Pressing play on a Lara Sarkissian track can feel like entering another world. And that's exactly how she wants it to be. "I would do field recordings in and around churches, and I got really into the concept of aural architecture," the producer told me. "Like, how certain buildings, especially houses of worship, are designed to receive certain sounds and create specific effects. Different Armenian monastery domes are shaped in a way so that the voices during liturgy and chants echo back at you, to create the effect of a communication with God." Sarkissian’s fascination with otherworldly sounds was part of a long, winding discussion at a restaurant in Glendale, California, over an Artsakhian delicacy called Zhengyalov Hatz. After I asked her my very first question, she spoke for almost 25 minutes uninterrupted, starting with her personal history in the Armenian diaspora and unfurling from there.

Sarkissian first came to international attention as part of Club Chai, an Oakland party that started in 2016 and ended last year. Yet it feels almost eternal, its legacy long outliving its short lifespan. Along with her fellow cofounder 8ULENTINA, Sarkissian created a space in the Bay Area for marginalized artists of all backgrounds to express themselves, mixing contemporary dance music with deeply personal strains of diasporic sound, composition and aesthetics. The party became a label, releasing influential compilations that charted a new, wide-ranging yet close-knit global club scene united by one idea: everyone interpreting dance music their own way. You can hear (and see) its influence in the wave of artists once supported by the label, like Russell E.L. Butler or quest?onmarc, who are blazing their own trails today.

Using her background in film, she started composing mini-epics like Peninsula, that imagined gorgeous, haunting landscapes through a clever mix of sampling, chopping and repurposing. She found new inspiration in multi-channel installations and sound art, finding new ways to create her sound worlds, until they became full-on three-dimensional spaces, like her installation at the ISM Hexadome in Berlin, or an upcoming work at the Venice Biennale. During the last six months Sarkissian has released a few one-off tracks that feel more like esoteric tone poems, songs that build worlds more than create narratives, and she's following it up with something that resembles a return to the dance floor: first, a track on the Tresor 30th anniversary compilation, and then, next year, her debut album on a prominent electronic music label that will remain unnamed for now.

Through it all, her music has only become more bewitching, enveloping and seductive, building on the diasporic tradition of her Armenian forbears by taking it to brand new places.

Let's start with the usual question. How did you get into all of this?

I've always been a music lover. My mom was a record and tape collector. Any time we were in the car she was playing her cassettes—my family are Armenian from Iran, so I grew up on both Iranian and Armenian music. (There’s a long history of a lot of Armenian producers and arrangers behind some of the biggest Iranian pop stars.) The community has many different diasporas—Syrian Armenians, Iranian Armenians, Lebanese Armenians, all from different cultural contexts. I was always around performances from the different Armenian diasporas and we would sing in choirs in school. Music and performance is very much a part of our culture.

I was never a club kid. In high school I listened to post-punk and post-rock, and I went to [San Francisco venue] Bottom Of The Hill a lot with my friends for indie shows. We had a band in my garage where I played drums pretty briefly. Then I was curious about programming drums and downloaded Mixcraft on my mom's computer and would make, like, acid techno tracks.

I went to UC Berkeley and I was studying an interdisciplinary major involving film and new media. For my third year I went to Copenhagen on foreign exchange for eight months and took two film classes, including a sound-for-film class. You were encouraged to go out and collect field recordings, come back and use them to make a composition. Then you made a film for that composition. It got me thinking about the visual aspects behind sound, and I realized that sound is a very visual thing for me.

After that I got more into experimental filmmaking, going to Armenia and creating short films. But eventually I sold my camera to focus on music, trying to figure out how to transfer those feelings from filmmaking into music. It would always be based on a scene I imagined, or some other immersive environment—as if I'm stepping into it, or inviting other people into my music. I would take atmospheric sounds or textures or voices and create these rings, or layers. Even though I loved percussion, drums were never the driving force or main focus. I wasn't thinking about the dance floor, I was just making something to listen to.

So where did DJing and club music enter the picture?

I started DJing on college radio at Berkeley, a training program learning how to playlist, host, and curate music. Around 2014, I met Esra, 8ULENTINA, at a friend's artist residency in Oakland. At the time, I was making these edits of Armenian pop tracks—super collage-y, and inspired by nightcore. I didn't know much about production at that time. I was learning through making them. Then I learned that 8ULENTINA was also SWANA [South West Asian and North African], and I had already come across their SoundCloud mixes and edits. I reached out, they invited me to their studio in Oakland and we started working together and they taught me how to mix. At a certain point we decided we needed our own venue or physical space to invite people to, a space to experiment with sets and create a different kind of dance floor for people in the Bay—not only to represent our heritages but something open format, like mixing Armenian wedding tracks with The-Dream.

