Ani Phoebe

Social Studies · Stories & Sounds: 006 - Ani Phoebe

Can music be a force for good or change, or is it just an art form to be enjoyed and appreciated? Ani Phoebe’s life proves it can be both.

Ani is a Queens-raised DJ and admired digger and selector currently living in Hong Kong by way of Rio de Janeiro as well as stints in New Delhi, Turkey, and Paris. Motivating her travels, her intermittent resettling, has been in part her good work in journalism, in studying social movements, and in communications strategy for feminist and social justice NGOs. The other parts? An enviable dose of radical spontaneity and, of course, music.

Spontaneity is a quality few possess and even fewer turn into something beautiful beyond themselves. In 2019, Ani arrived in Hong Kong from Rio, where she had lived for about 5 years, for a gig at Potato Head on a DIY DJ tour—and she didn’t go back. Community had been central to her DJing since she started; joining and leading collectives of female and nonbinary DJs in Brazil and in India gave her the confidence to spin treasured records in public. But it was in Hong Kong that she most famously combined her passion (records), work (social justice), and ideals (collectivism). She started Bad Times Disco (a fitting name for a party birthed mid-pandemic) with her new friend Yuki Kai as a pseudo pop-up record shop. The endeavor, which started as a smart, sustainable, and fun approach to selling records to make way for more digging, evolved into a party to engage Hong Kong creatives around discovering eclectic music during uncertain times, and then into an explicitly political gathering, a party for borderless mutual aid. These solidarity parties have raised almost $200,000 for grassroots movements, benefitting migrant workers in Hong Kong from the Philippines, contributing to disaster response, and helping to expand vaccine access in India.

Bringing people together around unfound sounds reaches beyond the democratic dance floor of Bad Times Disco, and there is, as an interviewer for Eaton Radio Hong Kong called, an “Ani Phoebe Sound.” It’s hard to put that sound in a box—if you’ve heard Ani in some capacity, you know. In fact, we were initially drawn to Ani through her intriguing selections on her Lot Radio show Parallel Worlds. Her rewards from her record digs and, thus, our rewards as her audience, are as internationalist as her work and travels. Records are physical manifestations of culture, humanity, and personality for Ani, and her DJ sets string them together and project them in the spirit of Cosmic and Balearic traditions. She also delights in getting people to dance to the downtempo gems, the dreamy dub, the weird, and the ethereal, to traditional instrumentation and strong female vocals from around the world. When she’s carrying a club, her sounds span 90s progressive house to 2000s Eurodance—and flipped out interpretations of them.

Ani mapped her travels and told Azzeddine about her work, her approach to digging and DJing, and her unrelenting commitment to the intersection of music and mutual aid. We also wanted you to get a real taste of what moves this selector—with five records she considers current faves. Ani details her choices for us. A treat.

Interview - Azzeddine Elasri     Editor - Sacha Madadian     Art - Alfredo

Let's start with the beginning, you're from New York, right?

Yeah. I'm from New York City.

You went to school there?

I'm from New York City, but I didn't fully do my university there. I left New York to study, actually, in Massachusetts. But then I bounced around a lot, during university. Actually, university was kind of challenging for me. So I dropped out of school for a while, and I did a lot of other things.

I started working, I did internships. I was traveling a lot. So I think the university phase is where I started actively thinking, ‘Oh, I'm going to have a career outside of the U.S. I probably don't want to stay in the U.S.’ And in the end I had some family pressure and I ended up graduating from NYU, but I really didn't like it. I almost wish I hadn't finished school. NYU is— you don't really get any type of community or support from your professors there.

What were you pursuing in college?

Well, that was the reason why I kept on switching around. I couldn't figure out what to study. [T]he thing that I had a really difficult time with is I didn't like the restrictions from every department. For example, if I was interested in anthropology [and] I wanted to become an anthropology major, but then I wanted to take classes in history or languages or science, I didn't have enough free classes to do other things.

