Dancefloor mysticism and ancestral resonance collide on his recent IBOGA.

“The iboga plant is indigenous to the humid, tropical climates of West Central Africa, including Gabon, Cameroon, Congo, and Angola, which are home to the second-largest rainforest in the world,” read the notes for DJ Joaquin Joe Claussell’s new selection of edits, IBOGA: Unofficial Edits & Overdubs. “It has been used for centuries in spiritual initiation ceremonies and practices, particularly by the Bwiti tradition and religion in Gabon.” Inspired by those influences, Claussell dug through his record collection and hit the studio to make a comp of edits and overdubs that the notes call “African vibrational sounds and rhythms.” Issued in the fall, the edits have just been repressed on vinyl in extremely limited quantities.

Claussell’s obsession with records runs deep. Before IBOGA — before his legendary DJ sets and sought-after remixes — he was behind the counter at Dance Tracks, the East Village record shop that doubled as an underground nerve center. More than a store, it was a sanctuary for the deep, obscure, and percussive. Claussell, an obsessive digger with an encyclopedic ear, helped turn it into a launchpad, both for the records he stocked and the ones he’d produce. That curatorial instinct has fueled his labels, Spiritual Life Music and Ibadan Records, where house music is never just house music but a restless, rhythmic dialogue between past and present, tradition and experimentation.

Claussell’s catalog is stacked with productions and remixes, but his edits might be the purest reflection of his ethos. The Unofficial Edits & Overdubs series, pressed in small vinyl runs, plays like an ongoing séance: lost grooves stretched, thickened, laced with extra percussion until they pulse with new energy. With IBOGA, he pushes that even further, channeling decades of rhythmic obsession through the hypnotic influence of West African traditions.

Other installments in the Unofficial Edits & Overdubs series include Part One & Two of Six, Special Advanced Edition Vol. 2, and Part Four, each offering Claussell’s signature approach: extending breakdowns, layering percussion, and pulling deeper into the groove until the track feels less like an edit and more like a conjuring. Like IBOGA, these releases aren’t just for the dancefloor. They’re excavations that get better with volume, pulling lost rhythms into the present.

On Friday (March 22), Claussell will unveil Praise, a six-LP box set built from the vaults of Savoy Records, what he calls “the Strictly Rhythm of gospel music.” This deep dive into spiritual fire and raw rhythm reshapes classic recordings into floor-stomping testaments to faith, funk, and transcendence.

Claussell told 15 Questions that the role of a DJ is “being a conduit for something greater than all of us. The current landscape of DJ culture doesn’t practice this and that’s unfortunate. But if we were to look at music and art through the lens of spirituality and freedom that derives from it, then I believe that bestowed upon us would be the ability to recognize the incredible gift that we’ve been blessed with.”

He added that DJs and other artists “are given a golden opportunity of transforming the world from the chaotic state that it currently is in to a peaceful planet filled with proper love and understanding. It’s all well and good to see some booty shaking and hands up towards the air on the dance floor. But what I really strive to witness are folks becoming radically changed.”