She came to D.C. as a student and finished a master’s at Georgetown in 2012, but she embraced DJing a couple of years ago and eventually gave up her policy-oriented career. Now she’s DJ Ayes Cold, pronounced “ice cold.” And in committing full-time to her craft, she’s become a fixture at U Street venues like the Velvet Lounge, Tropicalia and 9:30 club.

“When I started DJing and people started responding to it, I realized that, for the first time in my life, it was crystal clear to me that I enjoyed something,” the 29-year-old says, smiling. “I feel like we go through our lives in this haze — we’re not sure if the things we enjoy come from a place of genuine passion or not. In the past I’ve found it hard to separate the things I genuinely enjoy from the things I think I should enjoy.”

The Chicago-born, India-raised musician has also played at prominent local festivals — Broccoli City and Trillectro — and opened for fellow DJ/producer TOKiMONSTA. She’s staying busy in the near future too, with a performance at U Street’s Dodge City, a youth event at the Hirshhorn Museum and a slot during a benefit show at St. Stephen’s Church.

We met up to discuss the tensions inherent in deciding to become a full-time DJ, the emotional aspects of her field and why people shouldn’t compare her to a certain South Asian artist.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Bandwidth: What pushed you to make the jump to being a full-time DJ?

DJ Ayes Cold: My earliest gigs were house parties and little art openings, for friends. Before that, I released a few mixes on Soundcloud and I realized that mixing came very intuitively to me. And I also realized that I really enjoyed it. I could just go down a rabbit hole and just test out blends and mixes for hours and hours and hours kind of like a child playing a videogame — that level of intensity and focus. When I started going out there and doing house parties and stuff, I felt like people’s enthusiasm and reception of me DJing matched the intensity and passion from which I came at it. So as soon as I saw that those two things actually aligned, like people’s enthusiasm with my own passion, that’s when I realized that there was an opportunity here and an opportunity I had to seize.

“My parents came from this background of very educated, intellectually aspiring, middle-class Indians, so you can imagine the things they were listening to.”

And was there anyone trying to hold you back from making that jump?

Everybody was encouraging, but I guess the pragmatist in me, at the time, was definitely a little conflicted and I had to fight that voice, which was like “Oh, you’ve worked so hard to go down this policy-oriented path, and you’re just going to leave it so you can move into a completely different direction of work?”

So most of that doubt was coming from yourself rather than other people?

Absolutely. That’s my biggest challenge, I think, is my own self-doubt. I have this ability to put on this confident exterior but I think a lot of artists struggle with crippling self-doubt. I feel like I’m also very sensitive, and I think that’s what makes people dance, to be honest. It’s because I’m very much about reading the energy from a crowd and that helps me when I get it right, but that makes it also hard to have a thick skin when you care about people. I guess I’m a hyper-empathetic person, or a hyper-empath. [Chugh references Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, where the protagonist has “hyperempathy.”] I’m not literally her, but I do feel like I identify with her. I feel like the part of me that I used to want to work [on] before I started DJing, which was that super-sensitive part of me, I feel like now it’s a source of strength. Of course, a source of weakness too, but now a source of strength which is being able to connect with people and take them on a journey.

DJ Ayes Cold (Photo by Africanist)

How did you get into music? It seems, as a DJ, you have to know a lot about music.

To be honest, there’s still a lot of music that I’m still learning about. The more I DJ, the more I learn about music. The more spaces I go in, the more people come up and ask me for things I don’t have. I’m learning from people, I’m often getting a lot of tips from people in the crowd. Funk, hip-hop, early R&B — I’m still catching up to [them] because I spent my childhood outside of the U.S. It’s just classic, there’s nothing like it: the sound of ’90s R&B. I play it, but I didn’t grow up to a lot of ’90s R&B, I grew up to classic rock that my parents were listening to. Some DJs come from the angle that they [want to share their musical catalogs]. I don’t think I come from that angle. I’m going to be real with you, it’s not something that motivated me to DJ. I grew up listening to Eric Clapton, The Doors, INXS, Guns N Roses, Prince. If there was any R&B my parents had, it would be Seal, Sade, Whitney Houston — but Bodyguard era. Classic rock — in India it had a huge following. And then there was random Indian music, qawwali, folk music, Indian music they thought was “tasteful.” My parents came from this background of very educated, intellectually aspiring, middle-class Indians, so you can imagine the things they were listening to. Like Abida Parveen. If there were any Bollywood soundtracks, it would be to the film Bombay, I remember that from my childhood. And some Punjabi music, because my mom’s a Sikh, like Bally Sagoo, early bhangra, pop stuff. It was an interesting mix.

