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Jakarta Post

DJ Riri: Spinning the beat of his life

JP/P

Dian Kuswandini (The Jakarta Post)
JAKARTA
Sat, April 4, 2009

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DJ Riri: Spinning the beat of his life

JP/P.J. Leo

DJ Riri enjoys the nightlife his own way. He’s not one to follow the crowd; rather, he creates his own – a frenzied one.

Many would shrug their shoulders when asked if they’ve heard of Audi Riri Mestica Rachman. But say DJ Riri, and clubgoers’ ears would prick up and their spirits start pumping to the remembered sounds of dance music.

Riri is one of the few Indonesian DJs who have successfully brought the industry out from the underground scene, making it recognized by those outside the party set. But getting ahead of the pack in the dance music industry was not something Riri achieved in a just a few years: It took him 17 years of learning and getting experience in deejaying to get to the top.

“When I started here, the dance music industry was nothing like it is today. It was just beginning to flourish,” Riri says of when he first hit the Indonesian dance scene about nine years ago.

Back then, he says, the dance scene always had negative associations, especially drugs and alcohol.

“I said I had to do something to put this industry in a positive light,” said the 35-year-old. “I wanted to communicate this industry to many people in different ways.”

So Riri stepped up, doing more than just playing and mixing records at nightclubs. Rather, he dedicated himself to developing the industry by establishing a DJ school and management agency, as well as a recording label called Spinach Records.

“We’re working out ways to make a DJ career a professional one. We have about 20 talented DJs under our management,” says Riri.

To get dance music heard outside the clubs, Riri released records under his own label, including his own albums Keluar Malam (Out of the Night) (2004) and Stereo Mestica (2006). His first album was a breakthrough in the dance scene.

“At that time, no DJs here were really putting out records. And people thought stuff like, ‘Why the hell is this DJ Riri releasing an album? There are no songs for him to sing in the first place’,” Riri laughs.

“But that was the thing. In other countries, DJs have their own albums, so I wanted that to happen here.”

Not only did he make it happen, Riri also earned plenty from it. To his surprise, his first album sold about 12,000 copies, and his stunning 2006 single “Fadeaway” won the 2006 AMI Award for Best Dance Track. Hs second album won the 2007 Ravelexx Dance Music Award.

But if Riri has been exploring the local dance scene for nine years, where was he doing before that? Didn’t he say he’d been spinning records for 17 years?

Well, he says, “I didn’t start it as a formal job. It was only my hobby before.”

He says he took up deejaying after he had to stop playing in a band.

“I was in a band when I was in high school. But when I was about to leave to study in France, I couldn’t take my instruments with me, so I stopped playing music,” says Riri, who left Jakarta to study French when he was 17.

It was when he was in France that he was introduced to deejaying. When he moved to Switzerland a year later to study hospitality management, he began his musical journey in a small bar at Montreux, called Mayfair Café.

“I was exposed to heaps of DJs around that time and had the chance to learn from them,” says Riri, naming London-based DJ Danny Dibbia as one of his gurus.

Even though he spent years in Switzerland developing his DJ techniques, Riri did not take it up professionally. Instead, he worked in the hospitality industry, hopping from one hotel to another, one even as far away as Thailand.

It was only after he landed a great position as a hotel manager in Indonesia in 2000 that Riri decided to start his DJ career.

Although he was a complete unknown here, Riri needed only three months to win over the crowd in a brand new Jakarta club called Retro. Between them, Riri and fellow DJ Romy had the club fully booked throughout the first year, with an average of 2,500 people coming every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, with no guest DJs. The rest is history. He’s now the king of the nights, leaving local and international audiences craving his beat.

Crowned the No.1 DJ in Indonesia’s Top Ten DJ Paranoia Award in 2007, Riri reached new heights when he was chosen by a cigarette brand to become one of its icons for his modern, unique, dynamic and creative personality.

But don’t be mistaken, he says. “I don’t smoke. I quit a long time ago. It’s only because of my creativity that A Mild chose me as one of its icons,” he explains.

Riri insists he’s not influencing people’s decision to smoke; rather, he says all he wants to influence is the success of the local creative industry, in this case the dance music scene. His new commitment requires him to design a cigarette packet by himself which, Riri says, has added new color to his life.

“I thought [doing the design] was a great chance to promote the dance scene to lots of people because I put lots of elements of the DJ personality into it,” Riri says. “All I want is to make the dance scene more acceptable than before.”

The dance scene now is certainly different from nine years ago, and so is Riri himself. While he used to be kept busy onstage wooing the crowd, Riri is now managing director of the brand new Barcode club, nestled in Kemang, South Jakarta.

“Well, I can say that now I only DJ for four hours a week. The rest is behind the scenes,” he says.

Which includes, of course, spending time with his wife of two years, actress-turned-DJ Alice Norin.

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