Getting social: Q&A with Canberra House Social

Over the years, Canberra has welcomed a number of new venues catering to all types of music fans. Our nightlife/music scene has become very diverse, whether you like pubs or clubs, there is now something for everyone.

RNB fans have places like Dolce Bar and Playground (City), while Mooseheads and Academy (City) play the latest chart topping tunes. House, trap and more underground sounds, like techno have venues such as Mr. Wolf and the newly opened Kyte bar (City), to play their music too!

Until now! There is a new (and unique) player in town; Canberra House Social is made up of DJs from the house, techno and disco music scenes combined. With no set location, the group comes together to throw parties at various locations around town.

I sat down with one of the founders of Canberra House Social, Loky Watt, to find out more about this exciting new venture:

What is Canberra House Social?

It’s mainly a group of house, techno and disco DJs who come together to throw parties. It came about as an idea, because there were a lot of Canberra DJs playing music that they didn’t really like or appreciate, but the venues they were playing at had to ‘sell’ that music to their customers. We kind of got fed up with that after a while and decided to piece together our own crew and throw our own parties and since all the DJs were playing for free it meant the party could be free. So it was advertising to a lot more people as well.

How many DJ’s are in the group?

There is no number, just whoever wants to do it does it. But there’s probably about five or six of us who are really involved and pushing for parties and coming up with new ideas for venues and stuff.

How do the parties come about?

Usually someone just comes up with an idea, for instance the last party, one of the guys found out that the Aviary rooftop bar (Acton) was closing down and we were allowed to throw a party there for their second last day. So they just pitched it to all of us and whoever was keen just helped out and made it all happen.

Once you have an idea, what’s the process to make it happen?

Well firstly you get your date, start to do the artwork for online promotion. You then put the ‘feelers’ out to the DJs to see who would be keen, work out set times- start to finish.

Also we’ve been paying for promotion on Facebook which is kind of hard when you’re throwing free parties but also just keeping on top of posts on our Facebook event page, to keep the engagement and reminders that the event is coming up.

You have already thrown two parties, how has the response been so far?

It’s been good, it’s a bit of a niche thing that we’re doing so it’s going to take a while until we build up a good fan base, but having it run by DJs makes it so easy and there is no risks involved, so they will just keep happening no matter what.

Is there a house music scene in Canberra?

Yes, but at the moment it’s not kind of combined. What we’re trying to do is bring the scene together, at the moment it’s kind of scattered. So that’s another thing we tried to do, get DJ’s from different parts of the house and techno scenes in Canberra and bring them into one party. Bringing everyone together, like a family.

Do you have any events coming up?

Yes, we’ve actually got a pre-party for Groovin the Moo (GTM). It’s pretty much been confirmed, but we’re still just piecing it together before we publish the online event to our Facebook page. We are yet to work out our lineup, but might be having a few artists who are on the local stage at GTM, which would be good.

More information about Canberra House Social and upcoming events can be found on their Facebook website.

House mix from Loky Watt, Soundcloud.