[Interview] D.Blavatsky
* Pour lire la version française de cette entrevue cliquez ICI!
In the past year, the Montreal underground scene (MEFD included) got really excited about this creature with an unforgettable hair color. And this growing obsession is completely legitimate. Blasting hardcore powerful music with a breathtaking scenic presence, D. Blavatsky becomes a guilty pleasure we love to satisfy at each of their live or DJ sets. Like a burning meteor that radiates everything in its path and not ready to stop its mad rush, D.Blavatsky, whose real name is Diana, is also a generous, full of love person.
To learn a few things about this exciting local artist who’s absolutely not done surprising us, we offer you a very beautiful and passionate interview. Please note that for the first time in MEFD history, some of the pictures are in color to properly appreciate this already legendary hairstyle!
Your flaming red hair has become your trademark. Are you thinking of keeping your current look or would you like to change your appearance one day?
Haha great first question – I can only speak on the permanence of my appearance with so much conviction as I am young and subject to volatile decision making… but my red hair is a significant part of my physical existence. My current look is the result of merging aesthetics that have developed over some of my most identity-forming years. Deeply intertwined with my visual and artistic tastes in other aspects of my life, I have become quite comfortable moving through the world with this particular mask and self-signifier. I think that red is a really powerful colour and it holds a lot of space in my life, but also recognize how much of my ego is associated with the recognizability my red hair gives me.
I will definitely change my appearance one day – I am only 22 and can be quite impulsive on how I feel change should manifest itself in my life. My long red hair is extremely empowering, but how it is socially responded to also contributes towards my self-contradictory dynamics of gender dysmorphia. Long hair impacts my social presentability as a woman and as much as I love it, a part of me always feels distant from its femininity. I spent the majority of my childhood up until I was about 12-13 with a shaved head. In retrospect it was a pretty weird decision my parents made/encouraged in me, but despite some of the struggles it arose within my childhood social life, I am thankful for the gender anonymity it granted me in my early years of developing self…
… But that’s just it – relationships with self and how our physical representations interact with the social worlds around us are messy and conflicting, and although I often think about cutting my hair into a more socially perceived masculine style, I am not completely sure that style shift will resolve these distances I have from gender performativity and my physical being.
So to answer your question more directly – I will probably keep the long red hair until I have some sort of ego death and finally shave my head.
You are originally from Calgary. What were the main reasons behind your move to Montreal?
As it will probably become more apparent to you and the reader throughout this interview, my early years of social estrangement, extensive reading, and current academic privledges have granted me with excellent bullshiting skills… I think I pitched it to my parents as ‘an exciting opportunity for growth and personal development’… but in all reality had somehow decided upon the idea of moving here halfway between my 3 best friends and bandmates talking about how sick of a city Montreal was, and my 19 year old thirst for adventure.
I had carved out various communities and places of belonging for myself in Calgary, but the energy of the city as a whole never fully resonated with who I felt I was becoming. Everything I did there was being drawn from relationships and inspirations not directly correlated with what it was I wanted to be doing. And although that established in me a strong independent core for my artistic vision (drawn from the internet and other obscured flows of ideas)- Montreal at a distance better suited this idea I had built in my head around living in a city that directly fueled/encouraged my passions.
I am a very earnest person and at the time yearned to live in a city that inspired and pushed me to expand my understanding of artistic practice and community gathering – But again, I really did not know much about Montreal. The city as an idea somehow intertwined itself with more abstract desires I held at the time, and then became a convenient place for me to project my hopes and aspirations onto in response to my feelings of detachment towards Calgary and the parts of me the city made space for.
I moved to Montreal out of a pure but naive determination – and although I could talk for hours about how ‘my aspirations in this city offered new frontieres for my education and experiential growth’, my reasons for moving here were mainly guided by the limitations I felt I had in Calgary and my need for change… Oh yeah – and the fact that my three best friends were also moving here haha.
Despite your young age, you have an incredible scenic presence, you are so confident. Where does this destabilizing ease comes from?
Difficult question to answer… and thank you for your kind words – Hmmm it’s tough to say… For as long as I can remember (and for as early on as my parents can recall) I have always been this way. Ahaha I would need to dedicate an entire interview to scratch the surface of my childhood, but to put it simply… I was a strange kid. I didn’t really start socializing until late elementary school and spent the first 10 years of my life completely immersed in my own world. So much of my sense of self in those early years was given the space to flourish within the disconnect that existed between my perceptions of the world, and early childhood conditioning around behaviour and social formality. I used to get in a lot of trouble for my directness and attribute a great deal of my current oratory skills to those early years of misunderstanding and communicative frustration.
Like any other piece of consciousness trapped in these flesh tubes, I have, and have had my fair share of complexities in my relationship with self. I can’t pinpoint the root of this ease to one specific life event or interaction, because I feel that all of the lived experiences that have informed who I am today have only acted to shape this energy source and sense of self I have deep within my being.
