By Cat Lewis
A Pink Floyd poster hangs on the wall with other favourite vinyl art, and a guitar—a Fender Stratocaster—rests against the desk. This is where DJ and producer RYUSSI (she/they) makes music.
Cables wind on the floor around a keyboard and audio interface, and as we sit to chat, RYUSSI’s cat weaves through our legs.
RYUSSI is a deep and progressive house producer and DJ. We sit in her living room in Bedford, 80 kilometres north of London, where she creates between shifts at a digital marketing job; her sets have appeared on playlists and mix series by BCCO, Porceptual, and others.
Right away, she says she has no stress about streaming platforms—not anymore.
“Everybody hates streaming platforms. But I’ve made peace with them because they’re part of the job. I’m going to be doing this for the rest of my life.”
Growing up in Edmonton in North London and moving to Luton as a kid, she learned to play the keyboard in church—she backed hymns at Sunday services until the day when she refused to wear a skirt and was told she couldn’t play in front of the congregation anymore.
“That was my first chance to bypass the service,” she says. The family went to church every Sunday. Playing keyboard—and refusing to conform—was her escape.
How did you get into music?
She knew she would work in music. Primary school was where she started being a multi-instrumentalist.
“I did the end-of-year school assemblies. For every single opportunity, I played.” First it was drums, then guitar—though she never stuck with formal training.
“I always started with a teacher, then got impatient. In the end, I’d just teach myself.”
As she grew, her mum urged a career that would pay well—engineering, IT, something with a better likelihood of being financially lucrative—but RYUSSI still felt drawn to music. “Everything’s naturally taken me down this path”.
RYUSSI confesses: she’s never been able to read sheet music.
“I couldn’t study music theory because I can’t read music. I can read and form chords—I can kind of read tab, but if someone said, ‘play it in this key’, I struggle.”
This meant she couldn’t get into the music technology course at college, so she enrolled in a music performance course, which she says mostly involved playing covers.
At a college careers day, after many unanswered uploads to BBC Introducing, a UK-based radio platform supporting unsigned, undiscovered music talent, she spotted a stand for the BBC. She walked up and addressed them: “I’m uploading my music, but no one’s playing it.”
They told her to keep going, and she did. Eventually, the BBC played a track she submitted. In time, the BBC contacted RYUSSI to play onstage at the Radio 1 Big Weekend festival, giving RYUSSI her biggest audience ever.
How do you create?
Describing what it feels like to create music that people love, RYUSSI pauses.
“You get a feeling where you know you just need to sit and create something. It’s a buzzing feeling. Then I just start playing, and it all comes out.”
RYUSSI doesn’t use traditional templates taught in music theory. “I find it easier to start fresh every time because it makes the process more free-flowing.”
This is why bringing the guitar back to her life—and her sets—has felt so important.
When she’s making four-on-the-floor beats, she feels bound by structure—transitions needed after 16 or 32 bars, everything on the beat. But “When I’m playing guitar, I start with a riff, then I bring in the strings on the MIDI keyboard. It’s more of a relaxed jam session, which turns into a piece of music.”
Can you share more of your creative process?
Listening to her SoundCloud, I hear a lot of range. Her music varies from tech house to more emotional, guitar-led tracks. Some are Ibiza-style dance sets. Some are ambient.
I ask her about that. “I can’t pigeonhole myself,” RYUSSI tells me.
“Some people say you need to stick to one thing, but I don’t see that as realistic.”
“If you’re creative, you’re creative. The end result should not be too clear in the beginning. I don’t go into anything thinking ‘I want it to sound like this’.”
“One thing that makes me feel ill is when artists talk about how a label has told them that their next track needs to sound like the last one. You can hear it in everything they make. It’s so formulaic. You’ve sucked all the life out of where you could go and what you could do. And you’re just like, okay, this is it now.”
“Here’s my philosophy with making music: To hear is one thing, to feel is another.”
With her BCCO mix, the inspiring idea was tech house—flamboyant, fun, party vibes. “I start with a concept,” she says. “What kind of mental atmosphere am I trying to make? How does it tie in with time, place, venue, and the kind of people who might be listening to it?”
She smiles and tells me, “I have the freedom to put out music and not have an expectation of how it needs to sound.”
Tell me about working with ADHD.
