Tag: female djs

PLAYING MELBOURNE: How DJ Tigerlily Became one of Australia’s Most Successful Entertainers

DJ Tigerlily, much like her exotic botanical namesake, is colourful, bold and born to attract excitement wherever she goes. And the Melbourne-born DJ has gone a lot of places in her 28 years, powered by her skills and love for creating and performing electro sets. From Las Vegas to Washington D.C, Los Angeles to New York, Belgium, Sweden and Seoul, Tigerlily has performed at Lollapalooza, Ultra Music Festival, Electriz Zoo and Hakkasan. The only thing louder than her blend of commercial house, Brazilian bass, and electro beats is her ever-changing, brightly hued hair.

Tigerlily, or Dara Kristen Hayes, started DJing at 18, though her immersion in music and its technicalities began much earlier, when her parents fortuitously enrolled her in music school. Tigerlily learnt piano from the age of three through to eighteen, completing the formal Australian music (AMEB) exams. She also studied trombone performance and composition throughout high school. “I did Music and Music Extension for the High School Certificate (final year graduation in Australia) and majored in performance,” she says. “In regards to dance music and DJing though, I don’t have any official training. I first started listening to dance music in my mid teens, about 15, and fell in love with it. I began creating my own music at the age of 18, messing around in my bedroom with a set of decks that I had borrowed.”

After completing a Bachelor Degree in Marketing and Sociology at the University of Sydney, she took part in the 2011 Your Shot DJ competition. Though she didn’t win, the runner-up recognition she received “kickstarted my DJ career,” she recalls. “I’m very much a self-taught producer, too. I downloaded Ableton and started messing around with it in my own time, until I was able to write melodies, beats, and songs. Producing and mixing came really naturally to me. I loved the process of translating my knowledge for classical music into a more contemporary platform.”

Two years after coming second in Your Shot, now defunct Australian electronic music publication InTheMix placed her in their top ten DJs of 2013. As far as accolades, recognition by staff and readers of the publication was no small feat. Indeed, two years later, her single “Paradise” made the Australian Record Industry Awards singles chart, peaking at number 67 in 2015, and the uplifting “Feel the Love” soon followed. InTheMix went on to vote Tigerlily Australia’s number one DJ for three years in a row, leading to her title of “Australia’s EDM Queen” by Tone Deaf.

She’s continued to drop one-off tracks in lieu of releasing an album because, as she explains, “The dance music world is very single focused, so albums don’t make sense for an artist like me.” Her collaboration with KSHMR, “Invisible Children,” is proof of her ability to turn Bollywood style beats into a club bangers, while the vocal, melodic house track “Ashes” shows a poppier, more contemplative side. But her latest single, “Get Down” channels a slinkier, more traditional house vibe than her previous work.

As royalty goes, her friendship and professional work with Tiesto, one of EDM’s most well known DJs, seemed destined. “He has been a great friend and mentor for me over the past few years of my career,” she told Tone Deaf in 2017. “He’s provided me with opportunities to warm up the dance floor at his own concerts with up to 30,000 people. We went back-to-back about a year ago in Vegas and I’ve never mixed with anyone like him before.”

When not spinning records and winning over global festival audiences or major brand clients, including Samsung, Ford, Adidas and Women’s Health magazine, Tigerlily is tending to her own podcast, posting vlogs on YouTube, or advocating for animal rights, wellness and fitness. She has spoken at events, and raised awareness for campaigns, animal sanctuaries, environmental charities and bushfire fundraisers. In 2018, Tigerlily wrote a guide to going vegan for Cosmopolitan magazine. “The best thing about being vegan is the way that it makes you feel and the immense amount of energy and happiness that I get after every single meal,” she told PETA.

Tigerlily admits the current pandemic situation has been a challenge, but certainly not one that has paralyzed her creative energies nor dampened her enthusiasm for multimedia projects. “I’ve been focusing on writing music and getting creative online with my social media and online presence. I work with some amazing brands, so I have been continuing to do some fun work with them,” she reveals. “Not to mention, I’ve been creating my own fashion line, merch line, and am continuing to be heavily involved in the animal rights movement via @our.soul.purpose. I’ve also been performing online regularly, and have just started DJing back in clubs last week, the first socially distanced party that I have played – and I loved it!”

