Growing up in Compton, Channel Tres’ imagination “ran wild.” It reached far beyond the boundaries of the Southern California city he called home to countries that, then, the budding creative had only heard of, Germany and France among them.

Combing through Kraftwerk and Daft Punk’s catalogs is a rite of passage for any dance/electronic enthusiast and, those days, the multihyphenate (rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ/producer) in the making was following in the footsteps of the many fans who’d pressed “play” on their repertoires before him. For a younger Channel, though, the stalwarts’ records did more than just initiate him to electronic's ambrosial idiosyncrasies. Existing in a realm far removed from the Gospel of his childhood and the R&B and rap for which Compton is reputed, their productions powerfully expanded his palate — and his sense of what was possible through music.

The effects — both of the pioneers’ sounds and this new perspective — were dizzying and irrevocable. So is “now being able to touch the soil of some of these places.”

“To be able to go to Berlin and all these different places…it’s just kind of crazy,” he tells Beatportal.

It’s fitting that the rollout for his long-awaited debut album, Head Rush, was led by the single “Berghain.” Named after the famous nightclub in Berlin, the song bears a beat as big as the club’s infamy for its selective and somewhat amorphous door policy. And of course, it has roots in the elusive venue. “Shit/I was in Berlin/At Berghain/Everyone’s the same/In Berghain,” Channel murmurs over the intro’s whirling production.

Playing Berghain in 2022 was a metaphorical acid trip. “That song came from my experience of DJing at the club and being in the club, but also the paradox I experienced in my head of me being this person from Compton, and now I’m at Berghain DJing. It just tripped me out,” he recalls.

But this disorientation was only temporary and even amid it, he “felt so in place.”

Booking Berghain would be a benchmark in any artist’s live career, and given what it takes to get in the door — much less DJ the club — one wouldn’t necessarily imagine the tenured acts who do so to find a teachable moment in the 1,500-capacity techno stronghold. Yet when Berghain staff refused to allow Channel’s managers to collect his money, he realized he’d be leaving the venue with more than a milestone.

“Berghain taught me so much…they wouldn’t even talk to my managers. They wanted to talk to me,” he says. “That esteemed me so much because in America, we’re taught you need a manager, everybody else runs this for you. I was taught ‘don’t talk to people,’ blah, blah, blah, a lot of things like that. And this was the first time where somebody was like no, you need to sign your check. I wanna talk to you. That spoke volumes to me, just as an artist. And I started looking at myself as not only an artist, but a CEO, a business owner, after that.”

As for the people who gave him the advice not to talk to people? “They don’t work for me anymore,” he quips.

Last year, the 33-year-old spent a good deal of time on the road, first for a short run of shows in support of Head Rush, which landed via RCA Records that June. Not long afterward, it was wheels up again, this time as support for KAYTRANADA’s TIMELESS tour. For Channel, neither the novelty nor the surrealism of music-mediated travel has tempered with time. This notion underlies the concept of the DJ set that the musical polymath, who “wanted to tell a story” during his one-hour set, presents on the GRAMMY Award-winning auteur’s international affair. Naturally, this narrative starts in Compton.

“I take you through a journey through my life in Compton, ‘cause a lot of my music speaks on that, ” he explains. “But then, you end up at this crazy techno club…It’s about just letting your curiosity and imagination run wild.”

The DJ set (and certainly, its plot twist), Channel says, “speaks [to] where music can take you.” Already this year, it has led him to South Africa and Australia, as part of the TIMELESS tour’s international leg, following a North American segment in 2024. In fact, he’s fresh off a flight from Brisbane to Melbourne when we speak on January 23. The next evening, he’ll play John Cain Arena before boarding another flight to Perth for his final show as a special guest.

It’s not his first time playing the land down under. After his debut set of shows in the country in 2018, Channel ran it back a year later as part of Childish Gambino’s This Is America Tour, where he warmed up crowds across Aussie arenas, including Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena. The venue, its website proclaims, is the “largest indoor and entertainment Arena in Australia” and is “ranked as the Number 4 Arena in the world (only behind Madison Square Garden in New York City, the O2 in London, and The Forum in Los Angeles.”

His invitation to join KAYTRANADA on the trek has come with a wealth of creative opportunities. In addition to developing the autobiographical concept that guides his DJ set, he’s had “more resources” for the bells and whistles, like lighting and visuals, that not only accent but also distinguish and personalize a DJ set. Of course, curating the music is at the center of it all and is especially critical to Channel’s storytelling aim. It’s that much more meaningful then, that he’s playing exclusively his own music for the very first time.

“That’s a big, big accomplishment for me as far as just DJing, to be able to play your own music for an hour,” he says.

His choice and ability to do so isn’t a matter of having enough music (if it came down to that, he could have started doing so much earlier), but rather more of a confidence factor. Like Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, KAYTRANADA has been an expander for Channel, who has shown him new possibilities, specifically that he can command a room strictly with his discography.

“That’s one of the things I learned being on tour with KAYTRANADA,” he attests. “Like he can hold a whole set just with his own music, and that’s something I wanted to do. I’ve seen it before, but I haven’t been up close to it and seeing it every night, so it definitely influenced me.”

