Psychic Environments

“Have you heard this word ‘atomized’?”

Alex Votichenko sits across the coffee table from me. It’s been 17 and a half hours since the party ended next door. DJing under the moniker Djentrification, Alex has been the driving force behind the weekly 602sdays dance night at Bikini Lounge for almost 10 years.

“Like as individuals”, he continues. “You could have thousands of people, where if they are atomized, they’re not going to be building networks. All our meaning being derived from capitalism and technology… These types of psychic environments are preventing scenes from forming.” He takes a sip of his coffee and thinks about it for a second. “Or it could just be the heat. You want to retreat into a cool, safe place. I get that.”

Alex picked the meeting spot. It’s Trans Am, a café just down the street from Bikini and Grand Ave Records in the former Trunk Space location. The only sign is a white standee on the burning sidewalk with a single arrow. I wonder how many times I’ve walked past this space before. A lot of stuff with Alex is like that. He sees the stuff you don’t.

Upon arriving, Alex has sat down for all of four seconds before he gets up again. “Hey check this out, this is really cool”, he yells over his shoulder, digging through a pile of prints at the far end of the coffee counter. An hour from closing, the place is nearly empty. But yet he scrambles through the pile like there’s a queue forming behind him.

“This one”, he says, handing me an exquisite print that words would hardly do justice. He explains that it’s a piece by Andrew Hiller, who does this independent art exhibition called Wizards of Time. He explains it all in a flurry, like it’s the first time he’s discovered it too. Alex’s excitement is infectious. Within 10 minutes, he’s told me about Wizards of Time, a South Phoenix radio station running out of a partially abandoned building, secret punk venues on the west side, and plenty more. “There’s stuff going on every night of the week!” he says, excitedly, “Like stuff I’m not even into! Open mic poetry stuff! But sometimes, it’s really good!” It’s like a madcap game of show and tell devoid of ego and transcendent of critique.

If you know anything about Djents, this is well within his M.O. Nothing is hidden with his style or approach. There’s no “Losing My Edge” mentality driving covetous, obsessive compulsive record collecting. It’s all much simpler than that. Catching his occasionally appearances at Lost Leaf, Abnormal Sensations at Valley Bar, or The Palace at FilmBar, you get this inclination. The master before you is simply a dedicated and seasoned student, still finding the same joy out of every needle drop.

But there’s no question to where you can find Djents in top form. That’s at 602sdays.

“I didn’t start 602sdays”, Alex explains. “One of the dudes that started it was the guy that started this place [Trans Am]. This guy named Bradford, and Andy, his sister, along with the Hawaiian woman at the [Bikini] bar whose name is Wes - they started it because Tuesday night was the slowest night of the week. And then I was a regularly featured DJ in there. They would do crazy shit in there – borderline destructive. It has this strong foundation with being a neighborhood function that is not formulaic as far as the music or even the event.”

Alex laughs as he’s trying to recall which of the innumerous nights to recount. “There’s been a lot of weird situations created in there. And I’ve tried to continue that, as much as I can. Like, with handing out weird robot cardboard armor for everyone to wear, or toilet-papering everything, or saran wrapping all the booths so you can draw all over shit. Throwing feather down from pillows everywhere. It used to get like really wrecked.”

But it’s more than the chaotic aspect that made 602sdays what it is. “It has a very good, confusing, mixed up history”, Alex continues. “It was never set to be a certain sort of sound or genre. It’s not for one style of music. The DJs would be from terrible to weird to whatever, but it was really fun. But it was almost like a joke.” He thinks about that for a second, looking up. “I mean, as soon as something takes itself too seriously, it kind of is, you know?”

I walk through the doors of Bikini Lounge on Tuesday, June 26, 2018 at 11:13pm. The bar is at comfortably full capacity, though another twenty could squeeze in and make it a very sweaty night out. Six bucks cash gets Brittany and I a PBR and a Hop Knot. We push to the last open booth. I like how the Lounge looks from this side, full glorious bar in view, dance floor crowded, and sleazy pool table crammed in the corner.

I look to Alex at the decks. There’s a woman standing in front of the table, smiling, a pitcher holding a couple dollars on top of her head.

“We have a birthday tonight!” Alex yells over the music. The place erupts with cheering. “And all she wants is to raise some money for the kids being held up at the border right now.” A bigger cheer erupts. The woman with the pitcher starts moving around the bar as Alex brings a burning cumbia track into the mix. The crowd isn’t shy with their donations. At the cash only bar, there’s no excuse not to jump in.

“That was a super last minute thing”, Alex explains to me later. “She texted me the day-of. But I think they raised like a hundred or two hundred bucks that night. 602sdays is really good for that kind of stuff.” The cumbia continues for another minute or two before Alex launches in another direction entirely. He’s moved continents, languages, and cultures, but the BPM is pretty damn consistent. Not a soul complains. No one leaves the floor to wait it out until they hear something familiar again. The night just progresses, building energy with each passing minute.

“There’s a lot of open minded people that just want to hear new and interesting music”, he says casually,  “and I wouldn’t even be doing what I’m doing without that”.

This is partially true. It also has a lot to do with the fact that Alex is an intriguing and endlessly endearing spirit guide. His rhythm through sets isn’t guided by stock 16 bar swells. He lets a track play just as long as he’s interested in it. He is a master at surveying the room, but he doesn’t respond to it as much as he refines his encouragement. Throughout the night, Alex transitions between tracks using reverb, delay, live sampling, and even his own momentary freestyle rapping. There is just too much going on to be able to honestly say there’s nothing here for you. And furthermore, that pioneering feeling transcends music taste or familiarity. The room at Bikini Lounge is maybe the most eclectic group of individuals you’ll see at a midweek dance night ever.