“The Aussie EDM scene is really supportive and it’s so awesome to see so many different people working together to make the best of this very weird time right now,” she says. “Recently, I’ve been seeing DJs, producers, club owners, promoters, and everyone else involved in the scene really join forces and support one another.”

Follow DJ Tigerlily on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

L.A. DJ Bianca Oblivion Shares Her Eclectic Tastes With New Tracks and Zoom Livestream

The first single Bianca Oblivion owned was “Pump Up the Jam,” the 1989 techno-pop hit from Technotronic that would endure on club dance floors for decades to follow. “When I was a little kid, I made my parents go and buy that for me,” she says by phone. It proved to be a seminal influence for the L.A.-based DJ and producer.

“Early ’90s house and techno were a big influence,” she continues. “You’re a kid, you don’t really know what it is. You just know that it’s music you like. So, I didn’t really identify what it was until later on.” Instead, it came together with Madonna, Janet Jackson, ’90s hip-hop and everything else that Oblivion heard in her childhood to build a foundation for the eclectic tastes she would develop in the DJ booth and her home studio. Today, Oblivion links together styles like baile funk, reggaeton and house-offshoots like Jersey club, vogue and UK funky.

Oblivion got her start on college radio in the ’00s, playing indie and post-punk tunes alongside her collection of hip-hop records, with some freestyle and house thrown into the set. In 2006, she began playing at clubs in and around Los Angeles. She set her sights on remixing and producing music in 2016, about a decade after her start in the club world. Oblivion’s first releases were unofficial edits. The two earliest of those, “The Girls Dish n Tell” and “House of Gully,” drew from early ’90s house jams. Not long after that, her edit “Chant Con Sal,” which melded the King Doudou cut “Sal” with “I Chant, You Vogue” by Leggoh, got a shout out in FACT Magazine. “That was one of my first edits and it got some attention,” she says. For Oblivion, that was incredibly exciting, so she kept going. Since then, she’s released of edits, remixes and original tracks.

Locally, she’s perhaps best known for the Latin American and Afro-Caribbean-focused party CULosAngeles, which she co-promoted with Francesca Harding for two years. She’s known for playing a broad range of music and for cultivating events that are inclusive. “I’ve always made it a space that’s inclusive of women, LGBTQIA artists and party-goers and want to make it a safe space for everyone with all different kinds of influences and sounds coming through,” says Oblivion.

Even during lockdown, Oblivion has been keeping the party going. On a Friday night, not long after Los Angeles County shut its bars for the second time during the COVID-19 pandemic, spirits were high on Zoom where Oblivion was DJing. It was 9pm in L.A. and there were already 66 people in the room when she began her set, some of whom would raise a drink or turn on the dance moves when their screens pop to the front. Oblivion gave the crowd a bounty of late-night, heavy-impact beats, with traces of turn-of-century pop – Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, Nelly. It was the first of her two sets that night for Spiral, a weekly Zoom party founded by fellow L.A. DJ The Saddest Angel. Oblivion initially came on board as a DJ, but recently, she’s been co-promoting the event.

“It’s unpredictable,” says Oblivion by phone. That goes for both her set and the crowd, which can bring in visitors from virtually anywhere with an internet connection. Oblivion had tried other livestream platforms before and says Zoom is surprisingly comparable to the club because of crowd response. “You an see the people vibing and dancing to it on screen,” she says. “Even if they aren’t on screen or don’t have the video on, they respond by chat.”

It’s become a special space, lockdown aside, because of the virtual party’s ability to bring in guest DJs and party-goers from across the globe. “I would actually hate to see this space disappear once the regular clubs open,” says Oblivion. “We don’t know how that’s going to happen or when it’s going to happen. I imagine that, at least in L.A., it will be this way for some time.”

