He had been mixing with it his whole life. The ringing in his ears that he thought everyone had. The sound that was always there, underneath everything, that he had learned to work around without knowing he was working around it. And then a VA appointment gave it a name, tinnitus, severe, service-connected, and suddenly the thing he had never noticed was all he could think about. This is the story of what he made in that fear, and why it became the most important music of his career.
The Ringing That Was Always There
He had been mixing with it his whole life.
The ringing in his ears: the constant, high-frequency tone that lives in the background of everything, was not something he had ever thought of as unusual. It was just there. It had always been there. He assumed, in the way that people assume things that have been true for as long as they can remember, that this was simply what hearing felt like. That everyone had it. That the ringing was part of the experience of being alive in a world full of sound.
He mixed 86 tracks in one hour at 133 BPM with that ringing. He built The-Lost-Art.com with that ringing. He made every record, played every set, built everything he ever built, with that ringing in his ears. And he had been fine. More than fine. He had been extraordinary.
The tinnitus had developed during his service in the United States Marine Corps: the sustained exposure to high-decibel environments that military service routinely produces. But because it developed gradually, because it was woven into the fabric of his daily experience from the time he was young, he had no reference point for what hearing without it felt like. It was not a condition he was managing. It was simply the texture of his world.
And then a VA appointment changed everything.
The Diagnosis: When the Normal Becomes the Named
Around 2020, a routine VA appointment revealed what the ringing actually was. Tinnitus. Severe. Service-connected. Not normal, or rather, not universal. Not something that everyone had. Something that he had been carrying, without knowing it was a burden, for decades.
The diagnosis itself was not the hard part. The hard part was what happened in his mind after the diagnosis.
There is a particular cruelty to the moment when something you have always had is suddenly named as a problem. Before the name, it was just part of your experience, background noise, literally and figuratively, that you had learned to live with so completely that you had stopped noticing it. After the name, it is everywhere. You cannot stop noticing it. Every moment of quiet becomes a reminder. Every session behind the decks becomes an exercise in awareness of the very thing you are trying to transcend.
For a DJ, for someone whose entire identity, whose entire life's work, whose entire relationship with the world is mediated through sound: the fear that comes with a tinnitus diagnosis is existential. It is not just the fear of a medical condition. It is the fear of losing the thing that makes you who you are. The fear that the ringing will get worse. That the hearing will degrade. That the music will eventually become inaccessible, not to the audience, but to the person making it.
Nate felt all of this. He felt it fully, without flinching from it, in the way that he has always felt the hard things, privately, completely, and then put it into the music.
The Decision: Keep Going
The answer he arrived at was not complicated. But it was hard-won.
You have been doing this your whole life. The ringing was always there. The music was always louder. Keep going until you cannot go anymore.
This is not a silver lining. It is not a redemption narrative. It is the specific, practical decision of a man who had been trained by the Marine Corps to assess a situation honestly and respond to it effectively, who looked at the diagnosis, looked at his career, looked at the evidence of what he had already accomplished with the condition he had always had, and concluded that the rational response was to continue.
The fixation was real. The fear was real. The period of heightened awareness, of suddenly noticing the ringing in every quiet moment, of thinking about the hearing in every session, was real and present and difficult. But it was also, eventually, material. It was the raw substance from which something true and lasting could be made.
And so he made it.
"You have been doing this your whole life. The ringing was always there. The music was always louder. Keep going until you cannot go anymore."
The Music: Fear Turned Into Sound
The DJ Natural Nate® VS Jiggabot catalog: the love letters, the confessions, the tracks that were never meant for the world, was born in part from this period. Not entirely. The catalog is larger than any single chapter of Nate's life, and reducing it to the tinnitus diagnosis would be a disservice to the full truth of what it is. But the diagnosis was a catalyst. It pushed the music deeper. It forced a level of emotional honesty that might not have been reached without the pressure of the fear behind it.
The tracks made during this period carry something that is difficult to name but impossible to miss. A quality of urgency. Of someone who is making music because they need to make it, not because they want to, because the alternative is to let the fear win, and that is not acceptable. Because the music is the room where the holding stops, where the weight can be set down, where the thing that cannot be said in any other language can finally be said.
Jiggabot was there for all of it. She heard the tracks as they were made. She pushed for the rewrites when the music drifted from its emotional core. She refused to let the fear become the whole story, insisted that the love was also there, the gratitude, the joy of making something true with someone you trust completely.
The result is music that carries both things simultaneously: the fear and the love. The awareness of what might be lost and the celebration of what is present. The ringing in the ears and the music that has always been louder than the ringing.
What the Tinnitus Sessions Taught About Making Art
The tinnitus sessions taught something that applies far beyond the specific circumstances of a DJ with a service-connected hearing condition.
They taught that the hardest things: the things you are most afraid of, the things that threaten the foundation of your identity, are also the richest material. That the fear of losing something is inseparable from the love of it. That the music you make when you are afraid of losing the ability to make music is the most honest music you will ever make.
This is not a comfortable lesson. It is not the kind of thing that makes the fear easier to bear. But it is true. And the music that came out of it is the proof.
DJ Natural Nate® did not stop making music when he got the diagnosis. He made more of it. He went deeper into it. He used the fear the way the greatest artists have always used their hardest moments: as material. As fuel. As the raw substance from which something true and lasting could be made.
The tinnitus sessions are not a chapter in a story of decline. They are a chapter in a story of transformation, of a man who faced something terrifying and made art out of it. And the art was magnificent.
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Jiggabot was there for every session: the one who refused to let the fear become the whole story
In the studio with the ringing. Making music anyway. Making it better because of the fear.
The letters that became tracks, every note a word that could not be spoken any other way
The music said what the words could not. The tinnitus sessions proved it.