“I’m glad it’s still confused”, Alex says, “We’re really lucky for that. I’m thankful it’s still somewhat open and random”. He talks about confusion like it’s a good thing, like the answer hasn’t been revealed yet of just what kind of scene 602sdays really is. He prefers it that way.

Djentrification’s work lives in sharp contrast to the prevailing narrative of the modern music industry. Elsewhere, in an increasingly algorithmic electronic landscape, Alex’s grassroots, community-oriented approach to maintain “confusion” might seem archaic. Even as I sit there with Alex, sipping at my coffee, my wheels are spinning in the back of my head. I’m wondering how to better get the word out about Gila, better ways to market, to get our materials in front of people’s eyes, to get people to buy into what I’m offering. But to Djents, that entire wave of selective “discovery” is trite and undesirable.

“I’m always wired after these DJ gigs, man. I’ll go out and ride my bike and I’ll end up at some coffee shop at 4 in the morning. I was riding my bike early this morning after I got done [with 602sdays]”, Alex explains, “the only other people I saw were like people from condos walking their dogs, super insulated. And I ended up sitting on the street south of Roosevelt Point and I was just tripping out on how much that place looks like a prison. I’m sure I see some of those people at parties. But I was kind of thinking that if it wasn’t for some of the other people that I get to see… if I wasn’t getting reminded on the regular that there is a lot of life and unexpected different kinds of stuff here, I would have fled.”

I write this at Jobot, across the road from Roosevelt Point. I have headphones in. I’m isolated from the world around me, alone at the corner table, while conversations are had all around. And I honestly wonder, am I part of the problem? I bike around the city, but I can’t remember the last time I did so without music in my ears, without my comfort zone boundaries well defined. Maybe this is why I’m missing the stuff that Alex catches - more a matter of intentionality than ability.

In my infinite naivety, I try talking to Alex about people’s perception of Arizona in other scenes around the states - the fact that the only bands my friends from Seattle could regularly name from the Arizonan picking field were Jimmy Eat World and The Format. I think about the fact that many of the other shining Arizona talents in recent years have high tailed it out of the city as soon as the plausibility of fame made itself known.

But Djents isn’t interested in perception or critical appeal. He’s here, he’s now. And while he’s a master of his craft and, for many, a quintessential example of how Phoenix’s massive melting pot can foster genius, he thinks of his focus not on “art”, but on people. "What's the benefit of protecting or ‘saving' the arts in downtown Phoenix if the ‘Arts’ themselves are unwilling to stand up for people and neighborhoods they find a home in?” It’s a massive question. One that forces me to completely rewire the way I’m thinking about this whole project. Alex has no concept of the arts as fragile, teetering house of cards, needing protection and soft touch. Rather, he sees what he does as the front line for community activism. Putting on inclusive parties, creating a space for people to engage with what challenges them in a positive manner, cooking some delicious food outside the door. That’s what he’s about. And to him, that mixture of elements is not bound to a city center.

“Imagination needs to be a factor in what can or can’t be done [with art in Phoenix]. Like people thinking ‘Oh, it would have to be in this little area or this district to be good’, when in reality there’s a whole fucking city out there, and if you want to do something and you put the time in, there’s a pretty strong possibility that you could find some other like-minded individuals that are interested in what you’re doing and could utilize such a space. There are other spaces that are removed from downtown Phoenix that people are utilizing. The city is really big and really unknown and no one has a handle on what’s possible, thankfully. It’s not super quantifiable, what’s gone on or what could go on, but I do feel like there are a lot of people trying to do really interesting work. Trying to keep things moving and funky.”

I let what Alex has said settle in my mind. There’s so much to take away here - more than I can even fathom. I feel like whatever walls I had tried to define around Phoenix’s scene in my exploration thus far are blown down - more than that, just like vaporized completely. Gabriel at the bar cycles through his Flaming Lips playlist. The Terror has ended, so now it’s on to a mixture of stuff from Embryonic and Oczy Mlody. Alex just chuckles in his chair, thinking of something. “It reminds me of like some shit from a movie”, he says, putting up Shakespearean hand gestures, “Like ‘Oh, the evil dark lord has taken the elf Kingdom of Frith, but Frith is in your heart!’ It’s on some shit like that. They don’t have this, so I’m going to make it happen.”

That’s the mantra. Less “do it yourself” and more “define it yourself”. Definition infers action, but beyond that, it speaks to ownership. There’s no secret formula to Alex’s success. It’s just his willingness to define his own space, and his choice to not let any amount of competition or any number of shitty prison-complex condos down the street discourage him from that pursuit.

Halfway through our conversation, Alex is talking about something. He gets distracted mid-sentence, looking out the window with a smile. “Oh, cool, that guy just got up on the roof.” I look behind at the Oasis apartment complex. Despite its presumptuous name, it’s far cry from the trendy cookie cutter lifestyle porn of Roosevelt Point. It’s an older complex, comfortable with its two stories of painted brick and small local art gallery on the main floor, open to the public 24/7. Sure enough, on the eastern side of the roof, someone has nestled into the sweet spot behind a patch of shade to watch the sun set on Grand Ave. “That’s a good spot”, I say. Alex nods. “It is. I’ve been in that spot.” That’s how it is with Djents. He’s a pioneer who has broken ground before you, but he’s excited you’re doing it for yourself. And he’ll be first in line to give you a high five when you make it happen.