Grayson Repp was not supposed to become a DJ. Growing up as the son of a former professional hockey player-turned-coach with a knack for swimming, the Vancouver-born Repp spent his childhood training to become an athlete, and ultimately, he achieved that. After high school, he went to Arizona State University to swim competitively. He was, however, always the music lover on the team: “I was the guy that would make the mixtapes to get all the boys pumped up,” he tells Billboard, a foreshadowing of his career pivot to come. “But I didn’t know why [I did it yet.]”
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It wasn’t until a few Scandinavian teammates put Repp on to the then-burgeoning EDM scene of the late 2000s coming out of Norway and Sweden, including Swedish House Mafia and Avicii, that Repp found his desire to make music himself. “I like to go all-in on things,” he says. “So I retired from swimming, I packed up, I moved home and I spent the rest of my student loan money on DJ equipment… I just mixed in my parents’ basement for a couple of years, teaching myself how to do that.”
Fast forward to after the pandemic, and Repp, by then a professional DJ in Berlin trying to make ends meet, found a new career path: he was asked to curate the music in the stadiums for the FIFA Arab Cup in 2021. “After the tournament, FIFA was like, ‘Hey, we really enjoyed that. Would you like to be this guy that curates the music for us in stadium?'”
