Seth Troxler
“I live to work on projects and build ideas that sit at the point where art, commerce, and ideas meet. For me, this idea of creation is really the essence of life.”
Seth Troxler is one of electronic music’s most instantly recognizable artists. He has carved out his own unique path as a cultural commentator, art curator, restaurateur, and entrepreneur. Descended from a family of cowboys and Baptist preachers, Seth is part African-American, with a singular approach to viewing the world through the prism of contemporary music culture.
Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and raised in suburban Detroit, Seth learned the art of DJing initially from his stepfather (then a college radio DJ) and later from working, at only 16, behind the counter in legendary Detroit record store ‘Melodies & Memories’. It wasn’t until Seth decided to explore new horizons in the mid-2000s, moving to Berlin fresh out of his teens (after debuting at Panorama Bar at just 18 years old), that his DJ career took off.
Since the move from Detroit to Berlin, before settling in London for several years, and now with his time divided between Ibiza and Zurich, Seth has established himself as one of the planet’s biggest DJs (voted the world’s number one DJ in the scene by Resident Advisor and gracing the front cover of Mixmag three times). He’s equally at home playing to the smoke-filled dance floors of some of the world’s most discerning nightclubs, such as CircoLoco, fabric (London), Nordstern (Basel), The Lux (Lisbon) or Blitz (Munich), as he is headlining the world’s largest festivals, like Glastonbury, Movement, Kappa Futur or Sonar. Right from the word go, Seth has been as passionate about food and contemporary art as he is about music, and these two interests have resonated at all points, and in parallel, to his music career.
A multi-faceted modern artist: he has held residencies at talismanic music institutions, pursued his own solo recording career(including a nomination for a Grammy in 2023 for his collaboration with Diplo), and of course, there are the remixes for The Streets, Hercules & Love Affair, and Carl Craig, to name just three. A staunch supporter of independent label culture, he recently debuted his own Slacker 85label and restarted Tuskegee to once again champion underrepresented artists in the dance music community. Furthermore, Seth has found the time to launch the successful Smokey Tails restaurant in London, to create and host his party during the Rio Carnaval, and then to stop everything and take the time out to climb Kilimanjaro for charity.
More recently Seth has focussed his creative energies on the Lost Souls of Saturn project, alongside his partner Phil Moffa and further opaque participants, which sits firmly at the intersection between futuristic electronica, contemporary art, and technology. In 2019 LSOS presented its audio/visual installation transmission at the Saatchi Gallery in London, after its premiere during Art Basel in Switzerland, followed in 2021 by collaborations with the Met in New York and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. LSOS recently released a new album ‘Reality’ (Feb 2024), in tandem with its own AR comic book with a world-first reader-controlled soundtrack. LSOS also, uniquely, curated a series of futurespective collaborative works, under the title ‘Reality’ and presented at W1 Curates immersive gallery in London in Feb 2024, which brought together new technologies, mythology, immersive art, and electronic music.
Extremely well traveled, constantly searching and experiencing, Seth Troxler continues to follow his own unique path.