Meet The Selectors: Jyoty

‍In Meet The Selectors, we highlight the selectors, DJs and music experts who have presented Listening Sessions at the Devon Turnbull Listening Room in 180 Studios.

Jyoty spent a decade on Rinse FM before lockdown saw her amass millions of online views and become well known far beyond her DIY corners of the scene. She’s spent the years since figuring out how to channel that success.

VF's Kelly Doherty spoke with her about growing up around music in Amsterdam, learning to DJ on the job, and why she'd rather be in the crowd than on the lineup.

For her entire life, Jyoty has been surrounded by music. "I think almost from birth," she says. She grew up in a Punjabi Indian family in Amsterdam, where music permeated every event and gathering, from weddings and New Year's parties to women-only and men-only gatherings and everyone-together gatherings. "I think from literally my earliest memories, music has always been a shared experience," she says. "Listening to it by myself would have come later in life."

Her teen listening habits were a clown car of genres, starting with the gabber sounds that dominated the Netherlands when she was in primary school, Tiësto and Armin van Buuren, and then rap and early ‘00s R&B.

For young Jyoty, the file-sharing service and computer virus super-spreader LimeWire proved a foundational tool. "Those were our first algorithms," she says. "You'd search for one song, and it would give you all these files you weren't searching for, but they were somehow related."

By her twenties, she'd returned to electronic music with UK garage, funky, dubstep, melodic house and Italo disco, and forged herself as a generalist music fan.

"I've always been jack of all trades, master of none," she says. "I always consider myself, in music, my role is to be like the Yellow Pages. I'm not the specialist in any of these things. I'm just a fan, but I can point you in the right direction."

Rinse FM, where she ran a specialist show for over ten years, was her first foray into sharing her knowledge with others. At first, she ran the show without knowing how to DJ. "I was just doing radio off the mixing board, the desk," she says. Station regular Genius pushed her to learn how to DJ, pointing out the bookings she was leaving on the table by presenting only. “For two years I kept saying, ‘No one needs another DJ,’” she laughs.

Her reluctance to add to London’s DJ industrial complex dissipated after Jamz Supernova asked her to open a room at Bussey Building for Rye Lane Festival, on the condition she "just play what you play on radio." Jyoty’s boyfriend at the time gave her two weeks of lessons, and she built a playlist to stick to. "It went obviously so horribly wrong," she laughs. "But I can't be bad at anything; that just doesn't exist in my life."

“The more I started practising on the CDJs at Rinse, the more I was like, ‘Oh, shit, this is really like an extension of my personality.’”

During lockdown, Jyoty went from cult specialist to widely known almost overnight following a stratospherically viral Boiler Room set. "I wouldn't have this career if it hadn't happened," she says, "but I also did not enjoy it at all, and I had to fight to find my way back to who I wanted to be."

The attention came with a version of herself she didn't recognise on the decks, playing sets built for big audiences rather than for her tastes. Instead of slipping smoothly into the mainstream DJ circuit, she decided to challenge her newfound audiences with the somewhat daring approach of publicly telling people not to bother coming to her shows unless they'd spent time with her mixes first and were willing to leave their "hyper-individualistic ways" at the door.

She sat on her viral Boiler Room set for five years before uploading more footage. The result, she says, is a new equilibrium across her sets. This year, for the first time, her 15,000-capacity Maiden Voyage set and her Dekmantel set weren't meaningfully different from each other, or from a night at her own party, Homegrown.

“It’s being well-received, and I think it has to do with the years of just telling people, ‘Hey, like, I'm only letting you know that you don't have to come for your own sake, because I also don't want you to complain in hindsight,’” she says. “If I've done everything I can do on my end to let you know that a set of mine is always gonna be different, depending on my mood, depending on who's before me and after me, you don't have to force yourself to come if that is scary to you.”

During her Listening Room session at 180 Studios, Jyoty built her selections around her personal experiences, presenting an eclectic journey through her first encounters with artists and sounds. She describes it as offering "enough nuggets" for the room to go and chase down themselves afterwards.

She admits to being nervous almost to the point of checking her blood sugar before the first filmed session, with the closeness of a seated room looking her "dead in the eye" being a world away from radio's solo comfort. "It brings the physicality of a DJ set together with the experience of speaking," she says, "without the pressure of stopping the flow of a dance floor."

The next chapter for Jyoty is Homegrown FM, launching from zero followers across every platform, a reset after stepping back from Rinse. "I want to challenge myself," she says. "Can I actually build a radio listenership from scratch, without the backing of an existing station?".

We’re also on the precipice of Jyoty releasing two EPs – the start of a producer era she's put off for years, on principle. "DJs and producers are not the same thing," she says. “I feel like now that I've sold out Ally Pally, now that I've headlined main stages, then I will drop music, because I don't want people to think that I got there because of making quick club tools that are really easy to just get the people in.”

Jyoty’s staying busy, with more shows lined up in the US, Jyoty’s Palace returning to London in 2027 and the simple business of releasing music and running a radio station.

As a friend said to her recently, she's moving from Jyoty the DJ to Jyoty the curator. "I'm just going ten toes down on that," she says. "I want everyone to come to me when they're looking for something."

Find out more about the events at Devon Turnbull's Listening Room in 180 Studios here.