In the end, I graduated from— NYU has this school called Gallatin, and you can just make up what you want to study. And it ends up kind of applying to your career as well, which I thought already at that point, ‘Well, work is going to be the same as this. You're just going to make up your own career.’ I kind of knew already you're not really going to apply what you're going to study. You're just going to take different parts and pieces of what you can do and then make a career out of it. So that's kind of what I did.

Photo: Gia Fu

Yeah. That makes total sense. What led you to pick Brazil and move out of the States?

I lived in South America on and off since high school. I did an exchange program in Ecuador. I had gotten a scholarship, and I lived with a host family. And then when I dropped out of school, I went back to different countries in South America and worked there, volunteered, did internships and stuff. So I kind of knew since I was younger that I wanted to live in South America.

I studied Portuguese in university, during my last years at NYU. And then I went to Brazil, after an exchange program in Argentina. By then, I was already speaking Portuguese fluently. I said, ‘I'm just going to move here after university, and I'll figure out what to do job-wise.’

But I felt it was a fit, in general. I don't really see myself living in the U.S. My family's Chinese and I grew up in the U.S. I wasn't in a Chinese bubble. I grew out of my Chinese bubble in high school. But I feel no desire to live and work there and interact with American society. I wanted to live somewhere where I would really interact with people, immerse, participate, work, volunteer, intern. And I think Brazil is a place where I saw that happening. It's very multiracial, multicultural. They have a long history of immigrants. It's not in any way a perfect country, but it is very multiracial. I think just from being from New York City, that was very important to me, visually, just being around a lot of different-looking people.

Is that when you started picking up records and falling in love with the craft?

Yeah. That's when I started fooling around with records.

Well, I always wanted to get more into records. I think I had this idea in university, I don't know, it was just in my head, I said, ‘I won't collect records until I have a home.’ Because I was traveling around a lot and moving around and transferred. I transferred universities three times, and dropped out of school for two years, and didn't have a stable address for five, six years.

So when I moved to Rio and I felt like I was really going to live there, when I stopped moving apartments, [when] I had gotten my first job after school, [when] I was able to pay rent (this took a while)— then I started collecting records.

And I collected records for a really long time with no turntables, no speakers, just collecting records and looking them up on YouTube or bringing them to my friend's apartments so I could play them. I started learning to DJ on my friend's turntables. I didn't have turntables for a really long time. So when people come to me and they are talking about, "Oh, I really want to get records, but I don't want to get the whole setup,” or “I can't afford the whole setup," I kind of tell them my whole story: "You should just begin to collect first." The whole thing is about the record. If you have a turntable and you have no records, then that's worse, I think.

It's kind of nice to begin collecting small in that case, a little bit low commitment. It's more about the music itself, and then everything else follows. It depends on what kind of a setup you want or what you want to do with it, if you want to just listen at home or DJ.

Did you have a specific sound in mind before you started collecting those records?

I think I really connect records to already having a music taste. I think investing in physical mediums is like— This is inconvenient. This is more expensive. This is taking up space. Why would you do it unless— It has to represent something for you.

By the time I started collecting records, I was already really, really, really thinking about what music I like. At that point, I had already been going to these parties in Rio. And for me, these parties were life-changing. . . And I was at these parties, I was trying to Shazam songs, and then I was asking DJs what these songs were. And then I was also making lots of friends who were musicians and DJs. And I think that's how you begin to develop your own music taste. You just know what you like, and you begin asking. And you see a pattern and a trend. And then you start to recognize labels. You remember the names of labels. You remember the names of artists and you notice, ‘Okay, this is a trend; I like everything from these particular labels, or this particular place, at this particular time, this decade, this city, what people were making from there.’ And then that's when I started collecting records. I didn't have any money to spend on random things. So I can't be picking up records and not knowing if I'm going to love them.

“I think I really connect records to already having a music taste. I think investing in physical mediums is like— This is inconvenient. This is more expensive. This is taking up space. Why would you do it unless— It has to represent something for you.”

When did you start getting gigs and decide to start playing out for crowds and audiences?

