My name is Steven Morris. I am 16 years old, work at New World Wanaka, and go to Mount Aspiring College.

The earliest memory I have that makes me who I am is years 3 through to 7 of my schooling life. During this period of time, I was bullied quite a lot by older kids and sometimes younger kids. This bullying lead me to do something that changed me a lot. In year 5 I began to take action by starting up karate, which surprised my parents because I’m not normally a very athletic person. After the 7 second week of karate, I remember one of the bullies hurting and sitting on my friend Johnny Percy, out of the tennis courts of the old Wanaka Primary School. I walked up behind the bully and shoved him onto his face off of my friend. Johnny got up and walked away. I began to walk away when the bully got back up and tried to kick me. When he stuck out his foot, I used a sweeping technique that I learned the week before to grab his foot, twist it to make him face away from me, and then I put one foot behind is grounded one and I stood back and pulled on his foot that I had a hold of. This caused him to do the splits and injure himself. I got back up and walked away. It was my proudest moment of my childhood, because it stopped the bully from messing with me ever again.

The second thing I remember would be my love of Electronic music. One day after listening to a famous DJ called Skrillex while he was still smallish, I became obsessed with the genres of dubstep, trap, and EDM, and 2 years later when I joined this college I began producing my own songs. My old songs back then were all made on my iPad and were pretty crap compared to today, but they were the basis of what my style has become today, which is Dark Jungle Terror and Hybrid Trap. My greatest song would be a remix/remake of a skrillex song that has brought more than 200 people, 700 odd likes and 21.4K listens to my Soundcloud fanbase. The best part about that song is that it took 3 hours to make, so it seemed as though I didn’t have to do anything to get lots of fans! (Which isn’t true). Another great thing about my music career is that me and my music making “alter ego” ‘Kaøz’ are kind of two different people – me being paranoid and unintelligent and Kaøz being kind of smart and really outgoing. Unlike me, Kaøz isn’t afraid of anything really accept death (which has a low likelihood of happening because I’m 16).

Although making the music and then listening to is great fun, the best part of all is performing. Performing in front of crowds is something really different when you are djing vs other musical performances. Djing live isn’t just as easy as pressing play and stop, even though that is the basic jist of it. You really have to be listening for when songs are finishing and starting, and you have to listen to the beat of a song and then either speed up or slow down the next song you are mixing in so that the timing matches, otherwise everything goes south really quick. Because most people believe Dj’s don’t actually do anything, they expect the songs to come out mixed perfectly and when you make a mistake it makes you look really bad. But it’s awesome to be up on stage in front of so many people, seeing the lights and crowd dancing along to the songs you play through massive speakers that fill the entire venue with epicness. There isn’t really a good way to explain it, but once you’ve done it you’ll want to do it again. It’s the best feeling in the world.

The latest edition to my character would be the discovery of my anxiety and paranoia problems. While I enjoy performing in massive crowds, being apart of them is really scary for me. I have a problem in my brain where my “fight or flight” process is always active, so I’m constantly feeling under threat by random people and producing adrenaline. If I get to know someone or groups of people I no problem being in a group with them i.e school assemblies don’t scare me. When I was in Melbourne last month, walking around the city was quite difficult for me because if I walk through too big of a crowd I can break down and have panic attacks, so I was always having to find a way around them, which usually led to me getting lost in the city on my own.

And those are the three biggest things in my life that make me who I am. They don’t exactly seem really important now that I read over them, but they really affect me in a big way. Also please don’t be thinking I have a multiple-personality disorder or anything when I talk about Kaøz and I, it’s just the best way to explain how it works.