4/4·Algeria / USA→Marseille, France
DJ, curator of Psartek
Four by Four learned to DJ inside a VR headset during COVID. He'd bought the headset for first-person shooter games. Then he found Tribe XR, a virtual DJ app with working turntables and a real mixer. The tutorial instructor kept repeating one line: "In music theory, all songs have a 4 by 4 time signature."
It stuck. Months later, when he needed a name, that was the one. "Every time you open a DAW, it says 4/4 right at the top," he says. "So everyone sees my name on it."
He's Algerian-American. At 11 he moved to France. He didn't speak a word. School was useless, so he learned the only way that worked: street football with the neighbourhood kids. Grabbed words one at a time. Within a year he was fluent. He could dribble before he could shoot. "I always hit with the tip of my toe. I only learned you're supposed to use the inside of your foot two years ago."
Music ran underneath all of it. At 12 he was up till 5 a.m. watching Ultra Music Festival livestreams from Miami, Tiësto and Hardwell at their peak. "Trance, jumpstyle. Super simple. I couldn't stop watching." A couple of years later SoundCloud pulled him into R&B and hip-hop. His first concert was Logic in Paris. He went alone, first time on the train by himself.
DJing didn't come from a childhood dream. It came from a gap. Around 20 he moved to Paris and discovered nightlife properly. When he moved back south, the kind of parties he'd been going to weren't there. So he threw his own. It was full. But not enough DJs played what he wanted, so he reinstalled the VR app and taught himself off a YouTube channel called DJ Carlo.
He started on Rekordbox because he's a gamer at heart and compared every option before picking one. For three months he mixed with a mouse. No controller. Just a screen and a cursor. Then his friend Bastien Regeste bought a controller, and they learned together. They're at roughly the same level today. Bastien took a bass music path. 4/4 carved out his own.
“You don't know how much time you lose just putting a headset on and taking it back off.”
— 4/4Amapiano was his first real lane. Around 110 BPM, close to house tempo. It taught him how to blend. He still blends straight bar on everything, even hip-hop. Doesn't scratch.
His first paid gig came from a rival collective whose controller only worked with Serato. He had four hours to learn the software before the set. "I was stressing. But at the end of the day they're basically all the same. Most important part is mixing in key."
He uses in-ears instead of headphones. Toggles cue on and off without breaking flow. Pre-cues every track before it hits the speakers.
Prep is methodical. Big "All" playlist pulled from Spotify, sorted track by track into folders: Amapiano, Afrobeats, house. Shows up ready to freestyle between them. Used to plan every transition on Saturday morning. Doesn't anymore.
His orga is called Psartek. Arabic, loosely "congratulations." You say it when a friend gets a haircut. Warm word, slight cheek. It started as 50% Afro, 50% rap, the gap he'd noticed in the South. Other crews copied the formula within six months. He welcomed it. Community was the point from the start, and he kept moving. One series, Soulstice, is 100% R&B selection: songs where most of the room can sing along. The next one is a single-artist night.
He runs the whole thing solo. Idea to venue takes about three days. "Any space can be a club. A club is just a room, a speaker setup, and lights. And the people who show up matter more than the DJs."
French crowds, he says, are têtu. Stubborn. They won't move until the room earns it. No instant bangers, no shortcut drops. You build it slowly. Instagram is LinkedIn for DJs. TikTok is where the actual partygoers live. The hard part is converting one into the other.
Asked what he'd tell himself at 12, watching Ultra at 5 a.m.: "Start now." And what he'd tell himself at 22, mixing his first Amapiano track, Waste No Ties by BRII, on a mouse: "You're on the right track. And you have incredible music taste."
Connections matter more than clout, he says. The best ones come out of nowhere. "You can try to force them. Most of them happen randomly. Just be authentic. Don't suck up. Respect yourself first."
Photography by naïri, lieselfrth, and MCPHOTOSKURO.