, we’re actually doing a couple of shows with Moby in the summer, which is exciting, because I think he did a great renaissance of his sound at Coachella this year. I watched that with real interest because I’m a big fan of Jacob Lusk, who was singing with him from the band Gabriel’s. I remember thinking, ‘That was a really clever thing to do.’ It was soulful, fantastic, and immediately touched your heart.

You’ve got to remember, Moby’s album Play sold something like 25 million copies. There’s a whole new generation now that just don’t know how enormous and influential that album was. There was a time when it was playing on almost every stereo in the world. Anyway, it’s good that we’re all still going — the old ones, the originals.”

You didn’t just change electronic music or the club scene — you also helped open the door for electronic music in the pop world. At the same time, your fashion expression and minimalist style also became very influential in that era. Your outfits and visual style helped shape the image of club culture in a very natural, organic way. How did you see the connection between fashion and electronic music? Did the club scene’s visual identity happen organically, or was there also a conscious approach to image-making?

Well, for us, the very first image-making exercise was our first video. The stylist put Maxie in this priest outfit and then in a suit, and he carried that suit aesthetic into the live shows. So Maxie — this beautiful, tall, bald Black guy — had this iconic silhouette in his body. 

For me, fashion and music have always been completely interlinked. I’ve been dressing up and doing crazy things with my hair since I was really young. I’ve probably had about twenty hairstyles over the years. It all came from club culture. What I found interesting about club culture in the beginning was that it started with a kind of dressing down — wearing baggy clothes, being less sexualized. Going out was about getting lost in the music. So I wore all the baggy clothes, fluorescent colors, mixed with ethnic clothing like Indian kaftans. There was this mixture of Eastern mysticism and oversized streetwear in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I always followed fashion and designers. I loved trying to wear things that nobody else was wearing. I guess I liked that feeling of belonging while still being an individual. When I started earning actual money, Jean-Paul Gaultier became very exciting to me. Every season I would go to the Jean-Paul Gaultier shop in London and buy one piece, because I knew I could wear it on TV, on stage, in videos, with the band. I loved it, and Maxie loved fashion too. I remember we bought him three Jean-Paul Gaultier suits, and he just adored them. He looked so beautiful in them. They lived and breathed in a different world from our everyday clothes — they were part of the stage identity, part of creating a look.

I like it when as a band we have a coherent look. I know what I like, and I have quite a strong opinion about that. You’re right — it’s quite simple and minimal, but I love strong shapes, good shoulders, sleeves, and certain details. I love the punk aesthetics. I love bondage clothes  and designers like Vivienne Westwood. I wore a lot of Westwood back in the day. It makes me slightly sad, especially in the DJ world now, when I see endless DJs wearing black T-shirts. I’m like, ‘Come on guys!’ There’s a whole world of creative geniuses out there making the most amazing clothes.

I am following people on Instagram who work with 3D printing and create sculptural gowns for the Met Gala out of 3D printed plastic. It completely blows my mind. Designers like Iris van Herpen — when I look at work like that, I feel like I’m watching another kind of genius. Something transcendent.

For me, growing up in London, fashion, street culture, and electronic music all mashed together. From b-boys to graffiti artists to hip-hop culture, street style became deeply connected to club culture. But because I started DJ -ing on the gay scene, I also loved how inventive people were. It wasn’t just baggy clothes — you saw real characters. People like Boy George would turn up wearing practically a teapot on his head, or some incredible suit made out of Astroturf or something. I think if you’re in music, it’s a bit sad not to be adventurous with fashion. I mean, right now I’m wearing a beige jumper, but it’s got little eyes on it and fluorescent pink details that match my hair. This is my day wear for working in the studio.

You are coming to play at Sziget festival and when you launched your new album in 2024 you played in the Barba Negra with your full band in Budapest.

It was fantastic. It was snowing, it was cold so I am looking forward to when it will be hot.

One sentence really stayed with me from the IMS conference, when you said that dancing is actually a political thing. We experienced it in Budapest with this huge shift and soon you’ll be playing at the Freedom of the Island at Sziget Festival. I am wondering what we can expect from the band? What can we expect from you personally? How are you preparing yourself for such a big moment at Sziget festival?”

Well, this one feels really significant because we’ve headlined Sziget a few times with Maxie, and it’s such an amazing festival. So it means a lot to come back without him. But as always, it is music from all of our albums, it’s a love letter to dance music, it is a huge tribute to Maxie. We’ll be bringing a seven-piece live band and an amazing show and we will be celebrating freedom and from the chokehold of Orban gone. The right wing doesn’t triumph in the other parts of the world because we are having a huge wave in the UK and it’s extremely frightening. A huge rise of misogyny, racism. It is people who feel like they have permission to be particularly disgusting to other human beings. That’s not okay. So hopefully the show will be a celebration of the fact that change is possible and that repressive regimes and the ways of thinking feel so old-fashioned. Where is the modern thinking in repressing people just because they look different, sound different, or live differently? Haven’t we moved on? It will be a celebration of togetherness, unity, and different generations coming together so hopefully some of the original Faithless fans will be there as well.

What is your message for the next generation?

Come and see Faithless, and bring your open hearts.

Képek : Dan Reid, Juan Sabatino