From:Sydney, Australia
DJ style:“Energetic, chaotic, experimental.”
Best known for:“Explosive DJ sets with live trumpet.”
Timmy Trumpet — the horn-tooting revelry renegade, the party-starter supreme, is the kind of guy you’d want to see up on that stage when your spirits are low, and you need a little something to set the blood a-flowin’ and the hands a-wavin’. But image, of course, isn’t everything — and despite the reputation that precedes Timothy Jude Smith, and even though he considers his lucky charm to be a shot of tequila, there’s more to the Australian DJ, producer and musician than his jump-on-the-booth-and-watch-me-go demeanor might lead you to believe. After all, it takes a lot to be a perennial visitor to the upper rungs of the Top 100 DJs poll.
For one thing, Smith isn’t just some shallow Mr. Good Times — he’s a bit of a philosophical sort, it seems, and in a 2023 interview with DJ Mag, he professed his belief in the tenets of Stoicism, namedropping the likes of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. “I’ll have Marcus Aurelius’s words in my ears, thinking, ‘amor fati, Tim’,” he confided.
That’s a mindset that could help anyone — but needless to say, to reach the kind of success that Smith has, there’s also a lot of grit and determination. The hard work began when
