Herb Sundays 117: Seth Troxler
[season seven finale] An elegant and accessible playlist from the globetrotting Detroit DJ.
Herb Sundays 117: Seth Troxler (Apple, Spotify).
Art by Michael Cina
"Soft landings, and intrusive thoughts" - S. Troxler for Herb Sundays
Edited from the bio: Seth Troxler is one of electronic music’s most instantly recognizable artists. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and raised in suburban Detroit, Troxler moved to Berlin at 18, before settling in London for a number of years, and now with his time divided between Ibiza and Zurich, establishing himself as one of the planet’s biggest DJs (voted the world’s number one DJ in Resident Advisor and gracing the front cover of Mixmag three times).
As an inveterate lover of independent music culture, he hast co-founded labels like Tuskegee, Visionquest, Soft Touch, and Play It, Say It and recently debuted his own Slacker 85 label. More recently, Seth has focused his creative energies on his Lost Souls of Saturn project alongside his partner Phil Moffa and others, displaying work at institutions like the Saatchi Gallery in London and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel.
I first met Seth when he was in his teens and was already frequenting parties and as a clerk at the record store Melodies and Memories, where he worked starting at age 16. He even did a stint as an intern for Ghostly. Troxler attended Lake Orion High School, the same as founding Ghostly artist Matthew Dear, so I asked Matthew for a quick memory on Seth:
“Seth & I went to the same high school in a very small town 40 miles north of Detroit. I first met him at a loft party in Detroit while he was still attending the school. A couple years later he came with me to Miami for his first time after an all nighter in Detroit. Later, we found him almost lost on the street in Barcelona during his first trip there. We pulled him into our van. Seth is seemingly always there. He lives through this musical experience, and shares his passion with anyone lucky enough to come into contact with him. I’ve been lucky enough to experience it many times, but I’m always eager for the next time.”
Troxler is a fascinating artist to me, given what he represents to dance music culture. He reckons he has been listening to House music since age 8 (his stepfather being a DJ himself) and started DJing around age 13. He’s sort of a rarity in the US, with most kids not experiencing the music until well into their teens. For those sentient in the EDM era and beyond, it may seem that electronic music has always flirted with the American charts, but it’s only in the last 15 years or so that it has been that way with any consistency if that’s true. The legend goes he skipped a big school dance and told his folks he was sleeping over at a friend’s, to go to a rave in Detroit to see Frankie Bones, and, by his estimation, has been to (or played at) “a rave nearly every weekend for the rest of my life.” He’s the most underground-minded of the DJs on many of the bills he plays but the most commercially accepted on others. He’s an unlikely evolution of a few key movements, Detroit Techno, American rave, and modern global EasyJet Techno. Seth is an artist who combined elements of all of them in the ‘00s to catapult him to fame globally.
Troxler’s persona as a hedonic pied piper has been well deserved, he arrived in the consciousness as a charisma machine, all hot pants and captain hats. To be fair, humor is a hard thing to do in global dance music; most nuance gets lost in a Eurotrash stew. While Seth laments some of these moves (opening restaurants, climbing mountains for charity) overshadowed his talent, it did make for good storytelling early on, but he always emerged as Drunken Master (1978), unfazed on the decks whilst many of his contemporaries would flame out in excess. Troxler studied art and the machinations of persona building (“People think I'm a lot crazier than I am,” he told Scuba on his podcast in 2022), referencing stunts pulled from designers like Stefan Sagmeister, etc. Troxler doesn’t mince words and often has gone on the attack on DJs, both commercial (Steve Aoki) and historical (DJ Sneak). Seth embodies a kind of Detroit forthrightness that is often foreign these days. He’s matured a lot but hopefully hasn’t lost his spark. His recent beat is that DJs don’t hit their stride til later in their career, which may be self-serving, but I think is true for those who love the craft as much as Seth.
From The Field:
Ghostly got the birthday treatment in The Fader this week. Thank you
and all the contributors.
Kicking off our 25th playlist series with a guest mix (Apple / Spotify) by your fave
. Not to be outdone, Andy Kellman (Herb 22) shared his 25 mix with some play count limitations here and Ghostly and Planet E alum, Rob Theakston (a future Herb no doubt), shared a Movement Festival friendly playlist as well.
Ghostly 25 mix, graphix by Cina.
