Coming through the pirate radio scene, Amsterdam-based DJ Passion DEEZ has been involved in music for over 10 years now. With his first introduction to music in Zimbabwe, it wasn’t until he moved to the UK at the age of six when things started to really click. It feels like it was written in the stars with DEEZ’s first toy being a radio, subsequently becoming obsessed with BBC Radio 1 and later on saving up to buy a CD player from his first newspaper round job. Learning the art of sequencing via curating playlists on his MP3 player which soon led to DEEZ wanting to learn how to DJ, his early influences around that time included Rinse FM, Fabriclive37 and Mary Anne Hobbs. Moving to Brighton in his late teens, DEEZ found himself amongst the free party movement and going to reggae and jungle clubs – all of which were more accessible than partying in London, something that is important to DEEZ when playing at clubs and festivals across Europe. All of these experiences are reflected within DEEZ’s DJ sets and radio shows which can be anything from drum ‘n’ bass, jungle, grime, garage and more. They always tend to be high energy and weave through the different styles with ease, keeping you on your toes. Now based in Amsterdam, DEEZ is a go-to within the local Dutch scene where you can often see him popping up on radio stations across the country as well as playing at venues and parties such as Cinnaman’s Colors, DGTL, De School, Drifl Festival, By The Creek festival and his own parties Passion DEEZ & friends. Alongside his DJing, DEEZ works at Patta where he’s also part of the cycling team. Together they take on challenges like the recent 150km race which coincided with Keti Koti – emancipation day in Suriname.
Next month, DEEZ will be opening The Nest stage at Dekmantel Festival – his first performance at the main Dekmantel festival following last year’s appearance at Dekmantel Selectors. In the lead up to his set we get the Lowdown on Passion DEEZ as we discuss all things from early beginnings and influences, coming through pirate radio and his approach to DJing, playing his first Boiler Room in Amsterdam and balancing wellness with working in nightlife.
Hey Passion, how’s it going? How’s your week been?
This last week has been crazy. At Patta, we were celebrating the emancipation of enslaved and displaced people in Suriname and the former Dutch Antilles 150 years ago, I went and cycled further than I have ever done before with my cycling team. Spent a good 4 and a half hours in the saddle sweating, getting rained on, doing impromptu mud face masks thanks to the wheel of my teammates kicking everything off the ground and gaining a great sense of accomplishment doing it. After that I went to the By The Creek festival to play a set. And that was just Saturday. If we wanna get into the whole week this might turn into a novel instead of an interview. But I stay busy and when I’m not busy, I’m at home trying to be a plant daddy to the best of my abilities. My monsteras are always pushing out new leaves, wish I could say the same about my prayer plants.
You’ve been active within the music industry for over 10 years now, mainly within the world of broadcasting on community and pirate radio, what would you say your first introduction to music was? Was there a specific track or album that you would say first ignited your love for music?
My first introduction would have been back in Zimbabwe. I grew up in the church so a lot of local musicians and stuff that my family had on cassettes. Some notable names were Charles Charamba and Lucky Dube. It all started for me when I moved to the U.K. at age 6 with my family. Remember one of the first toys that I was given was a radio and I became so obsessed with this thing. I would listen to BBC Radio 1 religiously to the point I knew the whole radio program Monday through Sunday. After a couple years of living in South London, I eventually got a job delivering papers in my neighbourhood. Like 500 houses per week and I couldn’t take my radio with me so with my first paychecks, I got a portable CD player and realised I needed some music so I went and bought some V.A. compilations such “Now! Thats What I call Dance Music ” and “The Best Love Songs Ever Vol. 2”. Then once I discovered there was more to life than HMV, I found out my home town had an independent music store called Banquet Records where I bought the 1st single from Arctic Monkeys “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” and some Manrylin Manson full length that the guy behind the counter upsold my prepubescent mind into buying. Something about when you’re young is you’ll do anything the not be treated like a child.
After a few years of spending my limited income on music, I discovered the magic of file sharing and upgraded to an MP3 player. It’s really here I started discovering the art of playlisting due to the lack of memory space on these early multimedia devices. I could get like 25 songs on it so I would sequence and make the most of that space. After years of collecting files and making mixtapes for myself, a friend of mine from school got me FabricLive37 and I realised that you could sequence dance music a lot more seamlessly than the Alternative Hip-Hop, Indie Rock, Punk and Hardcore stuff I was collecting. Almost overnight I became the biggest Mary Anne Hobbs fan and I would be searching for pirate radio feeds and early internet radio stations that we could get in our South London suburb. Eventually discovered Rinse through DJ Bailey who had a Drum and Bass show at that moment. One of his guests that I searched for on google was a resident over there.
