Nico Stojan has died. His family announced it in a post from his Instagram account on Sunday, July 26, and DJ Mag, EDM Identity and Electronic Groove all filed that week. No cause of death has been disclosed. He had been working in Berlin for more than thirty years.

The obituaries reached for the same three anchors, and they are the right ones: resident at Bar 25, cofounder of Ouïe, more recently SONARA. Résumé lines are what obituaries are for. Most of what a resident actually does is invisible from outside the room.

Then, on August 13, Magnetic Magazine published a production diary that had nothing to do with mourning.

I Am, credited to David Mayer, Nico Stojan and Tooker, came out on SONARA Records on July 24, two days before the family's post. Magnetic's How It Was Made column ran Mayer's breakdown two and a half weeks later, in the ordinary working "we" of three people in a studio.

A vocal from the crates

The record started as drums: layered, deliberately gritty, loud hihats, a kick built from four layers, three filtered down to dirt and the fourth carrying the weight. Boom-bap construction, essentially. Then it changed direction. "The charismatic vocal we found deep in Nico's magic crates took control of our process," Mayer writes, "and seemed to command us to choose a classic house-music approach."

Not a synth patch, not a chord progression. A record pulled from a crate at the right moment.

Stojan started out as a hip-hop DJ in the '90s before taking the Bar 25 residency in the 2000s, where EDM Identity credits him with shaping the club's culture through selections that ran jazz and funk into deep house and downtempo. The diary keeps proving that ear: hunting a West Coast "gangsta whine" lead, the three of them landed on a Cherry Audio Memorymode preset called "90s West Coast Gang." A thirty-year-old habit, still audible in a 2026 house record.

"His strength wasn't shown through loudness, but through his kindness, his honesty, and the way he was there for the people he loved."

Stojan's family, in the post announcing his death

He founded Ouïe in 2016 with Acid Pauli, and it became home to releases by Jonathan Kaspar, Chambord and David Mayer; his own records went out through Get Physical, Upon.You and Highgrade. In 2025 he launched SONARA with Mayer, Tooker and Jay Kurahashi-Sofue. Mayer is the throughline: on the roster of Stojan's first label, cofounder of his second, and the one who documented how the three of them worked.

DJVibe's archive has him about where you would expect. One name in the phase-two lineup announcement for BPM Festival 2015, filed in December 2014, sitting between Nico Glenn and Nicolas Matar.

I Am came out of what the trio took to calling basecamps: the April 2026 edition on Isola di San Pietro, a small island off Sardinia where Tooker keeps a studio and where SONARA was founded. It was the third time they had gathered for two weeks with no goal beyond making music into the morning. Mayer says most of what came out of those sessions is still scheduled for release on SONARA over the coming months.