I was raised in London. That probably tells you most of what you need to know…

Camden in the early 2000s was a place where you couldn't avoid music. It followed you down the street, leaked out of pubs at lunchtime, lived in the back rooms of record shops and soundtracked every walk to school. By 15, I was working behind those counters, learning the difference between records you sold and records you kept. At 17, I was playing them out, anywhere that would let me - bedroom parties, friends' birthdays, back rooms of bars in Shoreditch, then bigger rooms, then the rooms where you actually played to a crowd…

London taught me everything I know about DJing. The legends, the residencies, the parties, the clubs — that's where I learned what a DJ actually does. It's not just playing songs. It's reading the room. Feeling where the energy wants to go before anyone in the room knows it wants to go there. Building the tension. Holding it. Releasing it at exactly the right moment. That part can't be taught. It has to be felt, and it has to be felt thousands of times.

Then, in 2019, I moved to the South of France, to the city of Aix-en-Provence, and the French Riviera became my new home.

Something shifted here. They say the light is different. Spaces have a different energy. A wedding in a Provençal vineyard at golden hour, a yacht party off La Croisette beach during Cannes, a late-night soirée under the stars with the cicadas singing — these are not London basements, and they don't ask the same things of you.

These days I play across Europe. France, Monaco, Italy, Spain, the Swiss Alps and beyond — wherever the season takes me. My sets have soundtracked the Cannes Film Festival and the Monaco Grand Prix. The rest of the calendar is filled with five-star hotels, private châteaus, ski resorts, yacht clubs, and the kind of rooms that don't have signs out front. Each one asks for its own brief. Soulful house at the start of the night. Disco when the dancing kicks in. Balearic and Afro-Latin house for the in-between hours no one talks about but everyone remembers. Deep house and techno when the floor wants to disappear into itself.

What I do hasn't really changed since. I find the song that makes the room hold its breath. I find the one that makes them release it. I build journeys that feel timeless; moments you can't quite place but never want to leave.

Bon voyage.

— Mat the DJ