When Bianca Oblivion was 17, she went to The Echo in Los Angeles and pulled out a fake ID. Electroclash was at the height of its powers, and the young Angeleno—whose senior year at high school was soundtracked by Ladytron, Miss Kittin & The Hacker, Peaches and Felix da Housecat—was a fierce devotee. Earlier that day, she received her high school diploma. Many of her peers were at the beach and staying out all night, celebrating the closing of one chapter and preparing for another. In just a few months, she'd go across the country to study at Yale. 16 years later, she'd return to The Echo for a five-hour session, DJing alongside Machinedrum, Jubilee, edIT, Nosaj Thing, Jacques Greene and Jimmy Edgar. But that was the distant future. Tonight, a teenage Bianca Oblivion was in Echo Park, a few miles from Downtown Los Angeles, with her cousins. She had a rave to get into.

Bianca Oblivion (who didn't want to reveal her full name due to privacy concerns) had no idea at the time, but this party—her first club night ever—would prove prophetic. She spent her college years chasing those same endorphins. Electroclash, sure, but also bloghouse, fidget house, juke and anything-goes bootlegs. In the time since, she's earned a reputation as an eclectic selector: a US DJ with one foot in the UK, an eye towards the Global South and decades of experience on dance floors. Her current style, she told me on a chilly night in Seattle, is informed by the context collapses she first felt in club music two decades ago. "I want it to be seamless," she smiled, "but also, holy shit—we're on two different continents now. How'd that happen?"

This approach to head-turning club music is hardly new, but she thinks it's having a moment. "Jumping around different cultures and genres is just who I am as a DJ and a person," she said over a plate of Hawaiian-Korean street food. "There was a time when it was a lot harder for [multi-genre DJs] to get ahead in bigger markets. People were like, 'Are you going to pick a lane?' I never really subscribed to that."

Bianca Oblivion is a US DJ with one foot in the UK, an eye towards the Global South and decades of experience on dance floors.

If you tune into one of Bianca Oblivion's sets, you can count on a mixture of current diasporic club sounds—baile funk, dancehall, reggaeton—alongside dubstep and techno, roiling hardcore and a seemingly endless pile of hip-hop flips. It's tempting to slot her along contemporary club music trends, given the well-documented rise of the chart-pop bootleg in 2023, but her style is rooted in something more foundational. "In that era of mash-ups," she said, "That's just what you did. That's the DNA of how we DJ'd. We didn't have genre DJs [who only played one thing]."

In conversation, Bianca Oblivion is thoughtful, open and quick to trace histories, teasing out connections between her upbringing and the present with a gleam in her eye. As a child, her LA home was filled with the sounds of new wave, funk, hip-hop and R&B. She was "obsessed" with Miami bass and freestyle. "I was a kid watching TV all the time," she said. "I'd watch the beginning of MTV, and I'd watch Soul Train on the weekends."

Her mother enrolled her in dance classes: ballet, then hip-hop, and then African and Afro-Brazilian dance. She took to it like a sponge. "I'd watch TV and try to imitate the dancing I saw," she laughed . Her first-ever CD was Technotronic's 1989 smash hit "Pump Up the Jam", which she made her parents buy and played over and over. From there, it seems, the mould was cast. She was interested in body music, rowdy and playful stuff that kept energies high.

It wasn't long before she found her way behind the decks. It ran in the family—she had friends in the happy hardcore scene ("They'd wear the big pants and raver clothes"), and her cousins would go to raves. She first heard hard house through them. Her cousin held down a slot at Loyola Marymount University's radio station, KXLU, surrounded by a CD collection that blew a young Bianca Oblivion's mind.

In 2006, she started DJing: "People were like, 'Are you going to pick a lane?' But I never really subscribed to that."

She ended up becoming the music director for WYBC, Yale's radio station, where she hosted a show of her own. She kept dancing and started mixing. "For one of our performances, I choreographed a dance," she explained. "I had a couple of songs I wanted to do different parts to, so I did a really crude mix: a dance medley that took sections of different songs." It wasn't exactly three-CDJ dance floor material, but it was a foot in the door.

She started DJing in earnest in 2006, just a few years after that first night at The Echo. She played at a party called What The DJ Wants, hosted by some friends from KXLU. She'd never played in front of people before, but she pulled together some tracks, grabbed her iPod and went for it.

At the time, she didn't consider DJing as a career option. She'd grown up seeing hip-hop DJs with deep crates and turntablist bona fides, going to post-punk parties with a focus on selecting, and attending a handful of local dancehall nights. The ethos of the first—DJing as an art of scratching and mixing records—had stuck, and an iPod wasn't exactly the same thing. But she loved it, so she kept going.

"When you start playing sets and see reactions from the dancers, and they say, 'great set,' you feed off of that," she told me, her enthusiasm coming through just as sharply many years later. "I'd DJ at shitty artist lofts in downtown LA. I'd DJ at The Smell. I'd DJ block parties. I'd DJ art galleries."

Musically omnivorous from the start, she looked up to local DJs who were mashing up the things she loved: Bloc Party, LCD Soundsystem, Salt-N-Pepa. She'd play electro and indie dance, house and hip-hop, freestyle and Miami bass. "Growing up, I was obsessed with Miami bass," she told me, her eyes lighting up behind her purple puffer jacket. "The essence of that is still there—the heavy 808s, the hectic rap. That has carried on [in my practice] in essence, if not in exact tracks."