Was that the start of Club Chai?

We thought of it as like... a home to invite people into, a very personal place. There were a lot of nights in San Francisco that were themed around certain genres or eras, but not an anything-goes night where you might hear something totally new within dance music, or mixed in untraditional ways—genres and sounds that clearly had links, but were never presented or shared in the same space. We started with a monthly at a bar for nine months then realized we already had a consistent crowd that understood what we were doing.

I remember how free people felt on the dance floor. People coming up to us, telling us they are hearing music or genres they would only hear in other cities or countries as far as dance nights. We pretty much turned this small bar into a consistent dance spot. We thought, "OK, it's time to do a warehouse party"—that's when Club Chai began in January 2016. We found this warehouse. Every month it was us setting up the sound and lugging all the equipment ourselves, and it got bigger. Eventually we had friends helping us out and started to book touring artists as well as local DJs and performers.

At the time my mom was the chairlady of an Armenian arts and cultural organization, and she would give me advice on venues, even though she didn't completely understand what we were doing. I was also on the board for this Armenian organization, programming music and film events in San Francisco. A lot of days it would line up where I would help her with an event and the next day I would go throw a warehouse show. I started to understand this common ground or cross over by working within both communities, how certain frameworks or values carried over especially in regards to hospitality and empathy with artists and audiences. How my mom and I worked in similar ways even when in completely different contexts/communities. There was a sort of synergy there.

Through this work, I was also learning a lot about the Armenian diasporan musical communities in the U.S, the foundational musical communities in Fresno, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York, where some of the first Armenian musical institutions and spaces of gathering or clubs were formed after the genocide and displacement. It was a reaction, a need to recreate village musical traditions and dances. In these cities, Armenians performed with musicians of other diasporas, and also created what we now call "Middle Eastern music" in the States. Although there is different historical context for the need to create spaces here, I tried to bring this understanding with me in organizing within the dance and electronic underground.

Around the same time we started Club Chai we also started to pick up this UK audience, thanks mostly, I think, because of our monthly radio shows. In September 2016, we received funding from the British Arts Council in collaboration with the label TT [formerly known as Tobago Tracks], who helped us with the application and putting on our own London showcase in November 2016. Every time we went to the UK and Europe, we were able to connect to platforms or labels, especially in the DIY scenes and underground led by queer people and people of color. It was always important for us to connect to these artists and organizers within our scenes in other regions or countries and learn from them. We went back learning a lot about the dance music culture—especially the radio culture. Turning on Rinse FM every time you took an Uber, hearing DJ mixes on the radio and how normalized it was. We were like, "Oh my God, we don't have this in The Bay anymore!"

We wanted to see the same culture in The Bay. We organized DJing and production workshops, teaching people how to tell a story and create an identity or story for your mixes, the arcs you can create with your mixes. And we started to think that we should release a compilation with all these artists we were booking, or that were doing similar things as us, focusing on their heritage or local culture. In the past we felt like a lot of Bay Area crews just stayed in the Bay and never connected that much with cities outside the area. Our goal was to connect with those other communities, and maybe even create a whole new scene in the Bay area.

We didn't need to have a big headliner. If people see you are booking interesting sounds and artists that are pushing boundaries, are different, and what people are actually craving (and what is lacking in the region), people will come every month trust your curation and be down to hear artists they haven't even heard of. So we were able to book people who deserve more visibility, or artists who are leading things back in their own sonic communities, who are marginalized in electronic music yet have historical connections to it, and doing really amazing work that we thought people should know about.

You mentioned how you started out making edits of Armenian pop tracks. How did your music evolve from there?

I wanted to use Armenian instrumentation and references. It was very visual, like I was threading these sounds into percussion in my head. I noticed there were a lot of Armenian producers and musicians recreating old folk tracks or making dance tracks out of them, but I never intended for my music to follow that structure, or only be for an Armenian audience necessarily. All kinds of people understood the feelings behind what I was making, even when using specific Armenian sonic reference points or media.

I got into sampling duduk, a woodwind instrument indigenous to Armenia made from apricot wood. I would mess with the frequencies, stretching them out, chopping them up like a percussive instrument. It's a very lyrical instrument, it almost sounds like a voice. Thinking back now, I had seen my first live performance of the duduk when I was 8, my mom helped organize the Djivan Gasparyan concert in San Francisco. Different styles of Armenian music, and performance of certain instruments, are shaped by collective history, shared feelings or lived experiences from societal or political impact, as well as the environment. Rougher sounds or instruments are inspired by the mountains—like the zurna—while calmer melodies from the meadows and rural life. There's a tragic history of death and erasure, and this is also written into the music, but I think that shouldn't define Armenian music, and it shouldn't overshadow the use of these sounds in joyous moments and celebrations of life, or survival, or dance.

