DJ Ripley (us)

Brooklyn based Larisa Mann aka DJ Ripley is a member of Dutty Artz Founding and a founding member of Surya Dub SF. She is a a legal ethnographer with a PhD from UC Berkeley Law School and currently works as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Music and the Performing Arts Professions department at New York University. Larisa is a public speaker, gives lectures, participates in panel discussions and does presentations and workshops.

Music exists because it crosses borders, literally and figuratively. Physical borders: eardrums, walls, and legal borders: nations, zones, neighborhoods, the walls of your apartment vibrating as a car drives by. DJ Ripley uses music to celebrate people’s experiences across race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, highlighting the beauty of interconnecting global stories and rocking them into your body on the dancefloor. Ripley plays music from cities where immigrants and wanderers bring their sounds from home and mix them with big bass: you’ll hear azonto, cumbia, jersey club, kuduro, afrobeats, baile funk, tuki, bhangra, dembow, jungle, soca, dancehall, grime, gqom, balkan beats, uzbek pop, electro cha3abi, dub, footwork, kwaito and more rubbing up against each other in her sets. Dj Ripley mixes music to highlight difference rather than seamlessness. Pulling out familiar songs and sounds from people’s childhood or community, layering them with foreign, distant sounds to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. She has been playing her ferociously adventurous blend of global street bass sounds since 1995, across 23 countries on 3 continents.

"Bass music luminary" - The Fader

"Rhythmic danger in overdrive - rootical, rally-cry uproar" - Simon Reynolds