Everyone’s Invited to the Jam with Soulection at Magazine London

There are some lineups where you spend the whole day waiting for the one or two names you came to see. Soulection at Magazine London was the opposite. The joy was in never quite knowing who might appear next.

Taking over Magazine London, Soulection brought together an already ridiculous lineup of artists for a day that felt like one enormous, constantly evolving jam session. It was exactly the kind of atmosphere Soulection does best: warm, communal, incredibly cool without ever feeling like it was trying too hard to be.

Magazine was also a great home for it. The huge industrial space gave the event enough room to feel like a proper occasion, while still keeping the crowd connected to what was happening onstage.

At the centre of it all was Joe Kay. As Soulection’s founder, he could easily have spent the day simply reminding everyone of the platform’s influence. Instead, his presence felt much more generous than that. He brought the vibes, obviously, but he also seemed determined to bring as many people into the celebration as possible.

Throughout his set, artists kept appearing to join him, turning it into one of those performances where looking away almost felt risky. KWN came out. Odeal came out. Artists jumped onstage beside him, and what could have been a straightforward DJ set became something much more fluid and alive.

That, more than anything, encapsulated why the day worked so well. Soulection has always existed as more than just a label or radio show. There is a real community around it, and seeing artists move in and out of each other’s performances made that tangible. Nobody felt sealed off into their allotted slot before disappearing backstage. The whole thing felt collaborative.

And then there were the special guests.

Leon Thomas and Sasha Keable were easily my personal highlights of the day. On a lineup that was already stacked, managing to pull out two artists of that calibre as surprises was the cherry on top.

Both appearances sent a fresh jolt through the crowd and became the kind of moments that make live music so exciting in the first place: something you didn’t know you were going to get until suddenly it was happening in front of you.

The collection of artists made the day feel genuinely representative of the musical world Soulection has spent years building: R&B, soul, electronic music and everything that exists somewhere between them, without much interest in keeping those boundaries particularly neat.

There was also something wonderfully joyous about the whole thing. Festivals and big music events can sometimes become an exercise in logistics: rushing between stages, checking set times, trying not to miss whoever you have mentally designated as the reason you bought the ticket.

Soulection felt much easier than that. You could simply be there, dance, discover someone, watch another artist unexpectedly walk onstage and then lose your mind with everyone around you.

By the end of the day, it was difficult to pick apart where one highlight stopped and another began. The atmosphere was collaborative, spontaneous and, most importantly, incredibly fun. A joyous day of very good music, very good people and the constant possibility that someone else even more brilliant might walk onto the stage at any moment.