Features

Jockey Journal: Justin Oh

The on-the-road diary of the world’s top DJs treading the globe.

FOOD

Food! I love food. You love food. We all love food, right? From touring, I have been very fortunate enough to experience some of the best foods from around the world in some of the best restaurants. But, what is more interesting to me is checking out some of the local foods. Here is a picture from my tour in Hanoi, Vietnam. After the show, I asked the artist hospitality staff to show me something more local so we checked out some street food and street Pho on the outskirts of town. It was definitely the best Pho I’ve ever tried and really glad to have made the adventure out there. You can really appreciate the culture a lot more! There are some amazing eats in every country.

 

ULTRA KOREA 2018

Love the people of Seoul. This is my hometown and I always love playing at Ultra Korea. The crowd and energy was crazy. But, with my new style of DJing and music, I get to play more softer and story-driven emotional music alongside the hard banger stuff. This is really awesome to see how Korea’s musical taste has evolved and grown over the years! It gives me a lot of hope and confidence to play different styles of music and take bigger risks rather than the typical club music you normally hear when going out and partying. What I love about this picture is the fans are all super happy and repping Justin Oh and Monstercat flags. I also love to see this when travelling around other countries in Asia. Together we have come a long way in dance music and we have more to go in the future!

 

FRIENDS

There are cool people doing some cool shit in all genres of music. I’ve been lucky to meet some other amazing musicians during my shows and work. This is a picture with some really amazing hip hop acts in the K-hiphop/K-pop scene, GroovyRoom, Sik-k, and Haon. They killing it right now and we thought it would be dope to have special surprise guest appearance for one of my shows for the fans. It was a ton of fun and the crowd loved it. Korean hip hop has exploded in the past years and there has been a wave of Asian rap sweeping globally as well. It’s always awesome to embrace and celebrate change and the evolution of music. Maybe we’ll do a song together in the future!?

 

HAIR

This one is pretty random, haha. But, I always don’t know what to do with my hair. Never really dyed it. Don’t know if I want to dye it. I tried perming my hair a couple times to get some sick waves. But, maybe I should just stick to wearing a hat? What do you think?

 

FLYING

I never had a fear of flying. It felt normal to me like driving a car or riding a bus. But, that all changed. A while back when returning from a show in Tokyo, our flight was grounded for a good couple hours. There was a hurricane passing through that was delaying and grounding the entire airport. Two hours passed with no end in sight. All the food ran out from concessions and we weren’t allowed to leave our seats. Small cheers arise when the hero pilot announced that we would take off and start going home. But, by the time the plane was airborne that all changed very quickly. It was the rockiest ascent I have witnessed. Felt like a baby was shaking a rattle and the plane was the rattle. People were praying in the next aisle over and the passenger next to me left fingernail marks from gripping my arm so tightly. It started to feel like Mother Nature was going to win this one. Luckily, the pilot eventually managed to break out of the storm and we hit clear skies for the rest of our journey home. I still don’t have a fear of flying, but I do get small flashbacks from PTSD every time my plane hits a little turbulence nowadays. If I do a USA tour soon, I would want do it old school tour bus or gig van style. Road trip between gigs and hit some tourist places like Grand Canyon and Texas BBQ spots. Sometimes though, it isn’t always practical and flying is the only option.

 

BACK STAGE

A cool thing about playing festivals is that it’s always fun backstage! The staffs are really friendly, there is good food, and everyone is having a great time at the festival. You can also hang out with other artists and talk music. The vibe is always really chill and cool. Here is a picture when I bumped into Marshmello.