“People are very narrow-minded about brown women in music.”

Are you interested in incorporating more South Asian musical influences into your music?

I’m actually working on a track that has this bhangra influence but, I just — I don’t feel the urge to make South Asian-inspired music. I grew up playing the piano and I taught myself the guitar so I don’t really have an intimate understanding of Desi music. I don’t want to claim that. Why should I do it just because I’m brown? Although, this one track I’m working on, I took a mix that has a lot of old Bollywood music on it and I [sampled] some of the best parts. This is Bollywood music from the ’40s, ’50s, maybe ’60s, and there’s certain sitar riffs but I distort them. That’s a narrative that’s out there — the expectation or hope that I would make South Asian inspired beats. People hope that I can conform to it because I’m a South Asian woman and M.I.A. set [a precedent] for that.

But your sound is really different from M.I.A.

That’s true. But people are very narrow-minded about brown women in music. You don’t know how many times people have compared me to M.I.A., which is so ridiculous because we’re just so different. They just think “brown woman doing music with dye in her hair.” People are so quick to make comparisons to M.I.A. when you’re a brown woman doing something!

Any future projects in the works?

I have a series called The Freezer and there’s definitely a Vol. 6 coming out. I take forever to put them together so hoping I get my act together and release Vol. 6 early in the fall, but probably October or November. And I’m working on a lot of beats, and a lot of them are sitting on my hard drive but I know I want to release at least three of them by the late fall. I have enough material that I think I can do that, but the past six to eight months have been an intense process for me where I’ve been learning about music production, testing out different things, making beats, fine-tuning them; there’s so much that I constantly learn that’s new everyday and so I feel like by the fall, early winter, I’ll have reached a point where I’ll put something out. Probably a three-track EP, just a demo, just to test the waters.

What do you find roots you?

I have a hard time answering that right now. Rootlessness is something that I’m dealing with and that I’ve dealt with since I was a child. What roots me are values. What roots me is my approach to what I do. And that my approach is shaped by values and those values are hard work, not thinking about all the other distracting stuff, doing what I do from — it’s going to sound corny — a perspective of love and keeping that pure. Doing what I do from the perspective of really loving your craft and focusing on the craft. That’s what roots me. Everyone coming at me, asking me about my influences and where I’m going, not to say those questions shouldn’t be asked because that’s what helps make sense of artists, but I don’t really have good answers to those questions. I just really love playing with sounds. All kinds of music. I love every kind of music under the sun — except for really annoying EDM! But it’s my love of music that really is the grounding thing. I don’t know what the end game is from DJing, the future is uncertain, and you can see it as dark times and sometimes I feel that gravity, but the thing that brings me back down to focusing is the feeling I get when I DJ. It’s the pure feeling of joy; that’s what grounds me.

DJ Ayes Cold plays at U Street’s Dodge City on Aug. 28, a youth event at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden on Aug. 29, and a benefit St. Stephen’s Church on Sept. 1.

“I think about the idea that our bodies are policed at other places, and what are the possibilities of feeling free somewhere, and what are the possibilities of connecting with each other in ways that aren’t blocked by language?” says Kristy La Rat — stylized as Kristy la rAt — through a crackly phone. “Parties are a way of creating unexpected interactions, which are hopefully really positive and transformative.”

As the collective makes clear on the Facebook invitation for its five-year anniversary Friday night: “This fiesta is a mixed-community-amor, queer-fly, immigrant-posi, POC-centered, genderpolice-free, nena-run, friends-welcome, mucho-respeto space! No wackness, no one-identity-dominance! You are importante, loves! Gracias a todxs por ser inspiradorxs.”