I don't know [what] it's like for other people, but I think in the beginning it's quite hard. And actually, I would consider myself still pretty much in the beginning of figuring out if this is a career or just a lifelong passion. But in the beginning-beginning, it was maybe like five, six years ago, like 2017. And that was kind of when I decided that I would play publicly. Everyone has their own relationship with music. You don't really know if you want to play publicly in the beginning. It should be more about your own relationship.

But I played my first gig because me and a lot of other people, we were really critical about the lack of female DJs and parties in Rio. I mean, it just gets super tiring, when you see the same people play over and over. And not just the same people—not just the same semi-famous DJs and whatever local scene—but just all men, everywhere. Seeing guys who are complete beginners play out publicly, I think it gave me, and also some of my girlfriends, a sense of, ‘Oh, we should also play publicly because we know all these people. We know this guy is playing out for the first or second time, but he seems to be so confident about it.’

I started out playing at an art gallery, playing at private birthday parties, house parties. I think these things are great, just a little bit more low pressure, even though you're also kind of dying inside.

The other thing is, in 2018 I moved to New Delhi. I got a job at a feminist NGO, and I was pretty interested in this job. But I was also super interested in collecting records and getting involved in the music scene in New Delhi. And it was a very supportive place to be a beginning female DJ. I met all these other women in New Delhi— It's hard to explain to you, but at the time that I began to play out more publicly, I felt like, collectively, it was a time where I saw a lot of other women begin to play out publicly [too]. And you need time. You need time. I felt like I was starting out. I had this community around me, and they weren't hyper-famous women. They were [also] women starting out. They had some gender, some feminist consciousness.

I [had] started a kind of community project in Rio, as well, where [women and] nonbinary DJs would just meet up once a week, and we would just practice. That was a public thing. Anyone was able to join. And then with this group of women in New Delhi, I was doing workshops with them and hanging out with them. [A]fter I left New Delhi, they started a collective. So I felt like I was just part of this growing kind of swell.

It helped me play out, because I think the reality is just that you suck in the beginning. If I had just focused on how I sounded or how bad I was, I don't know if I would've continued. But there were a lot of people encouraging me, and the opportunity to play some low-pressure gigs.

I think that's what the music ecosystem needs. A lot of people tell me about the first places where they started to play and how supportive they were. Also, how little money they paid. And I kind of think that's okay sometimes. Maybe this place, they don't pay DJs as well, but you know that they program young or emerging DJs. And they have music every single day, seven days a week. And they're the first place for a lot of people to play. I kind of think that's great. That's very different than a super famous club that's super hard to play at.

Bringing it back to New York for a minute, are you still doing the Parallel Worlds show on The Lot Radio?

Yeah, I still do the show. It's been a little bit hard to keep up with it while I'm traveling. And I have noticed that it's harder to do it since we're now a little bit more in person. It was easier during the pandemic. A lot of people started radio shows during the pandemic. But I still do it. I still love doing it. When I was in New York City last, I had a friend come who was a last-minute guest, and that was great. He's Austrian German, his DJ name is Gazza. We also played at the same festival [(Cosmic Gathering)] this year . And I think it's a little bit of the direction of the show in general. The show is a little bit cosmic, organic, slower, not so dance music–heavy; very ethereal, more abstract, weird selections.

Is that how you usually play for festivals and your club nights, trying to capture those elements?

It's very funny. I don't think I normally play like that. I think that's the music that I was really enchanted by, at a point in my life. After Rio, the scene that most influenced me was Berlin, but this underground scene of Berlin, of cosmic DJs, of Sameheads, Camp Cosmic, Cocktail d'Amore people.

But I think that after some years of being really enchanted with a scene, you also get slightly bored with it. I think you just need a little bit more diversity or growth.

I honestly feel like right now I'm in a very cheesy music mood when I play out, almost like 2000s Eurodance, slash, imagine a Turkish wedding vibe. So I'm playing lots of pop remixes. I'm partially embarrassed to play some of this music after just being in love with rare records and cosmic DJs for so long. But the other half of me wants to play a remix of a Ricky Martin song. And that's a little bit of my general vibe, right now.