Oblivion, who also hosts the monthly NTS show Club Aerobics, has also been spending the time at home working on her productions. Her latest track, “Calling,” appears on the Club Djembe Vol. 2 compilation (out today), from the label (and U.K. club night) Club Djembe. Oblivion says that she was influenced by ’90s Latin and tribal house for the track. ” I don’t know if people really expect that from me,” she says, “but I think that once you hear it, you’ll understand that it’s a good fit with the rest of what I’ve done.”

She also recently collaborated with the MC XL Mad for another new tune, “Bubble Pon Di Bed,” that Oblivion will self-release in August.

“I actually feel that my current production really does stem from the initial edits I did, which also stems from my DJ style,” she says. “I just love to mix a bunch of different dance genres.”

Follow Bianca Oblivion on Instagram for ongoing updates.

“Party Girl” at 25: How Music Plays into Parker Posey’s First Leading Role

I can’t remember exactly when and where I first saw Party Girl, the 1995 indie flick starring Parker Posey as Mary, a New York party promoter-turned-library clerk. Over the course of the late ’90s and into the early ’00s, I watched it a lot and, every time, there was one scene that stuck out for me: Mary, having finally learned the intricacies of the Dewey Decimal system, decides to rearrange her roommate’s record collection accordingly.

Leo, her DJ roommate, is livid. “Give the system a chance,” she tells him before explaining the categories – “tribal, sleaze, disco” – that are subdivided into more specific categories. He rattles off a list of tunes he needs for that night’s gig, everything from Sylvester to Gang Starr. She finds and pulls them.

It’s genius! Of course, the same system that is used to organize library books would work for a DJ’s record collection. Alphabetizing records alone won’t cut it when your collection is more than a couple crates. Genres are a start, but the more specific you can be when categorizing the albums, the easier it is to grab your vinyl and go when you have a gig. Whenever I watch this movie, I hone in on this one scene and think that I really need to do this. It would make it so much easier to find what I need when I need it. Then I realize just how long this project would take, particularly for someone like me, who hasn’t used an actual card catalog since Los Angeles Public Library moved to computers, which may have been around the same time that Party Girl was released. Still, it’s something that’s forever on my to-do list.

But, I love this scene for more than just aspirational reasons. In Party Girl, which hit its 25th anniversary earlier this month, Mary is the quintessential ’90s cool girl. She lives in a loft in New York, has an impeccably organized closet of designer clothes and hobnobs with club kids. She’s also irresponsible, insensitive and bratty. Her quest to learn the Dewey Decimal system and become a library clerk isn’t a personal ambition, at least it’s not in the beginning of the movie. She does it to try and prove to her librarian godmother, who bails Mary out of jail near the start of the film, that she’s not a total fuck up. She’s trying to prove that she’s smart.

“A library clerk is smart, responsible,” says her godmother Judy says.

“You don’t think I’m smart enough to work in your fucking library!” Mary retorts.

Throughout the movie, there are two forces vying for Mary’s attention – the Party Girl and the Library Girl – like the devil and the angel on a cartoon character’s shoulders. The Party Girl is reckless, self-absorbed and lacking – as Judy says of Mary’s late mother multiple times in the movie – in “common sense.” The Library Girl is careful, helpful and knowledgeable. The film is essentially working with two female archetypes and the viewer decides if Mary has to be one or the other. Or, can she grow into a responsible, conscientious person without leaving the party? In the scene where Mary reorganizes the records, she does both. And, while she’ll slip up multiple times between this moment and the end of the movie, it’s the moment where we see that this doesn’t have to be an either/or situation.

There’s an underlying theme about the perceived intelligence of women that runs through the film. Later in the movie, Judy finds out that Mary had sex in the library. She scolds her goddaughter, “Melville Dewey hired women as librarians because he believed that the job didn’t require any intelligence. It was a woman’s job!” Judy, a middle aged woman working a highly skilled and sorely underpaid job, overcompensates by getting tough with Mary.

Meanwhile, Mary struggles to prove herself. After her crush, a teacher from Lebanon who is running a falafel cart when they meet, mentions Sisyphus, she starts reading Camus and shares her newfound knowledge with her roommate. “I think I’m an existentialist,” she says. “I do.” She spends a night in the library trying to learn that Dewey Decimal system.

