During the Carnival season, you're playing a slew of fêtes, headlining your own events — Soca Brainwash and Post Carnival Relief — DJ-ing J’ouvert Morning, as well as Monday and Tuesday on the road for the procession of the bands. How do you keep your sets fresh?



How I approach Carnival changes based on the length of the season, which is different every year because Carnival is determined by Ash Wednesday. In the beginning of the season, my set consists of 90-95% new music because people really have to get accustomed to it. I try to rotate those new songs as much as possible to get audiences attuned to what artists are releasing. It's a lot of new music coming out. You can have like five to seven weeks where you have to learn more than 200 songs. As the season progress and people get into to the new music, then I start incorporating some of the older songs for variety.



By the time the Soca Brainwash mix comes around, I have a bunch of different edits, acapellas and mixes. The way I put together my live show is totally different from the way that I play other sets prior to Soca Brainwash. Every weekend I play around with different mixes to see how my MC and I can work together and introduce the music in new ways. It's one genre of music that you're playing for a couple of weeks. The audience will be going to tons of parties so you don't want your set to feel repetitive.



How did you first get started in DJing?



I've been DJing since I was young, like five or six years old. My father had a vast record collection, so I used to listen to him play music in the house. I was always fascinated with putting music together; how one sound mixes with another. When I was eight years old, we had a record player that played the radio as well. I used to try to match the songs on the radio with some of the records that my father had. Those were my first attempts at making mixes, so I understood the concept from very young. It evolved overtime. By 16, I was playing in clubs professionally.



When did you start putting mixes online?



I started when I was in Florida at school at Florida International University. I started the mixes as a sort of forum for Caribbean people who felt disconnected from home back in 2006. Online radio wasn't as popular back then, so they didn't have access to new dancehall and soca that was coming out.



How did playing in Miami during undergrad affect your DJ style?



DJing in Miami was pretty eye-opening. When I moved there, the city put me in another zone, because I literally had the world as an audience. There were so many different groups there that I couldn't stay in the little box of Trinidadian music. I got exposed to Haitian music and a lot of Southern rap that you would never hear anywhere else. I’d head to South Beach and there was an EDM scene, which was before EDM went mainstream. I became really good friends with Walshy Fire around that time. We'd go to Mansion and Opium and bigger clubs. It was very enriching because it made me more versatile.

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