I think the thing that happens with parties, and I think the thing that happens with DJs that kind of bothers me, is when people are just taking themselves so seriously. Yeah, it's great to dig as a DJ, and I think that's what we should do. I think that DJs have this responsibility to uncover music that's not so widely known and to share it. But I think it's at the point where it becomes too serious, it becomes too introspective. The audience isn't connecting with it.

And yeah, I've just been really nostalgic for songs that I considered really trashy at some point. And things that people are singing to, finding really good remixes of these things. Pop is about a kind of universal experience. Everyone knows these songs. Everyone has a connection to them. But you can always find a flip or a twist that makes it special. You can find something that people don't know. And I think that's the other really cool thing that DJs find, too. It's the whole remix or edit or bootleg culture. It's the thing that I've always loved, how you can turn a song into something completely different.

This is my mood lately. It's just not taking anything seriously. And being a DJ is kind of ridiculous sometimes. I played this gig last weekend, and then somebody comes up to me afterwards and they're like, "Oh, I really love this song. What was the remix that you played?" It was “Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood” by Santa Esmeralda. One of the most famous 70s disco songs. It's beautiful. I was just smiling ear to ear. I was like, "No, it's not a mix. It's the original." This song is perfect. It's
14 minutes long. If you wanted to make a remix or an edit of it or something, go ahead. You can try. But the original is great. People expect DJs to play all the rare records or all the weird flips. There's a little bit of this defying what we're supposed to be doing, or what I'm supposed to be doing, that I feel right now, that I'm in.

“I think the thing that happens with parties, and I think the thing that happens with DJs that kind of bothers me, is people are just taking themselves so seriously. Yeah, it's great to dig as a DJ, and I think that's what we should do. I think that DJs have this responsibility to uncover music that's not so widely known and to share it. But I think it's at the point where it becomes too serious, it becomes too introspective. The audience isn't connecting with it.”

Moving to Europe, you've been traveling a lot lately, and you stayed in Berlin and Turkey for a while there. What were you up to?

Yeah, so I have my day job and my night job, I think. But I'm doing both of them pretty much all the time. My day job is doing campaigning workshops and doing comms for social justice NGOs, feminist NGOs. And yeah, I did a campaigning strategy workshop for an Armenian Turkish foundation. (In Turkey they say foundation, but it's not really a foundation. It's an NGO.) They threw a two-day festival/conference, and I did the workshop there.

It would've been great to get a gig in Istanbul as well, but I didn't really make an effort. I just wanted to focus on the workshop and digging. So every single day I went hunting for records, for a week. It was super exhausting. Sometimes I do this. It's just not all the time. Sometimes I get into a period where every single day I go digging. It has to be in a place where I like the music, but also where I have good sources. I did have a good source for Istanbul, but it was just one good record store, where I became friends with the owner, who then really helped me go to other places that are not on anybody's lists.

I think that trip was a really good example of combining my two jobs even though it almost feels a little bit hidden. I didn't try to talk about how much I was going to the record stores to the festival organizers. In retrospect, maybe I should've. Maybe there would've been an opportunity for them to do something a little bit more public in the future, like maybe a party. I talked with some of the other people who were attending, like a guy who's Turkish, who's working in this kind of umbrella civil rights organization in Ankara, in the capital. And he's really into electronic music. And he and I were talking about throwing a party and having it be kind of a fundraiser, but for mutual aid, not a fundraiser from this charity perspective. So there's a little bit of room for crossover in these two areas of work, but I'm kind of only in the beginning of exploring it.

I've done some mutual aid parties in Hong Kong, but it's been very independent. It's completely self-resourced, self-managed, and there's been no help. I haven't gotten any funding or resources or any help from NGOs, foundations, or anything. And I think if they did get involved, it would be really good for them. It's really good to do something that's a lot more community organizing, and not just doing a campaign and shouting at the void, doing a petition and then hoping that 10,000 people sign on the internet [but] then they don't connect to you for the issue.

It's not that engaging. It's very conventional. It doesn't always work. But yeah, there is some wiggle room to be creative, for sure. Especially the way you suggested it, which I find fascinating.