And that brings us back to the record collection.

I always think of Party Girl as a music movie, even if music only plays a supporting role. It’s a movie filled with jams – Dajae’s “U Got Me Up” and  Dawn Penn’s “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)” are just a few of them – and club life is part of the narrative. More importantly, though, Mary is trying to prove herself in a way that women must often do, particularly in music. When she reorganizes Leo’s record collection, we see a young woman who knows her shit. She understands the music, the way a DJ would need to have everything sorted and how to use an organizational system to accomplish that. It may be a short scene, but it says a lot about the character and how we view intelligence, while the movie itself was ahead of its time for the way it portrays music fandom – from a young woman’s perspective.

ONLY NOISE: How I Turned COVID Blues Into The First Virtual Emo Nite Hosted By Non-Male DJs

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Celebrating the arrival of 2020 immediately took me to 2010. I rang in the new year at Barclays Center with a friend, seeing The Strokes for the first time. It felt appropriate, given how at the end of 2019, I had mentally regressed to feeling like my teenage self.

The year ended on a rough note. I lost my job and months later, a friend died at a very young age. After spending the year working on bettering myself by going to therapy, exercising, drinking less, and leaving toxic relationships behind, suddenly all progress was lost. I was emotionally fragile and reckless, incapable of having a positive mindset. As someone whose work is tied to her identity, I didn’t know who I was without it.

I sought validation and anything that’d distract me from my depression. In a misguided attempt to find happiness, I entered a brief, unhealthy romance with someone. What was meant to be a distraction brought more emotional distress. In a way, it made me feel like I was sixteen again. At that age, I had turned to music to cope, listening to songs that made me feel less alone while dealing with heartache. This time, I decided to do the same. I revisited old favorites that accurately described what I was dealing with, such as “Glendora” by Rilo Kiley and “Title Track” by Death Cab for Cutie. I reminded myself that there was a reason why Jenny Lewis wrote about these issues: it’s common to seek validation from the wrong people, and it doesn’t make me any less of a person to have a moment of weakness.

Music helped, and later things started to fall into place. I was hired at my dream job. I eased up on drinking to cope with grief and depression. I was exercising regularly again, focusing on using it as a designated time to clear my thoughts. My friends were supportive as I attempted to rebuild my life. But just when I was finally feeling like my old self, the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City.

I began quarantining in early March out of precaution, before the city declared a state of emergency. My parents were very concerned, and though the pandemic was still in its early stages, my family urged me to return home with them to Puerto Rico. I initially said no, but after much convincing from my mom, I decided to temporarily move back home with my parents.

Typically, I’d avoid spending more than a week back home. It triggers painful memories from a decade ago, when I desperately wanted to leave the island. I didn’t have true friends growing up and spent much of my time isolated in my room, making internet friends and learning about bands through Tumblr and last.fm.

As a teen, I had no idea that finding solace in music through online communities would shape my future. My childhood bedroom walls are adorned with posters featuring some of the bands I’ve interviewed: Vivian Girls, Of Montreal, Best Coast, and Los Campesinos. I wish I could tell my teenage self, who felt so lost and insecure, that I’d accomplish so many things beyond my wildest dreams at that age. But being back home also felt like I was returning to feeling disconnected from the music-based community I had formed in Brooklyn.

In quarantine, I stopped hearing regularly from friends – it was reminiscent of that loneliness I felt as a teen. My depression returned and made me incapable of leaving the house; I didn’t have the energy to even take a quick walk around the block. No matter how much I accomplished at work, my depression caused me to be very hard on myself, making me think I was going to permanently lose the life I had in Brooklyn. This feeling persisted for two months, becoming worse each day.

One day, music writer Arielle Gordon tweeted about hosting a virtual emo night and after attending with my sibling, I realized I could create an online community of my own that would make me feel less alone. I told my sibling that I wanted to make my own virtual emo night, but with non-male DJs, widening the space for fellow music journalists, tour managers, artists, and anyone involved in music who, like me, were craving that sense of community they’d lost.

