“We need a place where music is not content,” Copenhagen-based producer pixel.daddy tells the crowd gathered before him in the Nørrebro music venue ALICE. Despite the heatwave that has descended on the Danish capital, his face is obscured by a pink knit balaclava, embroidered with the words “yes, daddy”, and the room is mostly shrouded in darkness – but for a soft, pink glow diffused by a feathered sculpture hanging above him.

This is not a piece of performance art, nor is it a sermon, but rather part of an – only slightly unserious – guided meditation. It’s how pixel.daddy sets the tone for every single SPOILR (fka Spoiler Room… we’ll get into that later), which is the event series he launched in 2022. Each month, emerging artists are invited to play unfinished demos to an audience looking to nurture a relationship with music away from the grip of algorithms and big tech. 

As well as the event’s founder, pixel.daddy is something of a conductor – moulding the room’s atmosphere as he sees fit. If he senses the energy lulling, he’ll press play on one of his own unfinished hyperpop beats, creating ripples of movement and dance. These small adjustments are crucial in maintaining the harmony at SPOILR, where artists must feel comfortable enough to play skeletal versions of their music. It’s a space for muddled lyrics that are yet to be refined and rough ideas for beats or melodies to be workshopped in front of a live audience: “Something that they would get something out of playing,” pixel.daddy explains, rather than music that is complete but unreleased. The idea is that, by playing their music to a room of strangers, artists can decipher what does or doesn’t work in a track.

“The magic thing about SPOILR is that the audience also plays such a big part in creating the atmosphere,” says Norwegian artist Øyunn, who co-hosted the most recent event, featuring an eclectic line-up of local musicians she’s inspired by. “There’s a big contrast to a lot of the other spaces in the music industry where there’s an expectation for perfection. With SPOILR, the audience is there to be a part of a process, so they know they’ll see people in a bit more of a vulnerable place.”

It’s a sentiment that rings true for N.E.GIRL, who was among the 10 performers the night Dazed attended, playing what she describes as a “sketch” that fused techno and dub music. “Playing an unfinished club track on a high-end concert soundsystem is a humbling experience,” she says. “More than anything though, seeing what connected with people in the moment was one of the most valuable parts of presenting my tune.”

In recent years, Copenhagen has solidified itself as the epicentre of some of Europe’s most exciting new music. This is largely thanks to the prestigious Rhythmic Music Conservatory, which has forged acts like Erika de Casier, Smerz, ML Buch and Snuggle and carved out an avant-garde musical identity for the city. Pixel.daddy also graduated from the school in 2024, and it was during his time as a student that he first began hosting SPOILR events, when he realised that he and many of his peers and fellow students had been creating music in a “very isolated” way for years – a method of working which he dubs the “bedroom producer epidemic”.

“It's not that fulfilling to push out music on the internet,” he explains of the solitude that has come to define modern music, both for artists and fans. “​​I think, fundamentally, music only exists when you play it to someone. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum of your laptop; it's been created there, but once it is played to someone else, then it lives, and then it changes for yourself as well.”

Intimate, community-led events have long been the focus, but SPOILR recently found itself in front of a global audience when dance music giant Boiler Room sent pixel.daddy a cease-and-desist, prompting him to change the event name from Spoiler Room, which it had operated as for the previous four years. The experience, he says, was “anxiety-inducing”: a tiny volunteer-run collective gazing up at a private equity-backed corporation with far greater legal and financial resources.

Refusing to bend to their every whim, though, pixel.daddy found ways to have fun with the looming threat of a fully fledged lawsuit. He held a tongue-in-cheek funeral for the old name in his local park, and, when Boiler Room requested he hand over his domain (for free), he hosted an Instagram giveaway instead, offering spoilerroom.org to anyone keen to use it for their own nefarious purposes. “It pissed me off,” he admits. “But it kind of lit a fire under me as well. Boiler Room has totally lost what its core value used to be. They used to platform electronic music scenes across the world, and now it's this headline DJ extravaganza that has nothing to do with underground culture anymore. It made me want to figure out a way that SPOILR doesn't ever become that.” 

Despite losing money on legal fees and the logistics of changing the name, he now looks at the debacle as “a blessing in disguise”, allowing SPOILR to firmly shed any unwanted association with Boiler Room and its parent company Superstruct Entertainment, which was acquired by KKR in 2024. The acquisition has since become the subject of artist boycotts and criticism from activist groups over KKR’s wider investment portfolio and reported ties to companies linked to Israel.

For critics, Boiler Room’s descent from a platform for emerging scenes to merely another notch on the belt for a global investment firm is part of a wider movement where music and culture are polluted by the interests of tech giants and major corporations. SPOILR, now more than ever, exists as the antidote to this big-techification of music. Neither the line-up nor any kind of genre focus is revealed beforehand, making it one of the few spaces where you can still be genuinely surprised by what you’re hearing. “Being exposed to something you don’t like is a really valuable experience,” pixel.daddy says. “Everyone can actually sit through 10 minutes of something you don't like. We put too much emphasis on being comfortable now.”

In shedding any pressure to conform to a predetermined expectation from the audience, the events encourage unrestrained creativity. Pixel.daddy’s own recent EP Laurie Eats Cake, a collaboration with fellow Danish artist Laurie Cakes, was largely shaped by SPOILR events, where its demos were tested live. Through high-octane slut pop and mischievous lyricism, it cuts like a flashing pink neon sign through the city’s hygge, yellowish lamplight, offering a needed burst of fun in a scene now mostly associated with beautiful yet subdued music.

Attention surrounding SPOILR is rightfully growing, and inevitably the possibility of brand partners or one-off events with bigger, established artists has been raised. Pixel.daddy, however, is adamant about maintaining SPOILR’s purity as it expands. He doesn’t want it to become a showcase or a space where artists hope to be discovered by the industry. “That would really ruin it,” he says. “Obviously I want people to come and experience it, but I also want it to be a level playing field for all the artists.”

Moving into the future, he’s keen for SPOILR to one day exist past Denmark’s jagged shorelines, and is toying with the idea of creating a framework that musicians in other cities can adopt for themselves. “I'm imagining that SPOILR could exist in Athens and Madrid and Barcelona and London simultaneously. It would be amazing to have separate entities of SPOILR in different cities that are essentially doing their own thing.” The possibilities, right now, seem endless – but one thing is clear, as he laughs: “Whatever happens, we will never be sold to a major venture capitalist firm.”