I'm curious about Bad Times Disco, your record shop and party in Hong Kong. How did it start? What was the idea behind it, and what were you trying to achieve through it? It’s still based in Hong Kong, correct?

Yeah, it's still based in Hong Kong. Yeah.

Is it because you were stuck in Hong Kong during the pandemic?

Yeah, that's basically the starting point. I was in Hong Kong during the pandemic. I didn't go back to Brazil, where I was living at that time. So effectively I was just living in Hong Kong, in this new city, without having planned for a move.

And then I met a friend digging for records. His name is Yuki. He's Japanese. He's another collector, DJ, digger, in Hong Kong. Until I met him, I didn't feel like I connected with any of the music people here. Yuki's very humble. He's a true music lover. I can tell that when we're looking for records, it's really about his personal relationship to the music and his personal love for the music. So we were just exchanging lots of records, whatever.

We decided at some point to sell records. We were trading with each other. I was buying from him, he was giving to me. It's a little bit natural; I don't know of any record collector who really doesn't sell at all—at some point you have to sell. It just gets to be too much. You want to get rid of some stuff.

And I think the question is, do you want to sell to make a profit, or do you just want to turn over your stuff? Do you want to formalize it? Do you want to do a discount shop? So I think in the beginning, what we tried to do—we would try to actually sell as if we were a shop. So we made up the name Bad Times Disco. That’s a bit more of my direction, my steer. My idea for it is— It's about the concept that we're kind of living in this dystopian late late capitalism, but music has always been a source of resistance and joy and community. And so, it's what we can do together, while we're in these really challenging times. It's not just to make a party, it's not just to make a party or exchange records, but it's also about mutual aid and solidarity.

So in the beginning we were just selling records, had this cute name, doing pretty well, and [had] some pop-up sales. And then very quickly afterwards, we started doing parties. It's nice to play at different venues around Hong Kong. But doing parties outside of these spaces, that's really the DIY scene. That's the liminal space. You kind of get to be a little bit more experimental, because you get to do something that you're like, "Well, I'm sorry, I can't promise you revenue or income for the night. I don't know if this is marketable. I don't care. I'm going to do it anyway." We manage to do independent events where we're DJing, we're selling records.

There's a very strong emphasis on second hand. We don't sell new records. We're also selling secondhand clothes. It's been very much about second hand and that kind of informal economy. Because Hong Kong and China, and a lot of east Asian countries, they have this hyper, hyper, hyper emphasis on new, new things and consumption. New records in Hong Kong are insanely expensive. All the record shops have to tack on the shipping to Hong Kong. It's insanely expensive.

And then also during the pandemic, basically these [Bad Times Disco] mutual aid fundraisers kind of began to happen. Because honestly, Hong Kong was in quite a privileged position during the pandemic. We've been really, really, really sheltered from mass death. We got the vaccines early.

So we started to do mutual aid parties during the second wave of COVID [for] India. India is the world's largest producer of vaccines, and they didn't have vaccines for their own people. COVID was really hitting, especially rural areas, marginalized people, extremely hard, just mass death and mass sickness. And so, we started doing a fundraiser to raise money for grassroots groups and organizers across India. India’s traditionally been a sort of favorable country for humanitarian aid or for NGO funding. Then we continued with mutual aid fundraisers [for] migrant domestic workers from the Philippines living in Hong Kong, and typhoon response in the Philippines. There's just been a lot of crises during the pandemic, and I think there's been a lot more opportunity for people to act transnationally and to think about how all of these issues are interconnected and without borders.

How does that work?

You don't need to be in the same country as somewhere else to educate yourself about an issue. So then you don't need to be in the same physical country to act. But what I find that most people don't have access to or knowledge about is the really local, grassroots-embedded organizations, because they tend to be smaller. They don't have marketing. They don't have PR. Some of them are not working in English. There's kind of this issue of how to transfer money. There's this issue of language, as well.

For me, it's always about working in a network. If you have people that you trust and then they have people that you trust, you follow this chain of trust. There's different ways to practice accountability and transparency.