After tweeting about wanting to do it, I quickly received a response from Lindsey Miller and Mel Grinberg – both of whom are managers whose work I deeply admire – saying they wanted to get involved. Within two minutes, we had a concrete plan, and we invited Arielle and Rolling Stone editor Suzy Exposito to join. I named it Home, Like NoPlace Is There after The Hotelier’s album – appropriately about confronting depression and dark memories.

Before planning it, my depression was making me feel like my life had no purpose. Planning this event made me realize that others were in need of a community as much as I was, and it was exactly the positive, healthy distraction I needed. People I hadn’t met before began promoting it and were excited for it.

It was nerve-wracking, though. It was the first time I had planned a virtual event. Would it even work? What if something went wrong and the event failed? When it was time for the event to start, there were already 20-something people waiting on Zoom. The number of people kept increasing throughout the night, and the awkwardness of having a virtual emo night dissipated. The Hotelier’s Christian Holden even joined! People made new friends and found a safe space where they could talk about music and joke with each other.

Many reached out later saying it was the most fun they’d had since the pandemic began. That was true for me, too. For the five-and-a-half hours of the emo night, I felt happy and appreciated; I was overjoyed that my fellow DJs felt seen and appreciated, too. The last thing I thought I’d do in 2020 was revisit emo, a genre I have a complicated relationship with due to feeling like my writing about emo wasn’t respected as much as male colleagues’ – not to mention how the genre is often tied to bands that represent toxic masculinity. But now, emo carries a more positive meaning for me. It ties different generations together, and on Friday nights, everyone gets to feel like they belong somewhere – no matter who they are.

With this emo night, I have something to look forward to weekly that gives me an excuse to (virtually) socialize and dress up. While it’ll be some time until things are back to “normal” – if that ever even happens – I’m excited to feel like my regular self.

Follow Home, Like NoPlace Is There on Twitter for ongoing virtual emo night events.

LIVE REVIEW: Maya Jane Coles @ Output

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I periodically look for DJ sets near me on live music listing sites like Oh My Rockness and EDM Train, but despite how famous she’s become in recent years, I didn’t stumble upon Maya Jane Coles’s show at the iconic Williamsburg club Output until I happened to be researching her online. In fact, female DJs were noticeably absent from last month’s show scan. Thankfully, while looking for Coles’s 2017 appearances, I found out she was playing on New Year’s Day. Not only that, but she was part of an all-female lineup also featuring Jade and Mightykat.

This show was unusual in another way: It began at 2 p.m., so attending it was one of the very first things I did in 2017. And it was a great way to start off the year. I entered around 4, during Jade’s set, which was full of steady techno beats interrupted by swaying synths and fading vocals. The highlights were the buildups, which culminated in recordings of a voice counting to four and a whistle, and her sampling of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.”

The packed club was full of blinking lights that switched from red and blue to pastel colors as the night went on. The crowd yelled as Coles took the stage, barely visible behind the mixer. The set took us on a deep house journey, making you feel like you were underwater and then in space. She sampled from her hit “What They Say” multiple times throughout the night, bringing it back to elicit cheers each time the energy started dying down. My expectations were high after hearing Coles’ recordings, and though her live mixes were mostly unfamiliar, she didn’t disappoint.

In many ways, EDM is one of the most male-dominated musical genres. But once you’re inside a dark club and entranced in the music and lights, the surface characteristics of the person spinning the beats are barely detectable, let alone relevant. In that way, EDM also holds the potential to be gender-blind — which makes me hopeful that club and festival lineups will continue to even out in 2017. As more people like Output’s New Years Day performers show off their talents, more people will see that the ability to make people fist-pump, shuffle, and shout knows no gender.

LIVE REVIEW: EDC Vegas

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Over the past couple decades, EDM has gone from a small subculture to a mainstream, worldwide craze. Artists like Diplo and Calvin Harris constantly pop up in celebrity news headlines, and a long roster of celebrity DJs from Elijah Wood to Joe Jonas (and wannabe DJs like Kylie Jenner) are taking up the practice. The frenetic dancing of EDM audiences rivals the energy only of heavy-metal moshing, if even that. Basically, DJs are the new rockstars. 

