Melbourne DJ Aram Chabdjian brings his satchel of eclectic taste to The Spice Cellar this Saturday night. A favourite of the Melbourne underground scene, Aram’s regular visits to Spice are always hotly awaited. What gives him the edge? Well, Aram’s not concerned with fancy stuff. He understands that his duty, pure and simple, is to play good music.
“You’ve got to facilitate the dancefloor and all the while tell your own story,” he says. “It’s so hard to honestly label what you play but I just like emotional music. It’s got to have a feeling to it.”
Aram came to recognition in the early years of this century, DJing at famed (and now defunct) Melbourne nightspot Honkytonks. He was still in his late teens when he started DJing, and it was a love of underground culture that first attracted him to the decks.
“When I found Honkytonks, once going to those dance parties, I just loved hunting music and keeping up to date with that,” he says. “I was pretty much going to Honkytonks, sometimes by myself, just dancing and meeting people there, and that’s where I started DJing a year and a half after going there.”
In a commercial sense, electronic music is going through something of a boom at present. The sound of EDM dominates airwaves and acts like Avicii and Hardwell have no trouble selling out massive outdoor dance events. However, Aram doesn’t believe the underground scene has undergone any major renovation as a result.
“There’s always been a few bars and a few crews that were throwing parties to cater for niche markets, so I don’t think there’s actually been a change. If you look hard enough you can find where you want to go to.
“When I started going out, probably 15 years ago, to dance parties and raves they had at the docks [in Melbourne], some of the parties were getting 12-15,000 people at an event.”
Another surface phenomenon seen in recent years is a huge outbreak of budding DJs encouraged by the usability of digital technology and high-speed internet connections. While the internet makes it easy to learn about tonnes of artists and immediately access their music, it hasn’t necessarily enhanced the quality of the average DJ.
“When I started, a lot of people had to spend their weekly wage on buying records and actually hunting down those records,” Aram says. “There was definitely a lot more appreciation for the music you were buying. Now you can just download anything and it doesn’t have as much of a value. If you’re downloading as well, you’re downloading all these new tunes. Whereas if you were buying your records for a couple of months you kind of had your sound and some of your staples in your set. You knew your records well, when to mix them in properly.”
So, how does Aram avoid the homogenising side effects of the digital age? His secret weapon is a carefully compiled record collection. Accumulated over multiple decades, Aram’s vinyl supply is an archive of quality material, which sustains his unique DJing personality.
“Lately I’ve appreciated not having to play just the new stuff that’s coming out. I’ve been going back some ten to 12 years and just pulling out all the tracks that a lot of the new kids that go out don’t really know about. I’ve enjoyed pulling out those really good records that not many people play anymore, but still sound just as good as the new stuff coming out.”
Catch Aram alonsgide Space Junk, Sam Francisco and Dean Relf atThe Spice Cellar onSaturday August 9.
