DJ Harvey Has the Good Life All Figured Out

For as long as there's been human consciousness, there's been the need to escape and transcend human consciousness, which is why small children spin around in circles until they fall down and grown-ups meditate, fornicate, and self-medicate until they fall down. It's also why we dance.

"What gets people going hasn't ever changed, for thousands of years," says Harvey Bassett, sitting in a Venice Beach café, two blocks from the Pacific Ocean. "Frequencies don't change. The sacred geometry doesn't change. People still dance to a rhythm, whether you're hitting a log with a stick or you've got a drum machine. It's still the same vibrations that turn people on."

Technologies, trends, and scenes may rise and recede, but as the cult-hero limbic masseur DJ Harvey, Bassett has outlasted them all: the '70s-punk scrum of his native Cambridge, England, New York's club circuit and B-boy underground of the 1980s, the rave culture of '90s U.K., his own Harvey Sarcastic Disco warehouse parties in post-millennium Southern California. Undercover today in jeans and a striped sweater-"day drag," he calls it-he radiates the amused existentialism of a veteran bon vivant. "Many occasions I've woken up in hotel rooms having absolutely no idea what country I'm in," he confesses. "I have to open the curtains: 'Oh, I'm in Berlin.' I've even opened my eyes in my own bed and not known where I am."

Ensorcelled since adolescence by the iconography of Southern California-neon sunsets! Frank Zappa! cults!-Bassett marooned himself in L.A. back in the early aughts by intentionally overstaying his visa. He took an apartment near the beach, learned to surf in Hawaii, performed domestically, got married and divorced, and generally lived his version of the California dream: When he's not working or surfing, Bassett says, "I'm sleeping, petting the Chihuahua, drinking cups of tea [and] watching Vanderpump Rules. " It was only after he acquired a green card a few years ago and was once again free to roam the planet that he discovered that his decade-long Stateside sequestration had stoked global demand for his services. At 50-something, Bassett is drawing a new generation of influential admirers, among them Berlin-based DJ star Peggy Gou, who calls him her "hero," and Vuitton don Virgil Abloh, who's conscripted Bassett to play Fashion Week pop-ups of his.