The morning starts before it needs to. A run, a workout, coffee, and then he sits down and makes something. This is the life Joachim Schaarup has built in Bali, piece by piece, after a longer road than most people know. The version of him that burned brightest and then went quiet. The version that came back.

He grew up moving. Born in Copenhagen, then London, then Berlin, the son of a diplomat, living what he calls "the picturesque life of a kid who had everything he ever wanted." Good schools. All the sports. A mother at home with time to take them places. By 13, he was in a basement with Fruity Loops, learning to make beats in a language nobody had taught him. By 16, he had told his parents he was not going to study. "They wanted me to study. And I just went all in."

That conviction never wavered, even when everything else did.

He started in hip-hop, rapping under the name J.O., a name he still has tattooed on his body, crossed out now. He realized the rap persona was not him, that writing lyrics was not where his real facility lived. When the scene around him shifted toward house music, he shifted too, back to producing, and this time it took. The KANT Project launched when he was around 23. Within two years: Beatport number one. Roskilde Festival. A full calendar. Support from the biggest names in the circuit. The kind of rise that reads as inevitable in retrospect and felt, probably, like finally standing in the right place.

But the nightlife had its own gravity. He was getting pulled toward something else. "I realized that I was developing a pretty bad love for the escape in the nightlife." He says it plainly, without ornament. Cocaine. Drinking. Sabotage dressed up as lifestyle. By 29 he was on welfare, unable to pay his rent, relapsing out of a 12-step program and back into it. The people who had been in his corner were now at a careful distance. "Everyone was like, that guy is a mess and he's going to drag you into his cocaine, crazy life."

He does not frame this as the music's fault, or the industry's. He is clear about that. "It wasn't music that got me up or down. It was myself." Some people can move through the nightlife and stay balanced. He could not, then. The reasons run deeper than a scene or a substance. When you do not love yourself and you have ready access to a state of oblivion, the math tends to work out one way. He understood this slowly and then all at once.

The 12-step program held. The first thing he did after finishing it was call his manager of 20 years and tell him he wanted to get back to the top. His manager told him what it would take: rebuild your reputation from the ground up, Copenhagen first, live properly, get serious at producing again. Two years where almost no one would work with him. Then, slowly, movement. Tracks finding their way out. Gigs coming back. A song he made in five hours sitting at almost 30 million plays on Spotify a decade later, still circulating, still landing.

He is 37 now, almost 38, living in Bali since the start of this year and the discipline that runs through his daily life is not the discipline of someone who is afraid of falling again. It reads more like someone who found out what they are actually made of and decided to use all of it. He runs. He boxes. He produces. He sends tracks to a trusted circle and waits for the signal: "boom, let's go." He sleeps after gigs instead of staying because the morning's work matters more. "I'm constantly imagining someone coming after me with a knife, resembling a boring nine-to-five where I'm clocking in for someone else. And then the freedom of being an artist, making music, traveling the world, playing gigs."

His philosophy of expression is not particularly mystical. He will tell you he did not get into music to project feeling or carry meaning. He got into it because he knew, from a very young age, that standing on a stage was what he was supposed to be doing. "I've always felt that I should be on big stages. I should have people looking at me." He says this without apology, calling it "whack" before saying it anyway, which is a kind of honesty most people do not allow themselves. The need was never abstract for him. It was specific. A body that needed to be in certain places, doing certain things, feeling a particular aliveness that nothing else replicated.

What changed after sobriety was not the need but the clarity around it. When you are not using substances to manage the gap between where you are and where you want to be, the gap becomes information rather than pain. He learned to read the dance floor for what it needed. He learned to finish a track instead of abandoning it for the next idea. He learned that "you can't create anything really successful unless you're also successful inside." These are not insights that arrived as revelations. They accumulated through seasons of showing up and doing the work in a body that was finally being taken care of.

He still doubts. He says this is the most important thing he has learned. "You're never going to stop doubting yourself. You have to doubt and you have to be insecure because if you feel like you have everything mapped out, then you're delusional." What he has made peace with is that the doubt is not a signal to stop. It is just weather. It passes. The work continues underneath it.

When asked what he wants from the music, he says he wants people to move. He wants a track to feel "like a really nice piece that you put on, like a piece of awesome sunglasses that you look forward to wearing." He wants timelessness. He is building a presence in Asia, playing gigs, producing, exploring a region that has something new to offer him. And somewhere ahead of that, he wants to show that you can live inside the world of nightlife without the chaos. Sober, healthy, present, and still fully in it. "You can have all the fun, you know, without all the chaos."

To anyone stuck, afraid to put their work out, waiting for conditions to be right, he says: "Do the thing that scares you the most and start with that." He says this like someone who has tested it personally. "What you get back is not up to you. But how you handle what you get back is up to you."

When asked whether he could live without music, he answers immediately. Absolutely not. And then, quieter, the other side of it: when the run is almost done, when the workout is finishing, he feels something that is close to anticipation. Because after, he gets to go home and make something. After everything, it is still that simple. Still that necessary.

Written and published by our legendary Chief of Publications Pauline Garcin.