Building the confidence that has empowered him to feel comfortable playing only his cuts was not a linear process. In 2023, anticipation for Channel Tres’ debut album was feverishly high, bolstered by a flurry of releases that whetted appetites for his fluid, sexy Compton house sound. They traced all the way back to his 2018 self-titled debut EP, a project that evoked an effortless sense of cool, further augmented by his deep, velvety baritone. Its chief standouts, “Topdown” and “Controller” made a lasting impression; the former even remains Channel’s second best-selling track on the Beatport store.

His follow-up EP, 2019’s Black Moses, also released via GODMODE, coupled with separate high-profile collaborations with songstresses Robyn (on “Impact, from SG Lewis’ debut LP, times) and Tove Lo(“Attention Whore”), built momentum for what fans knew would be a statement-making record from the artist who’d been on a creative tour de force since he officially started dropping music. And it was — though the album wouldn’t arrive for more than another year.

In its place came Real Cultural Shit. The 2023 EP was originally supposed to be Channel’s debut album but didn’t ultimately evolve into a fully-fledged long-form project for several reasons, the most decisive one being that the time simply wasn’t right.

“A lot of those tracks I had made in a different place. When I did Real Cultural Shit, I was just getting sober. When you get sober, the first few months, it’s a drag, and so my confidence just wasn’t there to promote anything,” he says. “I had to kind of work my way back into who I was before I was drinking.”

As he rode the ebbs and flows of this lifestyle change and the complicated emotions that it called to the surface, his signature, soul-stoking melange of techno, house, and West Coast hip-hop — as distinctive and ear-catching as ever on the EP — seemed almost to recommend Real Cultural Shit to new listeners itself. Channel’s growing prevalence was fueled not only by his releases but also by notable performances that increasingly thrust him onto bigger stages over the years, including Coachella’s Sahara Tent in 2022.

His rising stock and the heightened sense of suspense that enshrouded his debut LP stoked both his audience’s and the larger music industry’s sustained interest in how he would approach the long-player when the time was right. Upon its June 2024 revelation, the answer was clear: With renewed confidence.

“With Head Rush, I just had more confidence to put my feelings on display,” he says both self-assuredly and with a sense of peace that comes from his period of reflection, understanding, and finally, acceptance. “Before, I would have to be inebriated [to do that], but now, I’m freer than I’ve ever been because of the time that I’ve been like, ‘Who am I now?’”

On the record, he gets right into it. “Never put an artist in a box/They only thought I could do house/I bet they didn’t know that at one point/The only house that I knew was a trap/My aunty call it the booking joint/The spot across the street from my granny house/Seen a lot of shit there/It ain’t much that I’m scared of,” he vocalizes on the album’s eponymous opening track.

“Talking to God and asking, ‘Hey, is there more tests?’/Threw away the nickel bag, I can’t handle no more stress/I’d rather not do it if I can’t do my best/I put myself into the music, I feel so more relaxed,” Channel later concedes on “Here,” the poignant tribute to his late friend and collaborator AUGUST 08, with which Head Rush ends.

The dynamic and deeply thoughtful LP blends sentiments, memories, and observations inspired by his personal life with a variety of elements — ranging from disco to R&B — that enrich and expand on his established sonic signature. And although its A-list cast of collaborators (KAYTRANADA, Ty Dolla $ign, and Estelle, to name a few) betrays Channel’s star power, Head Rush feels strikingly personal, intimate, and unassuming, even amid its big, speaker-filling sounds. That’s because it “was really just an experience for me to just remember who I was, remember who I am,” he says.

Through it, Channel transcends his doubts with style. Did he ever feel like he wouldn’t be able to get back to that place, though, I ask?

“I was definitely hard on myself, but once I spoke to my therapist and spoke to my family and told the truth, like when I just admitted out loud that I feel like I can’t do this anymore, then everything just kind of went away…” he says. “I had to just show myself that I could still do it because when you make a lot of accomplishments on Adderall, you start to think that was the thing that made you do it. This project was about man, can I lock in, you know? Like I know how to do this, this is me…this is what I’ve been doing since I was three years old…like how did I lose that childlike type of excitement that I had about it? So Head Rush was just about getting back to that, where it was like music makes me happy. Life makes me happy.”

Of course, between his return to Coachella last spring, where he previewed the multifaceted project, and its ensuing critical acclaim, there’s a lot to be happy about. But these days, for Channel, waking up — whether in Australia or Silver Lake, the California neighborhood north of Compton where he’s since purchased a house — is enough.

He recently watched Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. The 2024 documentary chronicles the life of Reeve, the American actor who starred as the title character in the Superman film series and was later paralyzed after being thrown from a horse. “That really inspired me and made me appreciate life because…it’s like man, I can get up and walk around. It’s about paying attention to those types of things,” he says.

But some would say Channel Tres, lifted by a musical vision that’s turned daydreams of distant places into lived experiences, can fly too. Now that he’s made the album he needed to make to creatively free himself, both from his own reservations and the public’s limited perceptions about the range of his artistry, the future is a blank canvas.

He’s working on a new project, about which he’s surprisingly tight-lipped, offering just one remark about whatever is to come: “I’m just as much into dance music as I’ve always been, probably into it more.”

That, however, is not surprising, considering his emphatic admission, just moments before: “I found God in the club.”

Listen to Channel Tres' 'Artist of the Month' chart below, or check it out on Beatport.