When Korea’s DJ CO.KR steps up to the decks, you can expect a high energy, bouncy set full of UK sounds like funky and grime blended with house, baile, and more delivered in quick procession, packed of his own production and that of his friends. At Rover this Friday, he’ll have a crate full of unreleased tracks that he’s been rinsing to give crowds something new and unexpected but also to test them out before officially releasing them. Spin Da Up, Korean party promoters split between Seoul and Bangkok, will be hosting him.

CO.KR (pronounced Coker) first started DJing ten years ago, originally with a hip hop focus but pretty quickly zeroing in on grime, which he found online. Back then, other than him and a few other selectahs, no one in Korea really knew what grime was—that early 2000s digitized take on breakneck rap flows birthed in the streets of London town. So he had to start from scratch. “Cakeshop has always believed in the DJs, and they let us introduce it to Korean audiences,” he says of Seoul’s iconic underground club. “We’d play 80 percent hip hop to get them comfortable with grime and slowly started playing more of it as they grew familiar with it.”

Inspired by UK scenes’ value placed on dubplates—unreleased tracks that no one else has—CO.KR started producing his own music a few years ago for his own sets. He began with remixes of trap songs but after a while started producing his own original tracks. “They’re much more my own style, they’ve got my own flow,” he says. With a remix, he tailors the beats to the vocals, but with originals, he starts with his own tracks and the vocals come after. He built a strong network with overseas artists, linking them when they played in Korea and then collaborating online afterward. Usually, he’d be the one to book them in Seoul, but sometimes he’d be on the same lineup and take that opportunity to make friends. He’s released music with some solid names from the UK underground like Lady Lykez, Rico Dan, Nikki Nair, and Ikonika.

As CO.KR has moved even farther away from his roots in rap into more solid dance music territory over the years, he’s had to bring his crowds along with him on this journey, putting old fans onto new sounds and attracting fresh faces to his parties. “In Korea, there are different audiences. The hip hop crowd doesn’t know how to react to the dance music. But everyone seems to understand music like baile funk,” he explains. He’s been leaning into this global sound more heavily with his Ghetto Ray party series, which he describes as having festival vibes. Most of his streaming audience comes from the West, but he’s got hometown hero status as a DJ in Korea. Still, he relishes playing overseas in places like London. “They dance like crazy there,” he says with a big grin.