When the Coronavirus shut us down, clubs and festivals ceased, and everyone was essentially forced inside with no definitive end in sight, DJ Times wondered: How is our tribe coping? How are DJs getting by? So, we sent out our “Coronavirus Questionnaire” to DJ/producers from all musical genres to find out.
During this period, DJ Times will continue presenting the questionnaire responses from talented music-makers from all over the world. Here’s our latest entry, this time from Holland, the Amsterdam-based, electronic duo Vessbroz (aka brothers Armia and Arsham Pour).
What’s it like where you’re living? We aren’t exactly on lockdown. There were some restrictions, but still we could go out. Of course, we tried to avoid going out too often. So, we spent most of our time in the studio making music or improving our skills. We’re working out at home and reading books etc. We are so lucky that we have each other, as brothers, so we didn’t really feel bored at home.
Did you lose important gigs, or income-producing work? If there was no Corona, we definitely would have secured lots of important gigs. But we’re keeping ourselves busy with making music and will be ready once all these over for sure.
Are you doing anything now that can or will produce music-related income? Have you learned anything in the downtime? Besides making more music, we also have our own radio show, Electro Vessel, which is doing really great at the moment and it plays on more than 37 stations. We just recently added new a session to it. We conduct a video interview with our guests about the behind-the-scenes of music industry, and we post new episode every week on our YouTube channel. This video series opened lots of new doors for us and now we are planning to make even more videos like this with different topics. We also are in the middle of running our fashion line in collaboration with a well-known Dutch fashion designer Sepehr Maghsoudi.
What are you doing now that’s ultimately constructive to your music life/career? For example, any releases during this period? Yeah, we are releasing one track per month, plus four radio shows and four video interviews per month. Plus, we are working on new series of videos which is called “Far Away from Home.” This is going to be about successful people who live outside of their motherland. The goal is to inspire those who immigrate and let them know that living in another country doesn’t mean you can’t be a successful person! So, with all these videos and releases, we tried to turn this downtime into an advantage for our career.
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve realized during this period of social distancing? The world was such a beautiful place, especially with all the parties, festivals, events, etc., and we didn’t realise or appreciate it enough. Hopefully, once things start to become normal again, we are going to enjoy our life and beauty of this world and the people in it. But as I said, we try to look at things in positive way and turn the current situation into advantage and not just wait for all this to be over but keep learning, working and try to make a difference!
Have you done anything online recently? Have you seen any DJ video streams that impressed you? We have just recently become active on TikTok – we love it. TikTok culture is so different and fun. We’ve been making a ton of videos and even a few live streams on TikTok. As for others, David Guetta’s live-streams impressed us so much, especially how he tried to raise funds for charity with these events.
Any theme tunes recommended for the moment? Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us (Brazil Version)”
Any advice on staying sane & relatively positive through this situation? You can turn any hard times like this into an advantage for yourself. I am sure there are lots of things you always wanted to start or learn, but you never had a time to do so, now is the time to do those. And remember great rewards always come after hard times.
To check out more Life in Lockdown interviews, click here.
