For FAB L’Style’s October Icon of the Month, DCR MILDA talks about the dance floor that shaped him, the clothes he finds along the way, and the music he wants people to keep.
DCR MILDA is at his family home in the Czech Republic, about an hour outside Prague, eating his mother’s cooking and giving himself a few days to settle. A busy week has finished. Another tour is coming. For now, there is family, the sauna, and the chance to take things day by day.
It is a quieter introduction to someone whose performances often reach people in bursts of movement. If you have come across Milda through a DJ clip, you probably remember the energy first. He knows that. He also knows how much disappears when a whole set becomes 45 seconds on a screen.
“What they might miss is that I’m also an artist,” he tells FAB L’Style over email. “I do everything live.”
Across his answers, he keeps returning to the work behind the performance. Before the touring, before the filmed sets, there was a dancer studying songs at home, trying to understand exactly where to put his next movement. That attention is still there. So is the pleasure of being in a room where the music makes sense to everyone at once.
Growing up in a Vietnamese family in the Czech Republic, Milda heard different worlds through the people around him. At home, his parents watched Paris by Night, the Vietnamese entertainment programme that became part of his childhood soundtrack. With his predominantly Czech friends, he listened to rap and R&B, alongside Czech and other European music.
He cannot immediately name one song that takes him back. What he remembers more clearly is the feeling: living with his grandparents, spending time with other kids in a small city, being free. “I definitely knew I was trying to become someone big, but I didn’t exactly know how to get there yet.”
Moving between the Czech Republic, Vietnam and later Canada meant repeatedly working out how to belong. He calls it adaptation, although his account makes clear that it has not always been easy.
“At first, it was pretty strange because you think that the way you are should work everywhere.”
Over time, he became quicker at adjusting. There is a certain urgency in how he describes it, too: the sense that taking too long to find your footing could mean missing an opportunity or being forgotten. Travel has made him comfortable with change, but it has also taught him to expect it of himself.
Before the Decks, There Was Dance
Dance was where he first found a way to express all that energy. As a freestyle dancer entering battles, he wanted to know the music closely enough to respond to its smallest details. He would download tracks, open them in DJ software and study the waveforms, memorising the kicks, snares and other sounds before practising.
DJing was already part of his life, initially as a way to become a better dancer. When a right knee injury left him barely able to walk, that relationship changed.
“I was very frustrated and very sad because I didn’t really know what I was going to do.”
What he did know was that he wanted to keep making something. Music offered a direction, though turning it into a career required a different conversation with his parents. Dance had been something they could support as a hobby or a sport. Making a living from music was harder to explain. He went to school and set about proving that he was serious, to them and to himself.
Today, he considers his dance background one of his strongest advantages. It informs how he performs and how he watches a room. He describes having a metronome inside him, an instinct for timing that developed long before he depended on it behind the decks.
In a club, he is looking ahead, considering what might happen over the next five songs. What will keep people moving? What might interrupt them? He is careful to distinguish that closeness from a festival crowd, where reading individual reactions becomes more difficult.
The PLAYGRND set at APT200 captured him in a setting he knew well. He and his circle had spent years there, almost every Monday. For the filmed daytime party, they invited their friends and gave themselves room to enjoy it.
“Man, the whole set. The whole set, honestly. That was pure me in my flow state.”
He might have had one or two tracks in mind. Much of the rest came from the people around him. Looking back, he remembers being completely absorbed, proud of what he played and visibly happy to be there.
“Honestly, that set changed my life.”
As the clips travelled, so did expectations. People booking him had often seen only a short, particularly animated passage. He began wondering how he would sustain that energy and whether audiences would leave disappointed if the night felt different.
Eventually, he came back to a simpler thought: the performance people had connected with had come from being himself.
His feelings about phones on the dance floor are similarly considered. He wants people to be present, but he has no interest in pretending those recordings did not help build his career. People filming and sharing his sets made a difference. He can appreciate that while still wanting a crowd to get lost in a song.
Ask what he would change about clubs, and his answer is practical.
“The club can look however it wants, but it cannot sound however it wants.”
A poor sound system affects the whole experience, including his ability to perform. For someone who spent years learning precisely where a sound lands, it is an understandable frustration.
Finding His Place in Toronto
Toronto tested that commitment before it rewarded it. He arrived at 21, knowing nobody and still finding confidence in English. He recalls being scammed over accommodation soon after landing, further trouble at work, and the difficulty of finding gigs in a city where his name meant little.
What changed things was the community he eventually found. Meeting the More Sauce team gave him people who understood the scale of what he hoped to build.
“That was a really important moment for me because I realized I didn’t have to build my dream alone.”
He started More Sauce Music with Will, Fresh, and Chris. The label and its activations give them a way to bring music into conversation with other parts of local culture. When they travel, the intention is to contribute something and discover something in return, making space for local artists, food, fashion and talent.
That curiosity carries into how Milda dresses. His earliest reference points were the dancers around him, whose clothes had to move with them and could be clean, exaggerated or unexpected. They spent time in thrift stores, finding inexpensive pieces and making them their own through the way they wore them.
“They would go into thrift stores and buy hoodies for $2 or $3, shirts for $3, and then it was all about how they dressed and paired everything.”
He still admires that resourcefulness. Pharrell Williams is an influence, as are Fresh and Will, but inspiration might just as easily come from a stylist he encounters online or someone at a party.
He understands the appeal of a DJ arriving entirely in black. It simply does not appeal to him in the same way.
“For me, it’s ‘dress to impress.’ Always.”
His taste leaves room for impulse. A pair of sunglasses in a Melbourne vintage shop might feel right today. Tomorrow, he might want something different. Recently, he has been spending more time with Vietnamese fashion, visiting RUE MICHE when he returns to Vietnam and wearing brands including AAH MIDNIGHT CLUB for shoots.
The pleasure seems to be in finding things, trying them and letting his style change without needing to explain every choice.
When a Set Changes Everything
His musical direction is becoming more deliberate. The term “global house” describes his interest in bringing different languages and cultural influences into house music, informed by the places he has lived and the sounds he encounters while travelling.
His debut single, “Put Down Your Weapon,” came from a particularly personal moment. He was dealing with his own difficulties while thinking about the need for greater peace and unity. When a producer brought vocals into a studio session, he recognised something he had been trying to express.
“It came at a time when I felt like both myself and the world needed that message.”
As October arrives, original music is taking a more central place in his ambitions. He describes a shift from touring DJ to touring artist, with more attention going towards the work he releases under his own name.
DCR MILDA Is Thinking Beyond the Next Viral Moment
The practical demands continue regardless. There are permits to arrange, travel details to manage and problems to solve before he reaches soundcheck. He and his team call it homework. The performance is the part the audience gets to see after all of that has happened.
But when he talks about what comes next, logistics give way to something more personal. He wants his music to become part of someone’s everyday life, to be there during a celebration or a difficult period, as other artists’ work has been there for him.
“I’m not just thinking about the next show or the next viral moment,” he says. “I’m thinking about what I can create that will stay with people long after I’m done performing.”