It’s around this time when my childhood neighbour Efflex put down the drum kit and became a DJ. He lived around the corner from me and I was so in the mood to learn how to play rather than just sequencing. We burnt about 20 CDs each, locked ourselves in his shed for 11 hours and learnt to beatmatch. Like a week later we got a radio show in Tottenham on a school night and the rest is history.
Growing up in London, what were some of the most formative clubbing experiences and musical influences that still inspire you to this day?
Most of my clubbing experiences were not formed in London. I started playing in clubs around age 15/16 but I was still just into bands and rappers in terms of what I did in my spare time. Most of my clubbing experiences that made me who I am today came up because around age 19 I went to Brighton and saw a whole new world – at least compared to what I got to experience in London. How do I say this? Like in London, if you’re a first generation migrant family, there is no way you can really afford most social events in that city so me and my friends basically only went to forgettable student nights and 16+ rave nights when we were too young for the club. So once I got to Brighton and there was a big free party movement in these venues along the coast like this reggae club Riki Tiks and a junglist heaven called Volks, I found more space to go out-out with my friends in places we could all afford. This really forms my mentality with the places that I play in now, I think accessibility is very important despite being a festival DJ now, I try to make sure that very frequently I play in a space that the younger, poorer me could have gone to as well. Finding a home in those two clubs gave me a feeling of unearned nostalgia from listening to 90s jungle, early 00s garage and a full spectrum of reggae. This is where my mission of creating pseudo-nostaligia really took shape in my head. At this point I stopped DJing for a bit to focus on documentary photography and I wanted to create images that looked timeless. Coming back to playing out I was obsessed with how I can do that with music and combining R&B vocals, junglist breaks, post-dubstep basslines to create a stew has allowed me to create spaces that welcome all ages to create memories together.
Did you have any mentors or friends that were influential with your relationship to music? Anyone in particular who was showing you the ropes?
Around 3 years ago, I went record shopping during the pandemic, and the guidelines were all over the place at this point. I could pick up the record, buy it but they didn’t let me play the record. Now I don’t have decks at home so I went to this club that me and my friends all hang out at because they were recording a fundraising livestream and was hoping there is a gap somewhere for me to play it. It was a Missy Elliot DJ Zinc white label and without playing it I knew it was heat.
Cinnaman was playing the closing set of the stream so I approached the decks and was like “can you play my record”, showed him the thing and 20 seconds later, he was already in the mix and I got to hear that out loud for the first time. I looked up to him a lot even before I moved to Amsterdam and would go to all his shows anyway so maybe this would have been our 3rd interaction. After his set, he came to kick it with me and we spoke about UK Garage, BLM, his party Colors and our goals for hours. He very quickly took me under his wing, invited me to play shows with him and he was the only person who really called me out on bullshit transitions. Since then I have joined the same booking agent as him and we frequently travel and do shows together. Its like having an adopted brother and I’m grateful for everything he’s done for me and my peers. A lot of Amsterdam DJs can’t ignore what Colors did for the scene here in terms of pushin dynamic, diverse sounds in a scene that was either House & Techno or it was Hip-Hop, never both.
Now based in Amsterdam, what motivated you to move to the city? Do you think the city has changed anything about the way you interact with music?
So I was invited to showcase my photos in this city. At that moment in time I was shooting photos as much as I could, working full time at a Dominos Pizza across the road from my local skatepark and scheming how am I gonna make something of myself. When I landed here, I hit the ground running looking for work and housing. Build up a base for myself to want to express again. A lot of the work I showed in those first 4 shows were photos that I took back in the UK. Only about 2 years in did I start showcasing new work that I had shot here. One thing that I noticed is baring people like Cinnaman and Victor Crezée, there wasn’t really anyone playing the music I grew up on so then I had found my mission, and I think I now finally have the space I’ve always wanted to create and share with the world
Do you think that coming through as a radio DJ has impacted how you play in clubs and at festivals? If so, how?
Being someone with a radio background, storytelling is a key part of how we keep people’s attention. On the radio you can do that with the microphone but in the clubs and festivals you do that with your sequencing. I will very frequently do BPM shifts, echo out to almost silence and focus on playing unreleased stuff. I learnt a lot of my transitions from listening David Rodigan on the BBC, Stella Sessions with Skream on Rinse and old Jungle tapes – shout out Dave the Rave (the guy who lived above Dominos).
What is your approach to DJ sets? What story are you trying to tell?
The story that I am trying to tell is a great question. So I was raised by a single mother who had to work a lot to keep us above ground so a lot of my story telling comes from a female voice. I like to take vocals from love and break up songs and then layer that with songs that are full of wobbly basslines from my background as a dubstep DJ. To finish it of, I bring in the breaks because something I remember from them 140 bpm days was that we really didn’t play 4×4 beats and people would look at you like you were corny if you had a full beat so I still like to keep it broken. You’ll occasionally hear me play a full beat but it typically means that I’m gonna take you half time soon.