I say this now, but I was years late to the game. Until last weekend, I thought of DJs as the people who spun beats at nightclubs or curated songs on the radio. 

What lifted this rock I’d been living under? 

I attended one of the most epic music festivals in the world, Electronic Daisy Carnival. EDC springs up every year all around the world, from New York to Brazil. But Las Vegas was the perfect place to lose my EDM virginity. Electronic music booms through the city’s famed hotels and casinos, screens on the insides of cabs advertise DJs, and it’s home to posh nightclubs like Omnia, where Calvin Harris performs. 

Famed Vegas hotel Caesar’s Palace was packed with people from all over the world waiting hours on line to procure passes. Mountains loomed in the desert sky as they paraded by the thousands — some in animal costumes, others in wings, and some just in bathing suits  — toward the entrance to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where carnival rides, art installations, and majestic-looking sets stood.

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It felt like the Nevada dust had swept me to another land. Feathered creatures marched around on stilts. People in circus uniforms climbed light poles. Giant sculptures resembling space crafts shot flames. In a small house labeled “School House,” attendees colored with crayons and old-fashioned schoolteachers distributed gold stars. And as the event’s name would suggest, technicolor electric daisies bloomed from the festival grounds. 

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From the top of the stadium bleachers, I heard a cacophony of electronic music styles emanating from the varied stages. At a pyramidal pavilion called Neon Garden, Russian DJ Julia Govor set the tone early Friday evening with sensual, outer-space-like techno beats. Meanwhile, at the playground-like Upside Down House, hip-hop mixes got festival goers jumping.

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A mini festival within the festival took place at the Smirnoff House, a home/art installation where select DJs performed and guests colored on the walls. The packed crowd went wild as Martin Solveig, a French house DJ who rose to international fame with 2011’s “Hello” and has released hit after hit since, played upbeat tracks like “Do It Right.” 

But it was the main stage, Kinetic Field, where the fuse burning throughout the night exploded. On a stage guarded by two enormous human-owl hybrids, eclectic up-and-coming electronic artist Jauz remixed songs ranging from Queen’s “We Are the Champions” to Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World.” The night reached a climax when he asked the audience to get out their metal horns and banged out a punchy rendition of System of a Down’s “BYOB.” 

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Kinetic Field was also where the innovative Australian DJ Anna Lunoe became the first female artist ever to take the main stage at EDC Vegas. Saturday’s highlights included her infectiously harmonized “Stomper,” Tommy Trash’s haunting version of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang,” and Axwell Λ Ingrosso’s swaying electro-house.

Despite the eclectic lineup, the stages had one peculiar thing in common: No matter where you were, you were likely to hear a remix of either INOJ’s “I Want To Be Your Lady Baby,” The Chainsmokers’s “Don’t Let Me Down,” or, of course, Drake’s “Hotline Bling.” One cool thing about EDM is that it reflects the current state of our culture’s music right back to us.

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In EDC tradition, weddings were held in a 400-square-foot “Chapel of Nature” between stages. For the first time this year, legal same-sex marriages took place there. One couple named Chris and Skye’s wedding was live-streamed and given a reception at the Smirnoff House. The officiator asked that they “take good care of each other and rave on forever.” 

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That could be the slogan for EDC as a whole. Festival-goers doled out high fives as they danced past one another. Strangers asked me if I was staying hydrated. Another guest spotted my pass around my wrist by the hotel the day after and greeted me as part of the “EDC fam.” On my flight back, I was already planning my next EDM festival. 

If EDC is not on your bucket list, pencil it in right this minute. Whether you even have a bucket list or not, just go. Because even when you have not slept for two days straight and you’re being evacuated from a stage because it just caught fire and your legs are collapsing because you’ve been jumping on them so hard, you will love every second of it, the 5 a.m. end time will still feel too soon to leave.