Kia Sydney didn't grow up wanting to be a DJ. That was a happy accident. She actually hoped to be the prime minister of Australia or a professional swimmer, both of which point to her ambitious spirit. She told me her family gave her the biography of the now-retired Olympian Ian Thorpe for her tenth birthday. She also mentioned that New Zealand's former prime minister Jacinda Ardern used to be a DJ.

"Eventually I'd like to figure out a way to combine music and working in the public sector, but I feel I'm too busy to think about that right now," Sydney said, sipping on an iced coffee in Melbourne (naarm). We caught up for a quiet midweek moment amid the sweltering summer heat, right before she toured across Asia and relocated to Berlin.

Between DJing, organising parties and running two labels, Sydney is too preoccupied to have a career in civil service. The 26-year-old has steadily risen to the global stage over the past three years: in 2023, she'll play at Dekmantel in Amsterdam, KUNE in Denmark and Waking Life in Portugal. Her excellent set at last year's Sustain-Release festival in upstate New York turbocharged her momentum and cranked up the buzz around her label Animalia.

Sydney has a playfulness about her—and her work—that's unusual for techno's all-black, brutalist-bordering-on-post-apocalyptic aesthetic. She explains a lot of the inspiration for her wardrobe and creativity comes from her Croatian grandparents on her dad's side. "If you look at the way that my brother and I dress, it's like three generations down from my grandparents," she said. "I wear a lot of clothes that my grandma made. And my grandpa wore head-to-toe Adidas. He was a professional water polo player."

Sydney showed up for our interview in red Adidas sweatpants, a Brazilian football strip and a handmade necklace of old T-shirts and pearls, crafted by local designer Surfe Placid. She told me that her useless talent is shuffle dancing like Aziz "Zyzz" Shavershian, a bodybuilder and cult figure in Australia's electronic festival circuit. As our conversation unfolded, it seemed as if she was still getting used to the idea of talking about herself and coming to terms with her own success. She was generous with her answers, and it was never too long before she was talking about someone else making inspirational music or throwing the right kind of parties.

Sydney's entry into dance music came from a series of chance events. In school, she tried out for the choir but was knocked back for being tone-deaf. "DJing was a really good outlet for me because I wanted to do something musical that wasn't to do with singing," she said. She also grew up playing instruments including the piano and the clarinet.

When she was 19, Sydney visited Labyrinth festival in Japan. She described the trip as a "techno spiritual awakening because it's the mecca for that kind of music. It was a very wholesome way of immersing myself in that kind of sound. Then I got more into music, buying records and getting more obsessed with DJing for the next few years."(Japan is also where she discovered her "deep techno kings" like DJ Nobu and Wata Igarashi, who have immensely influenced her style.)

When Sydney's musical career jump-started eight years ago, the booking culture was very different. "Honestly, it happened because I was being tokenistically booked by my friends as their female friend, which is fine," she said. "I'm really grateful for that. And then I just started getting more gigs… it just kind of happened."

One of these shows was at renowned Amsterdam club De School after then-booker Elisa Luengo heard one of her mixes and invited her to play. "When I played at De School, the booker was like 'What was that music you were playing?' She was asking about unreleased tracks from [Australian producers] Ménage," Sydney said. "And then she suggested that I start a label. At the time I was thinking, 'I don't really know how to do it.' I was 23. And I didn't have any money or any connections or anything. But I just decided to do it. I was just going to try."

Covid-19 and Australia's subsequent long, strict lockdowns forced Sydney to take some time and space to think about the project. Things finally got going when her sister offered to design the logo. The name of the label, Animalia, references an iconic Australian picture book that takes the reader through 26 pages, one for each letter of the alphabet, featuring a small poem and corresponding drawings. It's dense with surrealist-leaning designs that spark fantasy and imagination—the letter "K" page reads, "Kid Kookaburra and Kelly Kangaroo Kidnapping Kitty Koala." Each design pops off the page and the more you look at them, the more you see. This echoes Animalia's EPs and mixes: the more you listen, the more they give you.

"When I decided to start the label, I was thinking about the name," Sydney said. "I found an old copy of the book in a charity shop and I thought 'oh my god, this is perfect!' The sound that I was thinking about was going to be playful and kind of wild. Also cute and silly, and not too serious. The graphics extend from that. I didn't want serious techno vibes."

Sydney's sets might seem serious at first: textured, layered narratives that span techno, deep techno, IDM, trance and wider psychedelic sounds. But her sunny disposition and gleeful bouncing behind the decks contrasts with her deep, bassy sound. "My roots in DJing and music are techno, that's what I was playing when I started DJing," she said. "But my sound has really evolved and I don't really like to limit myself."

Today, Sydney is one of a handful of DJs, producers and curators bringing a distinctly Australian sound to international audiences. Think the deep, psychedelic tones of DJ Life, Solar Suite, LOIF and Hannah D, and the lighter progressive house of Guy Contact. With fellow Australian producers like Roza Terenzi driving the sound forward, this generation of artists has shown there's an appetite for this music outside of Australia. The sound throws back to the country's location, outdoor festival culture and musical roots—sounds that were born from the bush doof. This new experimental style of prog house "definitely goes back to the '90s," Sydney said. "There are so many progressive house and psytrance labels from the '90s in Sydney and Melbourne."

This new Australian sound is so unique that a few international DJs have told Sydney that they have to be careful not to flood Australian audiences with tracks from their own backyard. In her mind, the country's isolation has also shaped this musical identity. "Perhaps it's that we're so far away, and we just hone in on what we've got," she said.

The way Australians consume electronic music is also a factor. There's a strong psytrance and outdoor festival culture hailing from the legacy of longstanding events like Rainbow Serpent and Strawberry Fields. "My friends would always go to Rainbow Serpent," Sydney said, "and that was never my vibe. But when I started going into music-digging holes I realised there's some techno-adjacent psytrance where the lines are really blurred."

Australia also has a culture of renegade summer parties hosted under bridges or in parks. This is a reaction to the gentrifying cityscapes, rising cost of living and strict liquor licensing laws. The outdoor listening experience has hugely influenced Sydney's sound. "I feel like psychedelic music works best [outdoors]," she said. "I just get lost. Otherwise the ceilings are holding you down and closing you in."

When she's DJing, part of her process is assessing the surroundings of the stage she's playing and conceptualising the set from there. "The context of the setting will push me in a different way," she said. "People tell me I have quite a distinctive sound but I can't tell so much because I hear so many different versions of it. I definitely have a euphoric side and a darker side. I'm a visual learner and I'll always be imagining the visual context."

Sydney told me that she was nervous to play psy-adjacent music while preparing for her set at Sustain-Release in 2022. "I feel like psy is a dirty word," she said. "My goal was to do this in a kind of classy and deeper way." Even the sound engineer at Sustain-Release recognised her as "the one who was going to play psy."

Throughout our conversation, Sydney repeatedly mentioned that her career wins so far have been because of luck and timing. She also spoke about her nagging imposter syndrome. What's clear is that, since her earliest SoundCloud uploads, bookers, producers and label owners have responded to her individuality as a person and as an artist. Her approach to Animalia says it all.

"Everything, even the graphics of the label are very childlike and chaotic and not overly curated," she said. "It's quite simple and silly. It's just me doing me."