You recently landed a new residency on RRFM, what do you enjoy the most about the radio format?
I love having a residency again. It’s been a few years since I was based on any station in particular. I was touring every radio station in the country for the longest time because I just wanted to hang out with music lovers, collectors and creators. You’ll be hard pressed to find a community station in this country I haven’t been on and these days, I’m even on the public and commercial radios in this country as a guest. To me RRFM is home, it has been for the longest time, but I kept delaying it as I wanted to be nomadic and stand up tall on my own merit, not just because I’m the homie.
You played your debut Boiler Room set in Amsterdam at the end of last year, what was that experience like? Especially to have your debut in a city that means so much to you.
Boiler Room felt like a fever dream. That came and went by so quickly from my perspective. They sent me the mail while I was on my way to Dekmantel Selectors and its kinda felt like now is the time so I said yeah lets do it. To debut and open in the city that I call home was an amazing offering. I knew my friends and community would pull up regardless of me opening so you see me start with an empty room and build up a real floor. That’s what I love about that video is it shows you what its like at most of my events. A very engaged room, diverse crowd and even more diverse music.
You mentioned in a recent post that you can’t get enough of collaborating at the moment – what does collaboration mean to you and what is it about collaborating right now that is giving you the most enjoyment?
Community is the whole reason I do this. I think it’s key to create spaces where people can have conversations that they dont have at home, at work or at school. I create those safe spaces for you to find out more about yourself and about people that aren’t in your socio-economic group that you belong to. I frequently collaborate with people that I met on terraces, in smoking areas and on dancefloors and this is how I hope to operate for the rest of my adventure. One collaboration I did recently was this track Kush Love which is on the debut LP from Retromigration. And I think it shows that we’re just doing things organically.
What do you look for in a collaborator?
Outsiders to the front!
On a wellness tip – we’re both in training mode right now, I’m running Amsterdam and you’re cycling in the Patta Cycling Team 150km challenge, and choosing sobriety during that period. How’s your training going? How are you finding navigating sobriety and prioritising your wellness / training whilst working within the music industry?
It was a nice adventure seeing how healthy I can be. I held myself to a high standard and this was the perfect time to switch gears into wellness. It’s a struggle but my team helped me through the first days and closer to the big ride. I was good to go. To be honest I surprised myself quite a bit and hope this is just the start.
How did you get into cycling and in Patta’s cycling team?
One time I was at Patta, two summers ago and Lee and Rogier asked me if I wanted to join the Team. I wasn’t on any of the Patta Sports Teams at this point but knew that sports is one of the four pillars so I should immerse myself in something soon. After quite a few meetings with sponsors, we finally got bikes and I’ve been in the saddle for about 6 month now.
How do you feel when you’re cycling? Do you feel like this has an impact on your creativity and musical output?
Its the only time I am ever alone with no distractions. Working in fashion and nightlife, you’re never alone so when I go on my solo rides, it’s really like meditation. Being able to succeed on my bike shows me that everything else is easy and it helps me a lot with performance anxiety knowing that I can cycle across a county and back. How can you lose?
Do you listen to music whilst you’re training? If so, do you have a hype track and/or go to mixes that help keep you motivated?
We don’t listen to music for safety reasons but our Team anthem is DMX – One More Road.
Following your set at Selectors last year, you’ll be opening The Nest stage at Dekmantel Festival in August (my new favourite stage at the festival), what are you looking forward to the most about playing Dekmantel Festival this year?
To play the Nest at Selectors was a dream come true and now that I’m at the main festival I’m over the moon. Quick story time here: I was never really swimming in disposable income so a few years ago I went to Dekmantel, no ticket, no list, but I went up and told them “Hi, I’m Passion, I’m on the list” to which the lovely lady behind the desk replied, “I cant see you”. After 10 mins of searching for a non existent name on this list, I was about to give up until some the crew from Zeedijk turned up, now they were on the list and this receptionist was just like “fuck it, here you go”. And every year since then I have finessed my way into the site and I think being on the line up is the finest finessing I’ve ever done. It’s a lot of pressure to open such a big stage but I think its about time. I’m joined by great names on this stage and I hope I can set the mood for Saturday. I just can’t wait to have all my friends in the forest creating a space for people like us and beyond to express.
What is your motto for Summer 2023?
Freedom is better than gold.
Dekmantel Festival takes places from the 2nd – 6th August – buy tickets here. You can keep up to date with Passion DEEZ on socials here – IG / SC