Showing up for oneself

Jiun has two boxes of sound. The first is soulful and percussive, R&B at its core, the kind you feel before you think. The second is louder. Think chopped breakbeats, hyper-syncopated kicks, bass-forward club music with vocal chops. "I think it unlocked a different part of me," she says. The unlock was physical. She hadn't grown up expressing herself through movement. Bass music is what loosened it.

She started DJing in December 2023, on a rented Grover controller and a twelve-month subscription she chose on purpose. "I was like, yeah, I can't escape this," she says. "I have to learn it now." By New Year's she was playing her first set in front of friends. The beatmatching was off and the mixing rough. She had been a DJ for less than a month.

A few months in, she was in Cape Town. Prime, an event known for platforming new and queer DJs, gave her a slot. She'd been a regular there years earlier, Ubering in from her exchange semester in Stellenbosch. It was the first time she played in front of a crowd that wasn't already in her phone.

She grew up in a small quiet country called Brunei, and although she misses the nature, there wasn't much room for the kind of creative life she'd come to want. She came to Germany to study, eventually settling in Berlin, and the contrast couldn't be sharper. The scene she found wasn't one scene. She could be playing hip-hop one night, bass music the next. Subcultures next to subcultures. "There's a lot of room for people to be versatile," she says. "If you want to share the music you like, there's space."

Setting a fee is its own thing. Starting out, you don't know what you're worth, and some bookers know it. They offer rates you don't believe you deserve, and when you push back, they make you feel like you're not good or popular enough to be asking. "I used to just accept anything out of desperation," she says. "Now another way to show up for myself would be to push for a rate I believe I deserve. Otherwise I'd feel small already, going behind the decks."

Her practice is less consistent than she'd like, and she knows why. Her brain still runs on a logic she traces to childhood, the kind that says fun has to be earned. Get the work done first. Then play the music. "Which is of course a very flawed way of thinking," she says, mid-sentence, already correcting herself.

These days she watches fewer how-to-mix tutorials and more recorded sets, to study how other DJs build sets. Asked whether she'd post the kind of educational videos that fill her TikTok feed now, she pauses. "It's scary to put myself out there like that," she says. And in relation to the genres she plays, "maybe the question is, who am I to tell other people about this if I don't come from that culture?"

What she'd prefer to teach, if she ever did, is electronic music from her side of the world. The stuff she's still discovering herself.

Biology, the field she came from, is something she plans to go back to. She talks about her brand the same way, the longer thread of how she wants to present herself, with nature and groundedness running through it. "Being in nature brings me a kind of joy that comes only in pockets," she says. "It's still. There's no rush. And it's the same when I'm mixing music. When I'm in it, I'm immersed." She plans to learn how to produce music, and incorporate elements of nature into them. Field recordings. Bird sounds in a jungle track.

Asked what a version of her from a few years ago would think, she doesn't hesitate. "She'd love it." Through music, she's allowing herself to take up space she was never brave enough to take. And what would she like to remind herself?

"Try not to focus so much on what people might be thinking, and just keep playing what you enjoy."

She knows the pocket of the crowd that isn't dancing isn't the whole story. She's learning the missed transition only she heard isn't either. Tonight, she has a mix to make with a controller at home.

Photography by Iris Wang and Joana Maxwell.

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