Scratching The Turntables Balls-Out

"Surreal. Just completely surreal to be honest. It's hard to get my head around." DJ Osyris - Jesse House on his passport - is about to hop on a plane to England. He's just taken out the title of DMC National DJ Champion and is about to head to the DMC World DJ Championships in London to represent Australia against the world's best turntablists.

"I've had three years off competing and this year was just more about getting my feet wet again, that was my main aim, and I managed to take the whole thing out - it was a really big surprise!" House laughs. He didn't even have a valid passport just in case - "I'm a bit unprepared. First world problems."

"I'm not the kinda person that's gonna go 'well I'm gonna go in conservative and get it out as clean as I can'. I'm like 'nah, let's just smash it'."

In 2014, the former dubstep master and club DJ took a break from the decks. His grandmother passed away two months out from competition and by the time 2015 rolled around he had been married, had three children and no time to practice. "This year was like 'no excuses, just do it'," he explains. "To be honest, I didn't look past getting through Adelaide. We had two competitors in Adelaide; one who's a two-time Australian champ... and DJ Snair who's a four-time vice champion, so runner-up nationally four times. So these guys are heavy hitters, I practice with them; I know what they're capable of. Going up against adversary like that, I'd back myself every time but it's not like a running race - it's judged subjectively."

At the finals, "The scores between me and George [Tomay, aka G-Smooth] were so tight. I was doing something a lot more technical and difficult, but there were parts in my set that didn't come off all that clean... As a battle DJ that was a big learning curve and made me realise that I probably should have toned it down a bit. I'm a very aggressive, headstrong DJ, so I tend to go in all balls-out, that's just me as a person as well... I'm not the kinda person that's gonna go 'well I'm gonna go in conservative and get it out as clean as I can'. I'm like 'nah, let's just smash it'."

"In the age where there's a lot of push button DJs... I just want to educate people of where this came from. It came from the Bronx... this culture of hip hop and where it's birthed from... It's having a massive resurgence right now. Vinyl - thanks to the hipsters out there who love having the real vinyl collection because everything's about old school and antique and cool, there's a massive resurgence. As human beings we always tend to look at the root of something, where it came from, how did it originate?

"When people ask me - what with the three kids and with anyone else going on - 'how can you still push so hard?'... we do it for the love of the culture. I do it to hopefully inspire other DJs with kids to go for it."