I am honoured to have loved and been loved in the ways I have so early in my life, and so much of the confidence I move through the world with comes from these profound relationships of trust and support. Even when my parents used to get called by the school to pick me up for getting suspended (which happened often haha) for talking back or leaving to play outside if I did not find class interesting, they trusted the processes of reason behind doing what I did. I have done a lot of stupid shit in my life – and have faced the repercussions of such lessons learnt 10 times over – but my deep love and respect for self as an extension of the love and support from those closest to me, allows me to move through the world with a special type of confidence in space held and energy shared.
What are your strongest inspirations? Are there any artists or performances that marked you forever?
Hmm, I am a very hyper-stimulated person (like most people who grew up with the dawn of the internet) and think that some of my greatest gifts come from my ability to take in and process huge amounts of stimulus/information. It’s difficult for me to organize and identify specific inspirations within my life because I am constantly drawing inspiration from so many of the things I interact with.
I feel very humbled and motivated to stay on my grind when I interact with people/communities who are doing something they are passionate about. The pulp of someone’s work doesn’t hold as much emphasis to me as the energy they devote to what they are doing. Whether that be a show or rave a collective is throwing, a new mix someone is working on, a zine or ceramic mug someone is making, or a new dish one of my roomates cooked – it’s these moments of overlapping passion and my ability to share in such excitements that most wholeheartedly inspire me.
I can be pretty intense within my rituals of creativity and often push myself to either an edge of indulgence or disciplined withdrawal to overcome times of artistic lethargy. I gain a lot of inspiration from pushing my body and mind through extremes – It’s a strange dynamic because of how balanced of a person I am – but I seek out these breaking points of mental and physical exhaustion (through sleep deprivation and physical training) in order to access my creative selves differently. I think a part of this is what drew me to raving so much. I love the idea of staying up all night and dancing for 8 hours straight and the sorts of demands such activities call of me (and often go home and work on music after a night/morning of raving). Ahaha I’m sorry if that sounds super preachy… just in a society I feel is constantly telling us that fulfillment is found through operations of acquiring, I try to remove things from my processes of being and creatively draw from what I am left with.
Seeing Machine Girl live at Poisson Noir is probably one of the most impactful show experiences I have ever had. The raw energy that was exchanged between them and the crowd is something I strive towards and I moshed so hard I almost puked… also dreams and my subconscious worlds really inspire me…
You do live performances, DJ sets and hybrid sets. I would like to know how you evolve through these different ways of doing music and how does this influence your creativity and your preparation?
I am honestly still figuring out how to more efficiently flow through these different types of production and performance styles. Everything has accelerated so quickly these past couple of months that my processes of preparation have developed more so out of necessity and adaptation towards each set at hand, rather than through experiential trial and error.
DJing, music production, and the other adjacent projects that make up my larger body of work are completely intertwined with every facet of my life. I easily spend 6-8 hours every day working on my various projects alongside school, work, training, and my interpersonal relationships, but there is never a time when I am not thinking about such things. I am very disciplined and extremely protective of how I choose to spend my time/energy, but I still have so much to learn and need to stay focused so I don’t burn out. I spend anywhere from 20-40 hours track digging for each mix I do and feel that adding my live production allows me to offer more of myself as an artist through hybrid sets, while interrupting my work flow in directions that ask different things of my skills and creativity. I love DJing, but purely devoting myself to mixing other people’s music can become a bit unfulfilling for me. By adding my live hardware and a third CDJ to the hybrid set up, I am pushing myself towards staying creatively stimulated while engaging/developing my overall skill set as an artist.
Like I have mentioned before, I still have soooooooo much to learn – and despite my political/economic ideological alignments (lol) the impatience of my age and mental world building tend to punish other aspects of my life when my capabilities as an artist can’t keep up with my capacity to work (in this really fucked up capitalist output production efficiency way). I often need to remind myself that I have been doing this for just over a year and a half and as I look into the near future and how these various music styles will develop, prioritize the merging of my high energy slimey warehouse rave sets with my more experimental noise-tech/punk live production.
You are now a resident DJ for OCTOV parties. By joining this team that offers more accessible techno events than what you’re used to, weren’t you afraid of losing your identity as an avant-garde underground freak?
Hahaha you folks are not playing around with these questions. I am a freak – that is for sure, but I can’t say I place too much importance on self-identifying with other labels such as avant-garde and underground. I see how such community/artistic signifiers have been significant throughout history but am skeptical of their contemporary usage within the electronic music world.
My work speaks for itself. I am honestly too focused on the spheres of my art and building/contributing to the sorts of communities I want to be a part of, to give energy towards thinking about how my public image might be received/responded to with these engagements.
Whether I am playing a daylight Piknic Electronik set with OCTOV, or a witching hour rave set in an abandoned tunnel – I feel that the reasons why people resonate with what I am doing is because they feel/experience how the pulp of who I am as a person and the passions of my art is so intensely communicated through such mediums. I hold a profound love and respect for who I am and the sort of space I want to create/take up. I am not afraid of how interacting with different events/collectives might change my artistic practices, because everything I do is such a clear extension of who I am as a person.
I am very thankful for being a part of OCTOV, and although they might not be considered as ‘underground’ as my other collective Non/Being and the raves that we organize (Vault), OCTOV has only encouraged/supported my artistic tastes and vision. I see myself bringing that freak slime energy to their parties, and know that anyone who interacts with my work (whether it be a DJ set, live show, or written zine) will feel the intentionality of my passions.
