EXCEL started DJing when he was a kid growing up in South Philly. Not in a club – in the house, on whatever equipment was there. He honed his skill and creativity from a young age. What he was building, without knowing it, was a practice: the ability to read a room, understand what a crowd needs before they know it themselves, and translate that into sound. Two decades later, that practice has taken him from house parties and local spots in Philadelphia to intimate vinyl listening rooms, to clubs in Los Angeles, Vegas, Miami, London, Tokyo, and everywhere between.

The resurgence of vinyl in the culture isn't a trend he's catching up to. Soul, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock, funk – these are the records that got him into this in the first place. The global music he's spinning now is a return to the source, not a reinvention. It's the same ear, the same instinct, applied to the rooms and moments that matter most to him right now.

Nike, Complex, Google, HBO – what they're getting is the same thing a room of forty people with a crate of 45s experiences: he reads the room and moves people. Every time. That's not separate from the craft. It's the same respect for the work that's been there since the beginning.

That same sensibility – the obsession with detail, the respect for what came before, the refusal to separate craft from culture – is what built All-Time High, the clothing brand he co-founded in 2020. High-quality Japanese denim, hand-dyed pieces, vintage construction: ATH is what happens when an artist and record collector turns his eye to what he wears. For him, curation was never just about sound.