RYUSSI was recently diagnosed with ADHD. As a cognitive behavioural therapist, her mum could spot the signs and encouraged her to get tested.
Of all the ways ADHD has impacted her life, RYUSSI tells me how “task paralysis” has been the hardest thing to work with.
It’s a common symptom for people with ADHD. “Task paralysis” keeps you mentally “stuck”, she explains, unable to start or complete tasks. For those with ADHD, she says, it’s common—and very frustrating.
Even though she can recognise the importance of the task at hand and can have the motivation to do it, task paralysis can leave her frozen and unable to act.
Once, when a company asked her to create a sample pack of her tracks, task paralysis hit hard. She got one track out of four completed and had 400 samples still to make.
“The thought of having to make them made me not want even to go on Ableton,” she says. “I got paralysis. I asked them to push back the hand-in date. In the end, I just couldn’t do it.”
RYUSSI recognises the symptoms and keeps a journal, recording daily notes on how she’s feeling. It’s systematic, and this approach helps her better understand her own brain.
Even with things like mind-altering substances, she says that she wouldn’t just take them without thorough planning and preparation.
“Even if I were to do something like magic mushrooms, which I know might help, I’d write down what answers I want from the experience, and write down what happened during it. I don’t do anything without planning.”
Let’s talk about work.
Today, she works in a digital marketing job, which pays the bills. But before that, she worked at a music company that platformed huge acts. She began as an intern, then was an assistant.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve just joined the music industry.’ But I soon realised it wasn’t what I expected. The tasks were mundane, and the strategy of what worked—a rote system of rewarding music that matched formulas of what sold before—was embedded in the work.”
“They’d worked with certain artists for years. There was not a lot of leeway for artists or sounds that were risky and new. And of course, that’s understandable. It’s a business.”
She decided to stick with it, so she could learn and “take what I could from the situation.”
The COVID-19 lockdown was hard. She spent some months in the office, shadowing, observing, and learning as much as she could by seeing and doing. Then it all went remote—for five years. At home, she struggled with no people around her to learn from: “That was really tough for me.”
What do you feel about social media?
Six years on from those early BBC uploads, RYUSSI doesn’t stress about numbers or likes on social media anymore: “I don’t see it as something to get followers. I just see it as my portfolio. This is who I am.” Connection and growth with her fanbase come from meeting people at gigs and festivals, she says.
In 2019, RYUSSI worked on a big music video shoot as a runner—the entry-level job on set where you help the crew with whatever they need, from moving gear to grabbing supplies. The shoot was for Pete Tong’s Ibiza Classics tour, and they were filming visuals for “Red Alert,” a famous 1999 track by the UK dance duo Basement Jaxx.
That day, Ryussi met Clayton Wright, who runs Little Gay Brother, an independent UK queer party and festival brand. Little Gay Brother also runs Feel It, a weekly club night. Five years later, the promoter behind Feel It reached out and invited Ryussi to DJ.
From this story, Ryussi muses: “Every connection makes a difference.”
Her perspective on networking has shifted. Before, it felt desperate, like everything needed to happen immediately: “You put all this expectation on a gig. That’s going to be the absolute moment. Then reality knocks you back down.”
What advice would you give your younger self?
RYUSSI looks back to when she was nineteen and knows now that what she thought she wanted wouldn’t have worked. “I was so desperate then,” she says.
“If I were given the keys to the kingdom at the beginning of my DJ career, I would be so fucked now. I would not have had the awareness to approach certain situations the right way or the wisdom to learn from my mistakes.”
The lure of the music industry can be very appealing, she admits. At first, she wanted something very different from what she wants now. “Your vision changes,” she says. “The stuff you want isn’t the stuff you need.”
“Initially, I wanted to tour a lot. But after working with artists who toured constantly and seeing the expectation of big energy, like it’s their first show every time, I realised that wasn’t it.”
Who inspires you now?
RYUSSI pulls up their track Growth, which features vocals from Louis Theron, an emerging UK artist. Her barber is Louis’s father. As she mentions his name, she is visibly energised: “He’s at university now, a multi-instrumentalist, great singer. Records everything himself and engineers it; he’s incredible.”
Ryussi smiles: “Louis’s dad and his friend Colin Francis were my mentors when I first started. I draw inspiration from Louis.”
