Artist Profile - Desiki

Meet Kiran De Silva. A promoter, DJ, obsessed electronic music fan and co-founder of the Front Left collective. In this interview we delve into Kiran’s involvement in dance music, the community ethos of Front Left and what goes on behind the scenes to make it all happen. 

Tell me where your love for electronic music began?

Deep in some dirty, derelict warehouse I’d say. Although the first ever electronic music CD I bought, was Daniel Bedingfield's “Gotta Get Through This” when I was about 11 and at the time probably had no idea that’s what dance music was. When I was 16, I started going to raves and listening to hard dance music and then when I was 18 I progressed into the club stuff. That slowly brought me to house, then electro, and then eventually to techno.  

Did your career in the promotional side of events, begin when you progressed more into the clubbing scene? 

I think that’s when it developed further, but even in my rave days I was always working at parties to try and get myself free tickets. Whether that was through selling tickets, handing out “scat packs” at the end of raves or standing on doors wrist banding people, I was always doing whatever I could to be involved. When I turned 18 and got into the clubbing scene, I got into street team promo work and got stuck into that more and more. From there my jobs started to get better and I was given more responsibility - bookings, marketing etc etc and eventually just started running my own parties. 

In the parties you have run previously, you often double as a DJ. How do you go from being the event organiser, to throwing down tracks that get the crowd moving?

There was this period of time where everyone almost condemned the idea of the promoter-DJ, because quite often it was associated with the notion that you get booked because you’re a promoter and you’ve got a network as opposed to your DJing ability. I guess that is true to some extent, which is frustrating, but the other side of that, is if you’re the promoter of the party, there’s a strong chance you know what music works best at your own event. You spend the most amount of time immersed in your party or other similar events, so I often feel that by being the promoter, I have a much more in-depth view of what is musically relevant and the vibe you envision as the promoter, therefore being able to play a better set.  

Once you started the promotional work, what motivated your decision to get behind the decks and play?

Djing was always an underlying thing in everything I was involved in. Because I was always so invested in the music that we were playing at the parties, I always loved being able to be one of the people who actually delivered it to our crowds. 

In your experience over the last ten years, how have you seen the industry change? 

Dance music has become a lot more commercialised, which I don’t think is always necessarily a negative thing, because it’s global growth has definitely allowed more people (including myself) to make a living out of it. For something that was once relatively underground and mostly played in raves and warehouses, the past 5-10 years has seen dance music become a full blown mainstream industry. The majority of clubs play house, it’s all over the radio, there’s festivals all over the world - it’s now a billion dollar industry. The general expansion has meant that there is a whole lot more people involved in it - there’s more artists, producers, promoters and it’s an incredibly competitive market.  

Bringing it back to the music, tell what it is that you love about techno?

Rather than narrowing it down to a singular genre, my kind of interest is much more related to electronic music generally. For me, it’s that dance music represents a level of community and that’s what we’re trying to create and instil within Front Left. It brings a whole lot of people together, under the banner of electronic music. It’s incredible how dance music has the ability unify a bunch of strangers together and create a community. 

Do you think that many other parties, have the same level of creativity that you guys deliver time after time at Front Left?

I think there is a bunch of people out there doing really cool stuff, which is really motivating and inspiring to me, especially with the oppression that’s gone on in Sydney over the last couple of years. A lot of people put Sydney down for there being a lack of nightlife, but there’s parties being thrown in warehouses, in cellar doors, in RSLs, in car parks, in Portuguese halls and everything in between. There's this whole range of fucking cool shit going on and the people who are doing it, like us, are being way more creative with what they do.  I guess what’s unique about us, is that we create this extra interactive element through involving our entire production team in the process from start to finish. It allows us to make the parties so much more immersive and adds to the overall experience. Curating that kind of immersive stuff lends itself to a crowd who are more interested in what’s “off the beaten track” somewhat.  

You’ve got all of these like-minded creative people around, collaboratively contributing to something incredible. Tell me more about the community ethos you’ve developed at Front Left.

That’s how the whole project started. The idea was to get a collective of people who were on a similar wavelength and build something from that community. I think that Chris and I could have gone down a separate route and done it ourselves without re-inventing the wheel, but then we wouldn’t have been pushing the boundaries of how parties are formulated. For us it’s always been about the fact that we've got this slew of really talented and creative people around us. Involving them was as much about delivering the end result, as it was about the creative process of getting there. The whole thing has really snowballed to become this group exercise and the end result has been that the parties are amazing.  

Front Left’s community ethos spreads beyond the team itself and to the collective of people who attend. Can you explain more about the Free to Move and LGBTI+ movement that Front Left is promoting?

The Free To Move/LGBTI+ artwork and posts were essentially just us making a public point about the inclusiveness of the Front Left community. It’s about being an inclusive party and brand, that isn’t for a certain type of person or a certain group of people. We’re open to anyone and everyone who wants to come and enjoy the music and be part of a culture of mutual respect. We felt it was important to take a stance politically through the party, to say that we are people, and a brand, that respects each individual and are in full support of the LGBTI+ community. We also endorse ‘Free to Move’, which is a movement aiming to prevent and stop women from being harassed at events. While those are things that Chris and I haven’t ever had to personally deal with in the parties that we’ve been running, it’s about being proactive and positive. We live in a very negative society - you know we’ve got racist politicians in our senate and Trump in power - regardless of impact, why shouldn’t we take a stance on something we actually can control? We want people to know that Front Left is a party that is a safe space, friendly and open to everyone.   

What was it that inspired the concept of Front Left and why did you decide to take things into your own hands?

I think just being able to have full creative control over what we want to do. We’re figuring things out as we go, learning from every party and that’s a really exciting part of it all. We’re prepared to experiment, push the boundaries further each time and we’ve got all of these creative people at an arm's length, ready to help us build something incredibly unique. The only way I think you can truly do that, is when it’s your own money on the line and your own creative direction/vision. 

What excites you the most about what’s to come for Front Left?

Quite simply, to see its growth and for us to be able to do more and more with the parties, productions, spaces - everything. I guess when you’ve got such a creative team of people putting their heads together, we’re constantly coming up with new ideas, that we’re itching to activate and execute. Now we’re at the point where we’ve got more ideas than we’ve got time. We’re in a really positive position to keep working on the parties and also grow the record label simultaneously. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the music, so for us to have an outlet and a platform for the talented producers that surround us is another really exciting thing and a great way to engage people on another level to the parties. We’re starting to connect everything together and have a really holistic approach to everything we’re doing.