Estella Boersma Is Ready to DJ With Gusto for Her Miami Debut

Estella Boersma will concede she was neither born on a Dutch dance floor during Tiësto's first set nor did she write a well-regarded treatise on Rotterdam techno. But the music the Dutch artist spins would beg to differ.

Since she started DJing three years ago, the 24-year-old finds herself dropping hard techno at a breakneck pace with tinges of the deep stuff and ambient intros featuring samples from old NASA space missions.

Boersma's next pit stop lands her on foreign soil at Little Haiti's Domicile for her Miami debut on Friday, February 2. Expect her to play a high-octane set with endless energy; nonetheless, Boersma isn't sure if it will be rubber-stamped "hard techno" from start to finish or if the night will provide her some wiggle room to experiment.

"I'm going to feel it out," Boersma tells New Times from her home in Berlin. She's sporting a black long-sleeve shirt and crucifix pendant necklace accentuated by her sharp blonde bangs as she casually smokes a cigarette while her cat hops around in the background. "I count on my instinct 99 percent of the time when I play. I pre-select tracks and like to go record shopping to see what I cannot find online. I don't know if it will be a hard techno set, a crazy upbeat one, or a bit slower and deeper."

If genetics are any indication, Boersma's predisposition to rave runs through her veins. She noted that she and her parents have a strong connection to electronic music. "We were going to raves when I was a kid," she recalls fondly. "I would sometimes have to go to my grandparents for the weekend, and I would be very sad that I couldn't go. I always said I can't wait to be 18 so I can go with them to the festivals."
On a fortuitous night at the famed club De School in Amsterdam, an 18-year-old Boersma found herself trapped in the rhythm of the night with little desire to escape fate. "It was the craziest night of my life. I had never seen people so free — ever," she says. "I didn't know that music could make you dance like that for so many hours. And just be there and appreciate the people, the sound. It was great."

The fates conspired again, and she found herself at a friend's house who just so happened to own an old-school monitor system that he used to produce techno music. "I was like, 'What is that? Starship Enterprise?' It looked so mysterious."

Following a short tutorial from her friend on how analog gear produces music, she had to get a synthesizer — immediately. She went to the music shop Bax in Amsterdam, bought a rudimentary synth, and started making rough sounds. "I asked my friend, 'If this how you make music, should we go to the music store?'" she says.

But Boersma didn't go from a bedroom DJ to a globetrotting producer from views on TikTok. Her path followed what feels like has quickly become an unusual move these days: She learned how to produce and then tackled DJing. In February 2021, Boersma released her first single, "Multipass," off her Dance Trax debut EP, Dance Trax Vol. 32.

It took four years of practice, but the five-minute track set the tone for her production talent, bringing in breaks, trance-drooling synths, and some mumbling acid lines.

"Mostly, I started figuring it out on my own, and at one point, the songs started coming together so cool, and it became a lot of fun," Boersma explains. "It was one big experiment, but I started it for fun and fell so much in love with it."
It wasn't until 2019, while she was living in Brooklyn, that Boersma put the work into mixing tracks. She returned to Berlin right before the lockdown, giving her time to learn how to DJ on vinyl. Boersma began playing sets, like at the Netherlands' Awakenings Summer Festival, once the pandemic restrictions eased and throwing down mixes for popular techno radio station and YouTube channel Hör.

A Zoomer taking on major techno festivals is already something to brag about, but her DJing shares equal weight with her career as a fashion model. She started modeling at 14, gracing the covers of publications like Vogue Italia and walking the runway at Paris and New York Fashion Week and for brands like Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs.

While Boersma isn't ready to quit modeling, techno's gravitational pull is stronger these days. "It's an organic transition," Boersma says. "I really appreciate having the artistic freedom and also the freedom of how I can present myself, more so than going to a casting where it can be strict, which doesn't have to be a bad thing, necessarily,"

So far, Boersma's fast entry into electronic music has been sparred from fashion-model-turned-DJ criticism. Of course, that kind of thinking seems awfully narrow-minded. Boersma wears many hats: model, producer, anime enthusiast, illustrator.

"I cannot really comprehend how fast time has gone because it feels great," she says. "Everything kind of started to merge into one another, and sometimes it feels like my memories didn't happen or like they were not real when they definitely were. It's like a different life in a different time. We're in a different universe, which is also good. I think it's a nice feeling."

Estella Boersma. With Izzlo, Spice Crime, and Nujiart. 10 p.m. Friday, February 2, at Domicile, 6391 NW Second Ave., Miami; instagram.com/domicile.miami. Tickets cost $20.62 to $36.37 via dice.fm.