Always archive.

“I'm a big music dumper. So I started making these playlists on my Spotify and they're called ‘iconic and amazing songs I listen to.’ It's nice to look back because you can hear the headspace you were in. Often it's quite erratic. Like sometimes it'll be jazz, sometimes it'll be funk, sometimes hip hop. It started to grow and I started airing it, but I was really doing it for myself to remember things to go back to. So I'm big on archiving. And then I shazam a lot too. Even if it's a song that I know, I'll shazam it just so I have it logged in my Shazam. And I try to let people play music around me, ironically. Everyone's like, ‘you're a DJ, put a playlist on.’ But I like to hold off so I can hear what other people are listening to. That’s the only way you can really learn.”

Follow a through line.

“I like an overarching theme, but that doesn’t mean a ton of constraints around it. When you have something to build around, it makes things fit better and it's easier to tell a story, which is what the experience should do. So I'll lead into whatever that is, then I have the flesh of everything — usually a mix of things I'm listening to, and something that's a party starter, like a nostalgic song — then go back and forth between those things. Nestling familiar songs next to something completely new, where the likelihood of people knowing it is pretty slim to none. So it's like, ‘oh, that was cool.’ And then, ‘oh, wait, now I know this again.’ Because if you just go in a completely new direction, you lose people's attention.

And then whatever I'm closing out with is the energy I want to leave people on. So if it's midnight and the party’s really going, I weave it in that direction. But if it's four in the morning, I might put on a nineties R&B song or an outro to something just to get people in the headspace of ending. But even through the build, through different genres, there's something overarching. I'll play a rap song, and then I'll play the original song that the rap song sampled, then play another artist with a similar BPM [beats per minute] to that sample. So there’s something connecting each thing to the other.”

Make an impact with your first song.

“The first song is always really powerful because it comes from silence. When you're at a live show or you're watching a fashion show, the first song comes on and you think, I'm about to go on this journey. I'm so excited to start having that again, that moment of waiting for something and you don't know what it's going to be. The last fashion week I went to, January 2020 in Paris, I went to the Jacquemus show and we were in this giant stadium sitting there in silence for ages. And all of a sudden white stadium lights came on. And the first song began. And I was like, YES let’s GO, this is going to be big. Then the models started walking to the music and everyone was just like, ‘this is going to be so sick.’"

Get out there and listen to the live stuff.

“I hope that live music and things like jazz come back in a big way and people go see bands, because we haven't been able to experience that in so long. Of course I'm a DJ, so I love to see other DJs, but the thought of seeing a 10-piece band is so exciting to me. I want to see the chemistry of musicians on stage. A lot of artists waited to put out projects, so I think we're going to have a lot of really good music come out. There’s a wave coming.”