China’s 20 year journey in sound

The music we grow up listening to does something irreversible to us, something that settles into the marrow long before we have language for it, shaping the way we respond to silence, the way we anticipate a beat drop, the way we lean in when a vocalist stretches a note just a little longer than expected and even when we think we have evolved beyond those early influences, when our playlists become more curated and our tastes more refined, the truth remains that at the core of who we are, we are the music that first held us.

China understands this not as a poetic idea but as lived reality.

When he reflects on how it all began, he doesn’t frame it as destiny, luck or even ambition in the traditional sense; instead, he brings it back to something far more instinctive and intimate.

“I always had a passion for music,” he says. “I was fascinated by how a song sounded. I listened differently. I always wondered how it was made. I was more drawn into the emotion that it evokes.”

That is perhaps the most telling thing about him. Long before he was thinking about crowds or gigs or longevity, he was thinking about emotion, about what happens beneath the surface when sound interacts with the human spirit, about how a sequence of chords can disarm you or restore you or unravel you.

His journey takes us back to 1999, a period when South Africa was renegotiating its identity, when cultural spaces were being reshaped and house music was carving out its own language in townships and inner cities. In Orlando, Soweto there was a garage that quietly became a sanctuary for a boy who was trying to understand why certain sounds made him feel the way they did.

DJ Mbuso, as China remembers him, “was that guy that had everything at the time”, the equipment, the records, the sound system, the technical knowledge and in an era before digital convenience flattened the playing field. Having access to that kind of setup was the difference between dreaming about DJing and learning how to do it.

At first, China would tag along with his older cousin just to be in the space, just to watch and absorb and listen because even then, he wasn’t merely consuming music; he was studying it, paying attention to transitions, to textures, to the mechanics of how one song could dissolve into another without the listener even realising the shift.

“It just felt like home,” he says, and there’s something profound about that, because home is not simply a physical structure; it is a place where you feel aligned, where your curiosity is not questioned but fed.

Eventually, DJ Mbuso saw the hunger. “He said: ‘If you want to learn, you can learn. I’ll leave you with the keys.’ He told me the basics and I figured it out myself.”

There is something deeply symbolic about being handed the keys 

to a creative space, about being trusted to sit alone in a garage studio and make sense of wires and decks and sound levels, about being allowed to experiment without supervision, to fail quietly and try again, to replay the same blend until it stopped sounding forced and started sounding inevitable.

That era also introduced him to DJ Claude, one of the selectors he admired most, a figure who represented not just skill but stamina. At the time DJing was not segmented into polished one-hour sets designed for social media clips but extended journeys that could begin in the afternoon and stretch into the next morning. “A DJ would play from the afternoon right through to the next morning,” he says. “The whole day.”

Those marathons demanded patience and imagination because you couldn’t rely on constant drops or gimmicks; you had to understand pacing, emotional arcs, the subtle art of holding a room’s attention without exhausting it, of knowing when to build tension and when to release it.

Pursuing that calling was not an obvious or socially validated path.

“Me wanting to be a DJ  was unheard of,” he says. “First of all, What is that thing?”

In many black households at the time, success was measured in degrees and job titles that carried visible stability. DJing felt abstract, uncertain, almost indulgent but China navigated that tension carefully, growing up in a strict household where discipline was non-negotiable, structuring his life in a way that allowed him to honour both responsibility and passion.

“The conversation came later, when they saw the passion and dedication,” he explains. Perhaps what shifted things was not persuasion but consistency, the evidence that this was not a phase but a calling.

It also helped that music was not foreign to his upbringing; it was embedded in the atmosphere of his home, carried through jazz records and soulful ballads and the unmistakable warmth of the Motown era.

“My mom loved the Motown era,” he says. “Teddy Pendergrass, Aretha, The Spinners, The O’Jays, The Temptations. That’s where most of my musical palette came from.”

Those influences were not superficial references; they were foundational textures, shaping his sensitivity to arrangement, to vocal layering, to the emotional weight that lives in a well-constructed song. When you add the improvisational genius of jazz legends playing in the background of his childhood, you begin to understand that his ear was trained long before he understood the technicalities of BPMs and crossfaders.

When he compares the DJ culture of the late ’90s and early 2000s to today’s landscape, his tone carries a thoughtful firmness rather than nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.

“DJs then cared more about the art. They were in love with the craft,” he says, recalling afternoons spent travelling from one record store to another after school, moving across Johannesburg and even Pretoria just to hear new releases, just to chase that one record that might transform his next set.

“There was excitement. You had to work for it.”

That labour built intimacy; when you physically searched for music, when you listened to entire CDs at store stations before deciding whether they were worth your limited budget, you formed a relationship with the sound that extended beyond convenience.

Now, he observes, access is immediate and unlimited.

“Everyone has access to everything. It seems easy.”

But ease, he suggests, comes at a cost. “People see music instead of hearing music. They’re more into aesthetics rather than substance.”

He speaks shortened attention spans, the way a song can be judged and discarded after a single distracted listen, how conversations about music often overshadow the act of playing it. “We talk more about music than we play music.”

For China, that imbalance is not just cultural commentary; it is a call to responsibility because DJs are not mere entertainers but custodians of emotional experience. “As a DJ, the gift of controlling people’s emotions is the gift. To make people feel a certain way, then take them here and there, that’s powerful.”

That philosophy was embodied in his recent event, Music and Life, a six-hour extended set at Constitution Hill that functioned less as a party and more as an autobiography in sound, a deliberate attempt to sonically map who he has been, who he is and who he is becoming.

“The whole idea was to give people insight into who China is, where I come from, what influenced me and where I’m going,” he explains, describing the technical and emotional precision required to merge nostalgia, current sounds and future direction without abrupt shifts.

“How do you start at 90 beats per minute and end at 119 and people don’t even feel the transition?” he asks and that question alone reveals the depth of thought behind what might otherwise be dismissed as simply playing songs.

“If six hours feels like two, then you did something great.”

Longevity, in his case, has not come from trend-chasing but from clarity.

“In every mess there’s a niche,” he says. “Just because there are 10 000 people doesn’t mean they all like the same thing.”

Reinvention, for him, has meant returning to school to study music production, embracing humility in order to sharpen his craft further. “Yes, I went back to school,” he says. 

Instead of criticising younger generations from a distance, he has chosen demonstration over debate.

“Instead of opening a podcast and bashing everyone, I’m going to go out there and show them how it’s done. Without ego.”

There is an album on the horizon, four to five years in the making, a 10-track body of work designed to fill what he sees as a missing sonic palette. “There’s a palette that’s missing. Everyone is just banging out. Too much hands in the air.”

He wants to restore the journey, to reintroduce patience, to remind people what it feels like to surrender to a set that unfolds gradually rather than aggressively.

When asked about legacy, his answer stretches beyond gigs and releases. “I want to build things that will outlive me,” he says, speaking about creative hubs, platforms, movements and structures that can nurture future storytellers long after he has stepped away from the decks.

In an era that rewards noise and speed, China insists on depth and intention, choosing not to merely comment on the culture but to contribute to it meaningfully, reminding us through action that music is not disposable content but living memory and that if we listen closely enough, we might find ourselves inside it.