Your notoriety is growing fast in the scene, you are playing some popular events like Piknic Electronik, Exposé Noir, Interzone or with famous DJs as LSDXOXO, etc. How do you deal with this growing popularity?
It’s been an intense couple of months hahaha. I have excellent stress management skills and shout out to my Romanian wolf pack upbringing for developing a really strong foundation of self and vulnerability suppression mechanisms (😜). Haha I honestly have been too busy to think about it and I try to not take myself too seriously. Like I have said before, I am really particular about how I spend my time/energy and have always had really small social circles.
As more eyes turn towards me and the pressure of expectation grows – these parts of my relationships with self and others only become more important towards keeping me focused on my grind. Those close to me know who they are – and their love/support is what keeps me most grounded throughout all of this.
I can fully devote myself to these passions of work because I know that I share love with people who have my back no matter what. How much time and energy this past year of creation has demanded of me has been a bit isolating, and I often find myself wishing there were more hours in a day. Although things are picking up on socially quantifiable level, I sometimes wonder about how I will look back on these years and the experiences I missed with family to pursue such passions. I think that one of the faults of my age and intensity is how invincible I can sometimes feel. I so earnestly throw myself into these mediums of expression and allow them to completely consume my life, because I assume that the bonds reinforcing my strength as a person will always be here to support/accompany me. I am really close with my family and this summer in the middle of all of these shows my dad suddenly became very ill. Rushed to the hospital, I spent my last couple of days visiting Calgary in surgery room lobbies in between playing shows at train yards and warehouse basements. Functioning under the impression that I would have that last week visiting Calgary to share time with my parents, I spent the month completely caught up with preparing for my sets back in Montreal. My dad is better now, and I am thankful for the support I was able to offer my family through this – but this chain of events set a lot of my ambitions and the sense of security that grounds them into perspective.
I do feel pressure on me as a growing artist – not because of these socially perceived shifts in popularity, but because I want to honour the attention, energy, and support people are giving me and my work, strangers or otherwise. Whether it be a new collective booking me for a show, or a person I recognize in the crowd who is following my artistic work/progress – I am extremely humbled by the space people are making for me and my art, and place so much pressure on myself out of my desire to continue to share this vision to the best of my abilities.
With which artists would you like to collaborate one day in your career?
Hmmm – my most out there collaboration dream would probably be MC Ride from Death Grips. Being able to work with someone who channels such a raw flow of energy would be so sick (that and I have been a huge Death Grips fan for a long time haha). Working with bands like Show Me The Body and Full Of Hell would also be super cool. I am interested in collaborating across genres and experimenting with what sort of strange stuff we can come up with. Machine Girl is also up there – would love to hit some blast beat electronics with them and mosh around on vocals.
Two projects here in Montreal I also hope to get the chance to collaborate with are Dregqueen and Exe.Jocko. Both duos have really interesting visions and are coming up with some really cool music. I feel that I have a lot to learn from both of them and am very thankful/humbled to be making music in the same city at the same time as both projects.
What can we expect from D.Blavatsky in the coming months? Upcoming Vault raves? New live gigs?
Blehhhhhhh – so much haha. I’ve got a lot in the works. The core project I am currently working on is my next album “YOUR CHOICE”. Intertwined as a cross-medium release, this album will be a merging of my dancefloor driving live sets and noisier experimental tech. I am also working on a zine to accompany the album that will include a lot of my written and collage work. I want the album to be formatted on a really short run of USB sticks that will include digital copies of my zine + some bonus phone video diaries/process clips/saucy afterhours content. I am doing a lot of world building with this next release and want to introduce a more concrete look into the realm of Blavatsky. I also plan on performing a live group ritual for the album release here in Montreal – and am excited to present my work within a broader performance context (expect cyber ritualism, lots of red fluid, and raw materials we collect from behind Home Depot haha).
I will be releasing some production work on a couple of upcoming compilations I can’t talk too much about yet, and will be consistently creating/performing new hybrid live rave sets (big one coming up with OCTOV presenting Cleric for Halloween >:~) ).
I have a couple of DJ mixes I am currently curating to release in the next couple of months with different collectives and have some DJ/live sets coming up in Toronto and Ottawa.
I will also be making a big launch announcement for a new collective/research studio I am starting with a couple of friends called Non/Being based here in Montreal – and have some exciting news on a compilation album we are working on called ‘Certified Reality’. Non/Being will be the core record label/ideological house presenting a lot of the projects I shall be a part of in the future and we have been working hard on our ‘Anti-Manifesto’ (lol) and collective goals. This will include zine releases, DJ mixes, live performance art pieces, raves, and much much more~
Have been looking into possibly throwing a Vault rave in the next couple of months in a recently discovered abandoned building – a church perhaps… or maybe a hotel… but that shall be kept under wraps until the date more closely approaches – for sure more rave slime to come :* Also I am constantly working on the Monday monthly Void and my monthly radio show at N10.AS Hive Mind. A busy boy with lots to share so stay tuned…
Thank you!
- Photography by Rémy.