Kristy la rAt started Maracuyeah — the name is an enthusiastic take on maracuyá, the Spanish word for passion fruit — with fellow DJ Mafe Escobar, known as DJ Mafe. Since its inception in 2011, the collective has grown to include other D.C.-area “Latinx” DJs, including Carmen Rivera, aka DJ Carmencha. (The “x” is a way to eliminate a/o gender distinctions in Spanish words.)

The community has stretched beyond the city, to Mexico, Austin, Texas and Paris. The goal is “world domination,” DJ Mafe deadpans, but then lets a laugh escape. She’s been in Paris for a couple of years, spreading the Maracuyeah gospel.

But despite that increasingly international reach, Kristy la rAt believes in keeping some of the action firmly in D.C.

“One strong element is a very local party that contributes something to the local scene,” she says. Both Kristy la rAt and DJ Mafe have backgrounds in community organizing.

The five-year anniversary show is Friday at a regular venue, a Salvadoran restaurant in the U Street NW neighborhood named Judy’s. Before the birthday bash, the DJs reflect their time together and what the future holds.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bandwidth: What is your relationship to music? How did you come upon music and how does it play in your life?

DJ Carmencha: It’s hard to define my relationship to music. I think that my relationship to music started in my living room listening to records with my family, and I try to carry that with me everywhere I go. All those songs and the way they make me feel in my heart.

DJ Mafe: I think growing up a Colombian, you’re pretty much surrounded by music 24/7. So you go to the store, you go anywhere and there’s music blaring there. In my relationship to music, it’s very important. I’m in finals week right now so I’m listening to a lot of music. I love this app called TuneIn where you can listen to radio stations from across the world. So I started with a radio station in Cartagena, Colombia, and then I moved to a station in Lagos, Nigeria, and then one in Tallahassee.

Kristy la rAt: In childhood, it’s how I related to different parts of my family and understood moving between a lot of different spaces. it was kind of like the soundtrack of different experiences that helped me make friends and move through hybrid identity spaces. And then I would also say that growing up in this area, one of the amazing things is that it’s one of the more all-ages type city. So if you’re a teenager, maybe 13, 14, music was the way I could socialize with other people, express myself, even as a participant. I feel like also another really important part of music is raising money for different things. Some collectives I’ve been a part of here, they’re really grassroots efforts and a lot of the time, we end up getting into DJing as a great way to throw parties and raise money and fund our organizations that didn’t have any other funding.

“I don’t really believe that music can exist in an apolitical vacuum at all. We’re working with all different kinds of music at our parties. We’re touching on themes of gender and race and ethnicity and migration and safety, and all those are political and social concepts.” — DJ Carmencha of Maracuyeah

So following that, how exactly did you get into DJing? What made you want to be behind the table as opposed to in front of it, in a sense?

Kristy la rAt: Now looking back, a big purpose was to support different community initiatives. It was for grassroots radical organizing without having to deal with some sort of funding world or a funding world that didn’t want to fund what we were doing. But also, I started organizing and DJing dance parties in Lima when I was there during college. We organized a femme-organized — or “nena-run,” as they say in Spanglish — event space, so we brought a lot of elements of our identities into the vision and how we wanted to move and how we wanted boundaries and how we wanted our bodies to feel existing in that space and how we express ourselves. So kind of creating a space for our experience was a big part of it.

DJ Mafe: For me, I started DJing in college, first at the radio station and then I started the first Latin-alternative party there because I was tired of all the parties that were just Top 40 Latin music. There’s so much music and artists to showcase that are different from mainstream Latin Top 40. And then when I got to D.C., it was also on the idea that nobody else was playing the music that we wanted to hear, so we just took it upon ourselves to play it and learn how to be great DJs and create these spaces and tour.

DJ Carmencha: I came into DJing after working at a radio station in Berkeley, California. I started realizing that one of my favorite parts was picking the songs to play between talk segments and sharing music with people and feeling their reactions to the music.

DJ Carmencha (Courtesy Maracuyeah)

Did it take very long to learn to DJ? What are some of the tips you’ve learned over time?

