The slope above the Dnipro River rises steeply behind Kureni. On a Halloween-themed night in November 2024, Camara Stewart played the closing set there as Kyiv's nearly three-year-old wartime curfew approached midnight. He was first booked in the city in 2014, just after Maidan, the same year Russia annexed Crimea and the conflict in Donbas began. He kept returning, even after the full invasion started in February 2022, as nightlife adapted to air-raid protocols and daytime raves. On the lineup, he is known as CMR-A. The set he played at Kureni that night was soon posted online with the headline: "In a time of despair. United through music."
The story behind that booking goes back even further than his time in Kyiv. CMR-A has been shaping dancefloors since 2006, but his roots go back to a UK living room where his father played 7-inch reggae records through a wall of speakers. This was a home version of the Jamaican sound system his parents' generation brought to post-war Britain. The tradition from Ladbroke Grove ran through Notting Hill Carnival and into the small rooms where Stewart grew up. Around that time, DJ EZ appeared on cassette, followed by the Heartless Crew on the early-2000s garage charts. He also discovered the Gatecrasher and Cream superclub era, and the late-90s energy from those Northern English nights still influences his deeper sets today. Before focusing on music, he spent ten years working in women's wear as a stylist and art director.
After becoming close with a group of Koreans during his Master's degree, he decided to follow them home to Seoul in 2009, taking a job that lasted nearly five years. Itaewon's small venues drew him in quickly. The neighborhood, near the old US garrison, has always been an unusually open space where locals can break from daily routines. He started DJing seriously there and launched an events brand, introducing the concept of the Sunday daytime party. On Cheongpo Island, west of the mainland, he led the music camp at KoreaBurn, the country's regional Burning Man, where self-reliance and a gift economy bring together a few hundred Korean burners each July.
He moved to Berlin in 2020, an unusual time to arrive, as lockdowns were in full effect. As venues reopened in stages, CMR-A started to make his own mark on the German capital. He held a weekly residency at Crackers in Mitte. ELSE, the open-air venue on the Spree, put him on bigger summer lineups. His schedule would then fill up with bookings at Phantom Bar, Engtanz, KINK, Sisyphos, and Studio C. Alongside his Berlin gigs, he played internationally in places like Tokyo's "or," Bangkok's Vanilla Sky, Lisbon's Machimbombo. He also returned to London for sets at Sketch, Queen of Hoxton, RADIO bar, and the city's Burning Man Decom.
But it's Kyiv that has left the strongest impression on CMR-A. K41 and Closer defined the city's club scene in the 2010s, while Slava Lepsheev's Cxema parties hosted local-only raves and Rhythm Büro offered heavier nights. Kureni is a bit outside this core, an open-air venue on the green slopes below Arsenalna, near the Dnipro. The Halloween 2.0 lineup he played last November included Ukrainian DJs Alex P and KRØFT. CMR-A has told interviewers that Kyiv changed his view of what a dancefloor can be.
CMR-A has deliberately taken a slower approach to music production. He started his label, Culture Move, in 2025 to release his own tracks. "Didit" was released in March, a seven-minute house track. In mid-April, he released an Era Edits volume featuring reworks of Underworld's "Born Slippy" titled "Midnight" and "Uprise." A week later, "Stutter" rounded out the first release set. His wide-ranging podcast, The Rest is Music, now has six episodes, some of which were recorded live at places like Burning Man's London Decom and KINK Berlin. The tracklists include Orbital, Future Sound of London, Robert Hood, Palms Trax, Marshall Jefferson, and Chaos In The CBD.
On Saturday, July 11, CMR-A comes to Control Club during this phase of his career. After Seoul taught him how to gather a community, a fashion career that supplied a world-shaping visual grammar, Berlin as a base, and Kyiv proved the dancefloor is a place where experience is processed collectively, this city shares that same openness, with a taste for sets that move from deep grooves to harder, hypnotic sounds.