Luton, her home, has also been a big creative influence in Ryussi’s life. “Nafe Smallz is from Luton, too. Nathan is probably Luton’s biggest claim to fame. There’s a lot of creatives up there.”
For a town historically known for car factories and being home to London Luton Airport, it’s not a spot I’d expect to harbour so much creative talent—it’s a hidden facet of the area, she says.
Why has Luton inspired you so much?
“It’s genuinely the town. There are a lot of initiatives coming from the council to prop up the arts. Luton has the infrastructure.”
RYUSSI casts her mind back to 2024: “They did Radio One’s Big Weekend. Three days of music. Everyone in good spirits.” The joy this event brought to her is visible. “We experienced what the atmosphere could be like all the time, if the money went to the right places,” she says.
Sadly, with recent prince hikes and gentrification, the scene in Luton has changed—key venues have closed in recent years.
“For kids going out raving now, there isn’t anything happening anymore. The old venues were good. Every month, they had artists like CamelPhat, Faithless, Annie Mac, and Mark Knight, all playing in Luton. It was incredible. Now there’s no venue for them to go to.”
Tell me about your work with He.She.They.
The first time RYUSSI connected with He.She.They—a queer UK-based dance label and party collective—was through one of its organizers. He heard one of her tracks on the radio and messaged her on Instagram, asking for demos. Ryussi sent over some, and He.She.They later signed her song “Means To Change.”
She speaks positively about her experience with her music being signed to this label: “They’ve supported everything that I’ve wanted to do and release. They’ll give a bit of guidance because they know how it works, but when it comes to the creative side, I have full control,” she says.
The relationship with the label also provided big opportunities. Her first time playing the legendary club Amnesia in Ibiza was the opening for a He.She.They party.
Knowing how keen she is to play guitar now, I ask if we can expect live acts from her this year.
“I’m currently getting booked for DJ sets, which is great. When there’s more awareness of my sound, I’ll hopefully do live stuff. It’s fun to DJ, but I need to do more stuff with my hands.”
Why did you pick up your guitar again?
Some months ago, Ryussi picked up her Fender Stratocaster and started playing again.
Before that, DJing had started to feel like she was operating on autopilot, and she knew she needed to step back.
“I was getting a bit frustrated, wondering where to go next,” she says. “I stopped putting so much pressure on it and picked up my guitar again.”
With that, she’s found new energy, flow, and focus. Her acoustic music expresses deeper emotion, and a different side of Ryussi is starting to show. “It’s softening me a bit, which I need,” Ryussi says.
“With the guitar, I’m becoming more vulnerable with myself and my output, and that changes how I interact with others.”
Looking outside her own practise helped make that happen. She mentions her mentor once more:
“Louis Theron inspired that. He released a song titled ‘Not Today.’ Gorgeous melodies, structure, and lyrics. I need more of that in my life, where it feels like I’m bearing more heavy emotions instead of just hoping everyone will dance.”
Do you feel like you are growing into yourself?
Throughout our conversation, Ryussi mentions different artists, genres, instruments, and inspirations that have shaped her and her music.
“This room has so much of my personality on display,” she says as I look at the vinyl artwork and inserts she’s chosen to decorate her space with. We discuss how releasing on a streaming platform constrains how Ryussi communicates her music to listeners.
“Digital distribution takes away your personality. But when someone buys a vinyl, you can show them your whole character.”
“I want to convey meaning in the content I share; otherwise, on social media, it feels like recording for the fucking feed, the beast, the algorithm!”
We both laugh. I reassure Ryussi that I very much enjoy their social media content. Ryussi does “behind the scenes” posts on Instagram that are parituclarly moving.
For Ryussi, the philosophy around vinyl really matters. Ryussi refuses to create just to appease others. She really tries to trust the process and choose risk over repetitition.
“I believe patience pays off,” she says. “The way my music makes people feel is what matters most.”
Follow Ryussi on Instagram and RA and listen to their music on SoundCloud and Spotify.
Words and Interview: Cat Lewis, who also interviewed Benjamin Yellowitz for Hinterhaus
Photos: Provided by Ryussi with credits to Patrick Young, BBC Radio One, Aimee McGee and Anthony McLoughlin
Edits: Alexander Cheves
Cat Lewis writes on culture, creativity and the unseen characters of nightlife. Drawn to the subversive, quirky and queer, her writing champions those not usually seen and tells their stories loud and clear.
