China’s 20 year journey in sound

The music we grow up listening to does something irreversible to us, something that settles into the marrow long before we have language for it, shaping the way we respond to silence, the way we anticipate a beat drop, the way we lean in when a vocalist stretches a note just a little longer than expected and even when we think we have evolved beyond those early influences, when our playlists become more curated and our tastes more refined, the truth remains that at the core of who we are, we are the music that first held us. China understands this not as a poetic idea but as lived reality. When he reflects on how it all began, he doesn’t frame it as destiny, luck or even ambition in the traditional sense; instead, he brings it back to something far more instinctive and intimate.

“I always had a passion for music,” he says. I listened differently. I always wondered how it was made.

I was more drawn into the emotion that it evokes.” That is perhaps the most telling thing about him. Long before he was thinking about crowds or gigs or longevity, he was thinking about emotion, about what happens beneath the surface when sound interacts with the human spirit, about how a sequence of chords can disarm you or restore you or unravel you. His journey takes us back to 1999, a period when South Africa was renegotiating its identity, when cultural spaces were being reshaped and house music was carving out its own language in townships and inner cities.

[paywall]

In Orlando, Soweto there was a garage that quietly became a sanctuary for a boy who was trying to understand why certain sounds made him feel the way they did. DJ Mbuso, as China remembers him, “was that guy that had everything at the time”, the equipment, the records, the sound system, the technical knowledge and in an era before digital convenience flattened the playing field. Having access to that kind of setup was the difference between dreaming about DJing and learning how to do it.

At first, China would tag along with his older cousin just to be in the space, just to watch and absorb and listen because even then, he wasn’t merely consuming music; he was studying it, paying attention to transitions, to textures, to the mechanics of how one song could dissolve into another without the listener even realising the shift. “It just felt like home,” he says, and there’s something profound about that, because home is not simply a physical structure; it is a place where you feel aligned, where your curiosity is not questioned but fed. Eventually, DJ Mbuso saw the hunger.

“He said: ‘If you want to learn, you can learn. I’ll leave you with the keys.’ He told me the basics and I figured it out myself.” There is something deeply symbolic about being handed the keys to a creative space, about being trusted to sit alone in a garage studio and make sense of wires and decks and sound levels, about being allowed to experiment without supervision, to fail quietly and try again, to replay the same blend until it stopped sounding forced and started sounding inevitable.

[/paywall]