It was only natural that she found her way towards diasporic sounds. "It was around when I was growing up," she said. "I wasn't necessarily trying to find it, but I knew it. When you start dancing to that music, you have to feel it, so it gets internalised. In the 2000s, the hip-hop and dancehall fusions started [breaking through in the US], and reggaeton was huge. I was really into that."

As we spoke, she moved along her musical timeline with a historiographer's precision, tracing each step with a brightly painted fingernail. Towards the end of the decade, she fell in love with juke and Baltimore club. To her, it was the sound of familiar pop radio idioms getting tossed into a CDJ. "Everything started making sense to me," she said. "They were taking songs we knew—hip-hop, soul, funk, R&B, pop—and chopping them up. Any song that was happening at the time, they were making club edits of it."

She read music blogs and cruised through Napster, getting into fidget house, Lady Sovereign cuts and bassline. She found a grime blog hosted by "some Swedish girl" who posted scene gossip and low-quality rips. She caught Steve Aoki ("Before he started throwing cake") playing Douster's "King of Africa."

"I was like, 'Oh my God, someone sampled The Lion King," she said.

While she still retains that all-at-once approach from her Napster days, she's now honed in on something more specific. "[Global club music] is something I'm really passionate about," she said. "That's the sonic tapestry I want to weave. It's the story I'm trying to tell, and it reflects me and what I love."

Think of it like cross-cultural conversations played at triple speed. Her style is a car-crash approach to the decks, each blend landing like a barely contained explosion. When I caught her closing at Kremfest 2023, she showered the room with breaks, dembow rhythms and radio-rap gems until any distinctions seemed pedantic; the energy of her selections was only matched by her obvious joy behind the decks. (After she wrapped up at 3 AM, she lingered for a while longer, exchanging words and hugs with the crowd.) Her approach—a million genres tossed into a few CDJs—runs the risk of being muddied and indistinct, but she moves between styles with a veteran's touch. Her quick mixing makes every polyrhythmic drum line and left-turn sample flip all the more striking.

She laughed about this during a later Zoom call from her family's home in LA. "It's a running joke among myself and a couple other US-based DJs that straddle both worlds," she said, name-checking Angeleno-in-New-York Introspekt and Atlanta's Nikki Nair. "People don't expect Americans to have a handle on these sounds and these influences. [...] But it's all just electronic music, at the end of the day. If we have influences from there, and other places, it's like, 'Why not put it all together?'"

Her million-genre approach runs the risk of being muddied, but she moves between styles with a veteran's touch.

Alongside AK Sports and Star Eyes, she is also part of WARP MODE, a party that's hosted names like hometown hard dance heroes Baseck and Flapjack, Miami's kaleidoscopic club music duo INVT and speed dembow wizards Siu Mata & Amor Satyr. Eventually, she'd like to turn her label Club Aerobics into a space where she can mentor fresh faces. (It's fitting: until recently, she lived a double life, working as a tutor and substitute teacher on top of her DJing career.)

In addition to her work behind the decks, she's also moved towards making her own tracks, working with a wide range of MCs and producers in the process. She's built a fruitful working relationship with Sam Binga, a veteran DJ and producer from Bristol whose full-throttle approach to club music mirrors her own. They became fast friends in the summer of 2021, and it wasn't long before they started teaming up in the studio. Two years ago, she proposed they build a track around a sample of a mijwiz, a wind instrument most commonly associated with belly dancing and dabke. The result, "Sweatboxx Party," is a whirlwind of chopped-up folk music, storming hand drums and golden-age grime MCing courtesy of Manchester's Fox. She lights up when talking about her work with Sam Binga: simply put, it's about "getting the people dancing and going hard with no genre boundaries," she said, smiling.

This approach—playful, cheeky, riotous—is also typified by the long tail of "Sinais," a track she made with fellow Angeleno ONHELL. The original cut is a blistering run of junglisms and gut-twisting bass, but it turns out it's also a great foundation for edits. With "Sin Ice Spice Girls," she put the rhythm up against Ice Spice's "In Ha Mood" and Spice Girls's "Wannabe." In December, she tossed the track to London MC Logan, turning it into a transatlantic scorcher. It's the kind of globetrotting club music that she excels at: a tornado of Brazilian funk, dubstep, grime and bags of energy.

Bianca Oblivion's approach—kitchen-sink club tools, an everything-goes approach to collaboration and a rowdy attitude behind the decks—has clearly been working. From the outside, her career looks like it's been rocketing. A tour of New Zealand, Australia and Asia is planned for this spring, and WARP MODE is coming off of a successful 2023. She has what she calls "darker" and "headier" singles in the works with an exciting yet undisclosed UK label. From her perspective, though, her rise feels a little less quick. 18 years after she started DJing, she's still at it, and that's thanks to a slow, sustained burn.

"A lot of people tell me they've been only DJing since the pandemic," she said, back in Seattle. "And they have crazy success! That's a completely different experience to mine. I've been doing this for almost two decades now. Everything that's coming, I'm ready for. I've put in so much work. I've done everything by myself up until recently. So it's really gratifying, and I know what it takes to get here, and I know what's ahead. Things aren't coming all of a sudden—it's not been zero to 60. It's a load that I can bear."

"I've been doing this for almost two decades now. Everything that's coming, I'm ready for."