DJ BORING

The Winona Ryder sample that set 2016 house on fire

Winona wasn't born as a campaign: it was an intimate, almost private track, with vaporous pads, a punchy bassline, and the voice of Winona Ryder recalling how a casting director told her she wasn't beautiful enough to act. In September 2016, uploaded to SoundCloud and YouTube, the track overflowed to millions of plays and placed DJ BORING at the center of the lo-fi house wave, alongside names like Ross from Friends or DJ Seinfeld. The vinyl was released on E-Beamz, DJ Haus's label, and from that bedroom rarity came an international schedule.

An alias born in a cafe and a digger's ear

Raised in Melbourne, he started DJing at 18 at local parties and got hooked on house and garage around 20, after years of disco, dubstep, and experimentation. In 2015 he moved to London—he holds dual British-Australian nationality—and the name came from an everyday joke: a Swedish colleague explained to him that Trist, his nickname, means boring in Swedish. The next day he changed it on SoundCloud. Before that, he had DJed as Spook and Oswald. After the viral hit came Sunday Avenue (LPH White), Different Dates (Lost Palms), and Hidden Messages (E-Beamz) in 2017, For Tahn on Shall Not Fade (2018), and Wasted Years of Pumping Iron with Frits Wentink. With Stanley Schmidt, he founded the label Vienna, conceived as a playful space rather than a catalog of canonical house. In the booth, his trademark is mixing 90s vinyl with current tracks, with no middle ground.

Hardware, Phonox, and the DJ-Kicks volume

The sound began to open up to Chicago house, Detroit techno, trance, and funk, almost always created on hardware. In June 2019, he curated the Fun with Friends residency at Phonox, in Brixton. In 2019 and 2020, he sold out Bloc and E1 in London with his live show; the EP Like Water (Technicolour / Ninja Tune, 2020) came from that live repertoire. He debuted on the Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 in June 2020 and signed a Boiler Room at Lost Sundays (Sydney, 2021) and a b2b with salute at the 2024 AVA Festival. Beautiful Strangers (Running Back, 2023) delved into a more kaleidoscopic house. In July 2024, he delivered his DJ-Kicks volume for !K7, featuring his own tracks like You Luv Me and N15. Collaborations with Confidence Man, ATRIP, or SWIM continue to be released, and in 2024 he hit Tomorrowland. On the dancefloor, he remains the opposite of his nickname: a selection of rarities, his whole body over the booth, and a dancefloor designed for people to really dance.