Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy would never say it herself, but she’s an underground totem. A life spent dedicated to music has earned her unwavering respect as a DJ, radio host, curator and unofficial guardian of the culture. Whether she’s DJing the world’s most cultured clubs and festivals, musically hosting the Loft parties, curating a Classic Album Sundays event at the Royal Albert Hall, presenting her weekly Balearic Breakfast radio show or remixing The Cure and Róisín Murphy, her love of turning people on to new sounds has no limit. 

 Murphy’s production career began back in the early 00s under several different aliases. She was effortlessly eclectic from the off, and these days is a celebrated and in demand remixer who works under the Cosmodelica alias. She’s added versatile twists to everyone from Horace Andy and Candi Staton to Fat Freddys Drop, Lady Blackbird and Crazy P. In 2025, she began a project called Electrick Eden, a supergroup with Joe Goddard and Alexis Tyalor (Hot Chip), Al Doyle (LCD Soundsystem) and Lou Hayter (New Young Pony Club), that launched with a Cosmodelica Electrick Eden remix of The Cure at the personal request of Robert Smith, with plenty more to come.  

In between her extensive DJ travels, Murphy hosts her bi-weekly Balearic Breakfast radio show. It’s an unbound adventure into psychedelia, rock, jazz funk and beyond that is consistently one of the most-listened-to shows on Mixcloud with a clued-up community of like-minded music lovers tuning in every week. Naturally, the show’s reach has expanded into an on-going compilation series on Heavenly Recordings that has taken on a life of its own and also includes a residency at London’s NT’s Loft as well as a Pike’s takeover in Ibiza as part of Colleen’s All Night Long residency.  

In 2010, Murphy founded Classic Album Sundays, a celebration of albums that demand to be listened to uninterrupted, in full, on a high-end sound system. The simple idea helped crystallise and legitimise the audiophile culture that has grown over the last decade. CAS is now the world’s biggest album listening event and platform, with ongoing events at the V&A, the Royal Albert Hall and The British Library, and guests as varied as Nile Rodgers, Bowie producer Ken Scott, Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, Jarvis Cocker, Roisin Murphy, Eddy Grant and Laurie Anderson. 

For Murphy this is not a career, “it’s a quest.” Underpinning everything is her longing to build a community and uplift like-minded music lovers. She’s been doing this since 1982 when she debuted on high school radio in Massachusetts, and a love of the medium has endured ever since. In 1986, she relocated to New York to study sound and radio at the NYU Film School and became the first female program director at WNYU, one of the most significant college stations of the era. After graduation, she continued to work in radio and her syndicated show, Music View, went out to over 200 college stations across the country. 

Her musical curiosity later took her to David Mancuso’s Loft party, where the eclecticism made an immediate impact. A friendship with Mancuso was cemented and he became a life-long mentor. With him, Colleen co-produced The Loft compilations on Nuphonic, co-founded the London Loft party with David, Italy’s Last Note Loft party and they continued hosting parties together until he died in 2016 and at Mancuso’s request, she became Chairperson of The Loft to protect Mancuso’s legacy and continue the Loft for the next generation. 

A true music obsessive, Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy’s standing in the global dance music community has never been higher. “I will never stop discovering music,” says Murphy. “You always have to be looking ahead, expanding your horizons.”  

With her at the helm, the culture is in safe hands.