DJ Mafe: Technology is different, I would say. I started going at it with CDs and then learning the different tools. So just understanding how to do better mixing and understanding the different types of files and different types of sounds like if it sounds bass-y or not and if they go together or not, but also play with those differences. I remember there’s a lot of, how you say, prejudice if you don’t play a song or how the song should be played. So sometimes we were just like “f**k it, we don’t want to continue with the same BPM, let’s just mix it and change it up.” So I would just say keeping up with technology and covering those tools has been important.

DJ Carmencha: I was very privileged in taking a workshop that Kristy organized with another DJ in D.C. for women and gender-nonconforming people of color to learn some of the basics of digital DJing and organizing parties. And that definitely helped me very much feel more confident with what Mafe’s describing in playing with the tools and playing with the technology and experimenting. Just letting go of that perfectionist fear of making mistakes. But I’m still learning.

Kristy la rAt: One thing that I think is important before learning how to DJ is to think about your goals. Especially right now there’s a lot of hype in DJ culture and the atypical, mythological example of making it big very quickly as a DJ. And I think if that’s part of your goal, that’s fine, but it’s good to be realistic because that’s not most people’s experience. And the same elements that happen in society definitely play out in the DJ world, like attaining different levels of economic success and popularity. It’s very traditional in that way with, you know, discrimination and lack of opportunity. I think that’s why it’s important to have identity-based workshops and identity-centered spaces. Sometimes it’s easy to get confused on why you want to DJ, so just take a second to write down your purpose. Also, I think making playlists is half the battle of DJing, right? Like, a lot of the time it’s what you hear and curation is a huge part of it. And having your friends, too. DJing has always been a collective experience and a vehicle for more collective experiences that I just wouldn’t have enjoyed 100 percent alone, ever.

How have your parties changed?

Kristy la rAt: Well, we’ve learned a lot in how to organize these spaces and in the way that we DJ. And we’ve gotten a much stronger community over the years which means more people can hold down the space in a more collective way instead of the few of us who are organizing. Even the music collection has gotten a more hybrid in terms of playing with a bunch of different genres. And the space is a lot more centered on people of color and queer identities feeling welcomed, as well as everybody, but those identities feel more centered than when we began so that’s kind of cool and that was a goal and something that we’ll keep working on.

Should music always have a political role, or does it just have a social function? Or is it a combination?

DJ Carmencha: I think it’s hard to make a distinction between political and social for me. I think anywhere you exist in a space, you’re saying something with your actions or movements or the songs you’re choosing. I don’t really believe that music can exist in an apolitical vacuum at all. We’re working with all different kinds of music at our parties. We’re touching on themes of gender and race and ethnicity and migration and safety and all those are political and social concepts.

DJ Mafe: For me, music is how to share the immigrant experience and the immigrant experience is very political itself. I think it’s very difficult to separate, just as Carmen said.

Has it been hard keeping these spaces safe?

Kristy la rAt: I would say, even like safer spaces is a challenging proposition given the social conditions we’re working with that play out in most public spaces. So I’ve helped organize parties from house settings where you have more control to club settings where you really have to put your trust in the venue. I think that’s something that people don’t expect, to really create agreements with the venue and conversations about what would security look like and what would interactions look like and what does escalation look like. How do we want our guests to be treated or addressed, even thinking about something as simple as checking an ID. We have discussions on having those respectful interactions and having people not feel like their gender is being policed at the door when they’re coming to a place looking for a positive social experience. It’s a lot of work and it’s an ongoing set of questions that we’re looking to address. When we started working with Judy’s, the restaurant that we work with, it’s all-gender bathrooms, but it’s a whole system you have to work on. It’s a huge challenge and one of the most important challenges in organizing a space.

DJ Mafe: It’s just s****y when you go out to a place and you don’t have security or there’s not a positive space. Being harassed can ruin the whole night, so a space should be more open and safe spaces should include best security practices. People should demand more when they go out so that more of these practices can be shared and applied.

What tips can you give to people coming to a Maracuyeah party?

Kristy la rAt: Respect. And think about each other’s humanity. Not putting hands on other people unless you know they want you to. Not singing along to horrible words that you can’t say since they aren’t part of your identity. Just because a song is playing, doesn’t mean that gives you a pass to use that language if it’s not your place to.