In the West, the duduk is often perceived as a sad, melancholic sound, often associated with war, mostly because of its use in Hollywood and movies depicting the "East." I think it's interesting, especially as an Armenian in the West, to explore it beyond this imposed narrative. Since I often think about environment or spaces shaping sound in my production process, I thought—this is such a rich, chameleon-like sound, how can I use this in the club or other immersive settings?

I used to make music in our living room in San Francisco, where my grandma would usually be sitting around reading. As I started producing she got really ill and was in the hospital, I would take my laptop there and produce while sitting with her. After she passed, I started going to the Armenian church more often, and it was almost like a second home for me in San Francisco. I knew I could go there once a month, recite passages and practice reading in Armenian again.

When I got my first 360 spatial audio residency, at the ISM Hexadome in Berlin, I thought about the church, especially because of its dome design. I thought about monasteries in Armenia that are integrated into nature—like in the mountains with a creek running through it, or sunlight shining through these dark stone-walled churches.

I was starting to see a parallel between immersive experiences I've had in physical spaces of spirituality, spaces ranging from church to club—how powerful it is to be in unity with others under these communal experiences involving ritual, chanting, music and dance. I didn't even realize until later that I would literally be playing Club Chai until 4 AM, then next morning go to church to serve. So I became obsessed with getting similar feelings out of these two very different spaces and communities. I tried to take voices and stories from different areas of my life and fuse them into one, a reimagined world for an ephemeral moment.

So with the Hexadome and other multi-channel sound installations after, I tried to channel these feelings. It really improved my production, helping me separate all the layered elements of my music into a discrete space. Taking field recordings of the percussive sound used in Armenian liturgical service, kshots, and putting that alongside poetry, kicks, synths, duduk, those "Middle Eastern" keyboard presets from old Yamahas you hear at bazaars, and more. But with voice, I don't necessarily want people to understand. I put it through plugins and manipulate it until it sounds like a synth. It's more like a personal archive for me.

Do you consider your music diasporic?

It represents my specific experience as a diasporan. All the nuances that you navigate as a person, whether that's how you grew up, what your family was like... I have this specific memory stuck with me of being in this car listening to Iranian music and even feeling as a kid how the drums like have this warm, roll, it's a very physical feeling for me and I often think back to that specific sound I would hear a lot as a kid. Everyone has a different Armenian experience at home because their families are from different countries. And I don't know how that feels. So those car rides and times at home, I was getting my own experience, then I would get dropped off at school and experience a different kind of Armenian culture. For me, my music blends all these experiences together. I manipulate the sounds in a way that's not traditional, in a way that's not how anyone else would play it.

I've always thought that it's important to be engaged in your communities—for me that was both the Oakland DIY scene and the Armenian music communities. Especially if I'm referencing sounds from there, I want to make sure I'm involving people from Armenia, people from the Bay Area, understanding it, collaborating with them. That's how I see my music: as a reflection of the communities around me. And my music very much comes from lived experiences—even down to details like a dinner table with my uncle giving a toast, and how he's a big personality. A song or a piece could be creating an arc based off speeches at the dinner table. It's all super personal, and I'm not always trying to have people understand the real meaning of what inspired me.

Your music has always sounded very environmental to me, more immersive than narrative.

I started thinking about how certain sounds can be, like, ornaments. It made me think of music as something you would walk into, an environment.

But I also see it like how you create a film—there's a beginning, middle and end. I don't follow typical musical structures, because I don't really know what they are. I've been trying to make pop music recently and it feels like another world, because usually I follow a very filmic structure. Like there's a conflict then a resolution, that's how I would hear and write my own music.

The Bay Area has had a major influence on my work process with its DIY cultures, and encourages you to be interdisciplinary. There's a lot of all-purpose artistic spaces, mainly because of lack of space for artists—but with these limitations comes a crossover exposure with all kinds of artists across disciplines. All artists part of Club Chai were actually interdisciplinary, across video, sculpture, sound, performance and garment making.

You mentioned Club Chai again, which ended this year. Why did you decide to bring it to a close?

We both felt like we did everything we wanted to do with the project, realised our vision with it and some more. Esra and I are such good friends and collaborators, we're always gonna be working together in some capacity. I'm actually excited to be there as a support in another form and see what they end up creating and doing. Club Cha was a moment in time, and I hope that people continue to build and create new platforms in the Bay Area. I'm excited to experience the next events or artists that pop up.

Like a Club Chai diaspora.

Dude, yes!