“The first thing I want people to know about me is that I’m always doing my own shit.”

That’s something a lot of artists say but for Wiwek, it’s truer than most. He’s not only become a world-class DJ/Producer with a resume full of collaborators and festival gigs to die for, he’s also gotten there through a whole genre style he invented himself.

Born in IJsselstein, a little town in the countryside of The Netherlands to parents of East Indian descent, Wiwek grew up listening to Indian Folk music at home whilst being surrounded by Western Pop.

Inspired by hearing Tiësto spin on Dutch radio, he made his first beats on Music 2000 for the Playstation One and was soon making beats for local rappers whilst Dutch House music continued to boom. Retreating into his bedroom studio to refine his skills, he learnt to channel all those disparate influences around him and create a distinctive style, where complex Indian-inspired rhythms collided with the adrenaline-rush dynamics of Trap and Tribal House, which he named Jungle Terror.

A Twitter DM to Skrillex, who Wiwek knew was regularly playing his tracks, turned into a relationship that’s helped take the young artist to a new level. In 2016 OWSLA released his EP The Free and Rebellious, which not only included a collaboration between the two (“Killa”) but also served as the soundtrack to a short film called Still in the Cage that the pair co-produced, and premiered that August.

After 3 years of touring, Wiwek decided to take time off to refocus himself as he felt his creativity had hit an all-time low.

“After a month of not opening my music program I slowly started to get back into producing early 2018. I traveled for pleasure, started to read again, started to meet new people, started to find new energy in life and found my creative sweet spot again. I slowly started to create a lot of new ideas and in March 2018 I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night with the idea of my debut album. It should be called Cycles. Everything in the universe is a cycle and so is our life. Nothing lasts and everything destructs and rebuilds. I was always known for making hard hitting club music, but what most people didn’t know was that I had a melodic sweet side as well.”

“I organised a writing camp in the middle of the woods where I rented a house, invited a bunch of musicians and we had a week full of jam sessions, outside recording sessions (you still hear nature sounds in some of the vocal recordings) and night walks in the woods. We went into this camp without any goal and just let our creative gut feeling flow. The camp was a melting pot of different kind of musicians and writers with me being the only person coming from the dance scene. I wanted to create an environment of different worlds coming together.”