So that's how Bad Times Disco has evolved. Now we're not just selling records or doing a party, but I'm trying to actively figure out how to institutionalize the mutual aid aspect or the transnational solidarity aspect, how to make it more embedded in the work. Because, to be quite honest, there's no incentive for us to do it. There's nothing. We lose money doing it. It's hard, logistically. There's going to be a million reasons why most parties around the world— They wouldn't be able to do it. I think you really have to find some more support, or you have to be, I don't know, kind of rich to do this.

I need to find more support. Instead of just money, I need wealth in connections, people who can do this, or people who support that. People who have a great relationship to these organizations, or people who are willing to host this event at their venue. And I think that's the way that you can support doing something like this.

But if you just wanted to bankroll it by yourself then, as an independent promoter, as an independent DJ, we're taking money out of our own pocket. And maybe we just can't afford to do it. I don't shame anybody in the music industry for not doing fundraisers all the time. But what I do think is that everybody can do more than they're currently doing. Everybody can be more engaged in political community and making issues visible, or attaching it to their work a little bit more.

“I don't shame anybody in the music industry for not doing fundraisers all the time. But what I do think is that everybody can do more than they're currently doing. Everybody can be more engaged in political community and making issues visible, or attaching it to their work a little bit more.”

Do you think this is an obligation as an artist, to be more involved with what's out there? As you mentioned, if you see room to help out and invest and be a good ally and good support for those communities and organizations, then you should do it.

Yeah. I don't want to say that I think it's an obligation. I think some people have truly a lot to express. I mean, really, I meet some people, and I just think, ‘Wow, if it wasn't for their art, I think this person would die.’ They have no way to express themselves in this horrible society that we live in. There's just no alternative path for them. I really see that art for them is more. It's not about self-promotion; it's more about communication and transmitting ideas.

So I do see art in this very pure sense, as well. In an individual sense, as well. But what I feel about politics, I feel that we have an obligation to be more aware of how we need to be much more collective. That if we continue on in this individualist way, in this hyperindividual way, and the identity and the glamorization of artists is definitely contributing to that, I think that we just don't do well.

I think that if some artists are really struggling with where they are, for example if they're insecure about their work, if they're jealous or envious of other things, or if they feel like they haven't gotten so far, I would just invite people to step out of themselves for a bit and to think about collective issues and larger issues. And that's the way that we can overcome, I think, ourselves sometimes. Because there are individual things, and then there are collective things. We're so conditioned and we're so socialized to just think about ourselves and our family units, our intimate relationships, and our friends. If you were minimally interested in any type of collective cause or any type of anything that was for the well-being of, essentially, strangers— For me that is already so progressive.

I think so many people would say, "The greatest part of being a DJ is just getting to have this privilege of moving people, moving people and touching them." But unfortunately, then I think that people have to be a little bit more critical about the parties that they play at, and what type of people are they moving? And the economics of all of that. We are just not always playing at community-oriented parties, [it’s] just the fact. You have to pay entry for clubs and for parties.

One thing that we like to do at the end of the interviews is shout-outs.

Shout-outs? Oh my gosh. Let's see. Okay, I'm going to give a shout-out to my partner, Daniel, because he's in front of me. He's listening to me. But also because it's really hard to travel for this amount of time and not see your partner. It's not ideal. And that's something I think we need to talk about a lot more, and these expectations of DJ tours, or this glamorization of it. It just isn’t so super easy for everyone, or for me. So I think Daniel's super supportive, although he kind of suffered while I left. So now I'm really happy to be back in Hong Kong.

I was actually going to write an appreciation post for everyone who hosted me, booked me, came to hang out with me, while I traveled for a bit. I think it's been very touching and important because most of us haven’t been traveling during the pandemic. So I think a lot of people were trying to do too much in 2022, because we felt this pent up loss of these opportunities, the loss of these meetings.

But it was really touching. It was really touching to be physically together with people again and to play parties and festivals that I've never seen—some festivals that are older, some that are younger. Venues that I've never seen; they didn't exist before. Cities that I've never played in. So that's kind of a longer post that I have to do. I don't think I'd be able to do it in this one message.

Currently Spinning. . .

Tammy Lakkis

Toribio