Music News

Bianca Oblivion had earned a degree in public health from Yale, a masters degree in epidemiology from UCLA and another masters in medical anthropology from Boston University, but what she really wanted to do was DJ.

Growing up in a music loving family, the Los Angeles native immersed herself in city’s the sprawling music scenes as an adolescent and teen, while also taking dance classes in myriad styles. The love of music was just in her, and it went with her to Yale, where she was the music director for the school’s radio station and also hosted her own show.

Back in LA after graduating from Yale, she got another radio show on KXLU, then one night a friend asked if she wanted to spin at a nightclub in the city’s Culver City neighborhood. While she’d never played for a live crowd, she gathered her records, put some songs on an iPod and played the gig.

“That was it,” she says. “After that I was like, ‘I need to do this more.’”

Her academic pursuits also continued in tandem, and at school in Boston, she immersed herself in the city’s club scene to the extent that by 2014, she’d been nominated for a DJ of the year award by a local paper. “I very much had these parallel paths and sides of me that that I was somehow balancing,” she says.

But after ultimately earning a trifecta of prestigious degrees, “my job search was not really panning out,” she says. “I wasn’t finding anything I was interested in or seeing how I was going to make these degrees work.”

Again back in L.A., she took a job as a substitute teacher, finding the flexibility of the gig made it possible to play shows. Making it all work, however, required some juggling. When she DJ’d for Princess Nokia at Coachella 2018, she graded papers in her backstage trailer before the show.

The same hustle that’s required to achieve so much in academia has also defined Oblivion’s musical career, which is reaching new levels following the pandemic as she’s focused more and more on her own productions and booked gigs around the world. She signed with the European agency Three Feet High in 2018 and released her first single in February of 2020, with the intention of doing a substantial European club run that summer.

This was, of course, weeks before nightclubs around the world shut down during the pandemic.

But instead of quitting, Oblivion used the global downtime to hone in on making music, without having to care whether or not it was getting played out. “It’s daunting,” she says of learning to produce. “It was not easy, especially while seeing a lot of my friends around me and peers in the scene just flying with that. It was like ‘What am I going to do? How am I even gonna add to this?’”

But with time and tenacity, she carved out a sharp and clubby signature sound that melds techno, bass, drum & bass and a host of other genre. She also developed an email list, organizing her career-related data in precise spreadsheets. (“That is where the training in school and data management came in very handy,” she says.) When the world reopened, she was well positioned.

“Since the pandemic my career has really accelerated,” she says. “I’ve gotten to play in venues and festivals I hadn’t even thought I would.”

These gigs include the U.K.’s famous Glastonbury, where she’ll play for the third time next month, a pair of Boiler Room sets, one a b2b with her good friend and fellow DJ Jubilee, and many other events across the U.S., Europe, Brazil and beyond. When speaking to Billboard over Zoom, Oblivion is just about to play a set in London, where she spends a lot of her time and finds inspiration in the cultural and musical diversity.

The next day, she’s playing 6,000 miles away in San Diego, and the day after she’ll do a set at Lightning in a Bottle near Bakersfield, Calif. Her summer schedule includes Shambhala, Dirtybird Campout x Northern Nights, Toronto’s Sojourn Festival and Belgium’s Rampage Open Air.

Oblivion is very aware that her rookie status is one of gradually getting in front of more and more people over the years, rather than the rocket ship of virality. She’s cool with that.

“Sometimes people win the DJ lottery,” she says. “They get a viral moment, or they know the right somebody, or there’s something that pushes them a bit further and accelerates them. I’m not one of those people.”

But “I’m not complaining,” she continues. “I’m built for this in terms of where I came from and my work ethic, getting into more than one Ivy League school. I just set my mind to something and I’m relentless, not in a business shark way where I’m going to stomp on everyone in my path. More like, ‘What can I personally do to make sure I cover every single thing I can to get to that point?”

The grinding has obviously paid off. While it was only a few years ago that she was figuring out how to make music, Oblivion’s releases are ever tighter, fiercer and more stylish. Her latest release, February’s Net Work EP, features four inventive and frequently hard-hitting productions that feature collaborators including Lunice, Machinedrum and Sam Binga. Her forthcoming single is a baile funk track with British dancehall duo RDX, with it’s release date yet to be announced.

“In every industry, there’s going to be people who are going to jump the line or jump ahead, and that’s just what it is,” she says. “The only way to mentally deal, I think, is just to ask myself what I’m contributing. Why am I doing this? Is it because I want to get the best gigs or make the most money? No. I’m doing this because I live music This is my life. This is what I’ve been connected to since I was a child. So I’m going to make music and do stuff that’s going to fulfill me and add to the world that I love.”

The pursuit is also now paying off in ways that even this extremely educated artist didn’t imagine.

“People have come up to me at shows, especially young women, and they tell me they look up to me and like my music. I didn’t have that kind of role model as I was coming up as a DJ, at least not in the same way, so I’m just honored that people are even seeing me as a role model.

“Maybe I’m not that hot new DJ that’s touring everywhere,” she continues. “But obviously if my music is making a difference, and if just by existing in these spaces I can be someone that people look up to and see ‘okay, I can do this too,’ then that means something.”