Maracuyeah’s five-year anniversary takes place April 29 Judy’s Bar and Restaurant.

Shop owner Josh Harkavy calls the cozy storefront at 1628 U Street NW his “dream store.” He says its visibility from the street — and high ceilings — will be a major upgrade. Since 2006, Harkavy has run his tidy and well-curated shop out of a basement at 1901 18th Street NW.

Flower shop Bouquets and More previously leased 1628 U Street NW. Before that, eco-friendly shop Greater Goods occupied the space.

Joint Custody was the last record store to relocate from Adams Morgan to U Street NW. It moved from a grimy spot under the old Pharmacy Bar to a more spacious (and pleasant) location at 1530 U St. NW in 2013. But Red Onion’s departure doesn’t deprive Adams Morgan of all its record stores: Crooked Beat and Smash are still holding down 18th Street NW for the time being.

Three years ago, a move to U Street might have been unimaginable for Harkavy. In 2012 he announced he planned to close Red Onion. Months later, he had a change of heart. Now the business owner seems optimistic about his store’s future.

Harkavy says he’s “just excited and looking forward to the new space.”

If all goes to plan, Harkavy says, Red Onion will open on U Street in August.

Photo by Flickr user Elvert Barnes used under a Creative Commons license.

Update, 2:30 p.m.: Mayor Bowser spokesperson Michael Czin says the Funk Parade is “working its way through the normal process,” and the mayor’s office is looking forward to working with event organizers. “We are a pro-funk administration,” Czin says.

Original post:

A petition has started on behalf of the Funk Parade, the street festival that debuted last year in D.C.’s U Street neighborhood. The petition on change.org calls for the District to formally shut down U Street NW for the second edition of the parade on May 2, 2015 — a request that organizer Justin Rood says city officials rebuffed for last year’s edition.

The petition calls the 2014 event an enormous success, but says it could have been a lot less cramped if it had been permitted to take place on U Street.

“Nobody got hurt, but the route itself was not big enough to accommodate everyone,” Rood says. According to the petition — started Wednesday by Kevin Rooney of U Street Buzz — the inaugural Funk Parade attracted 30,000 attendees, all squeezed into a route that followed Vermont Avenue NW to V Street, winding up in Ben Ali Way. (The Washington Post published a map of the route last spring.)

“That was the route the city suggested. The worst part was the alley they had it ending on was narrow and short, and there was no dispersal area,” Rood says. According to Rood, Funk Parade attendees spilled over into U Street — which would have been just fine, if the street had been formally closed.

Rood says that last fall, Funk Parade organizers submitted a letter of intent to the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency — namely the Mayor’s Special Event Task Force Group — hoping to start the complicated process of closing U Street for the event’s second edition. He says they’ve heard no response from that or any other city agency involved in handling major events. (A spokesperson for HSEMA redirected WAMU’s inquiries to Mayor Bowser’s office.)

As of noon on Friday, the petition has been signed by more than 340 supporters. Rooney says he’s hoping for 5,000, but that’s a more or less arbitrary goal. “We don’t want to antagonize anybody,” he says, “but we want to show city officials that there’s broad support” for the Funk Parade.

Mayor Bowser expressed support for the Funk Parade in her campaign literature, saying, “With iconic arts institutions like the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center, and exciting new initiatives like the (e)merge Arts Fair, Capital Fringe and Funk Parade drawing artists, musicians, creative innovators and their visitors from around the world, cultural tourism is one of the city’s growing sectors.”

At-Large Council member David Grosso tweeted in approval of the petition Wednesday, writing, “The Funk Parade was awesome last year. Definitely want to see it happen again on U Street.”

Another at-large Council member, Anita Bonds, wrote a letter to Mayor Gray’s office in support of closing U Street for the event in 2014, says Bonds spokesperson David Meadows, but he can’t yet confirm whether the council member is ready to throw her support behind it again. He adds that Bonds “understands the concerns of closing such a major corridor.”

Funk Parade photo by Flickr user Kathmandu used under a Creative Commons license.