Discotchari Presents: Waking the Spirits of Urvakan Festival

This vinyl set was curated for Urvakan Festival 2022, originally scheduled to take place at The Composer’s Union in Dilijan last September. The nature of the festival and venue made our goal very clear: to take our audience on a dizzying tour of Armenian Diaspora hotspots from Boston to Beirut, Montevideo to Marseilles, and of course Santa Monica Boulevard to Sayat Nova Avenue. This festival was cancelled due to Azerbaijan’s invasion of sovereign Armenian land that they continue to occupy to this day while imposing an economic blockade on 120,000 Armenians in Artsakh. As of this video’s upload date, the blockade has persisted for 90 days and the regime in Azerbaijan has made clear their intentions to ethnically cleanse Artsakh of its indigenous people. Sometimes a set is more about storytelling than DJ’ing, and together these songs represent the story we wanted to tell about Armenian music at Urvakan last year. We are going to tell this story anyway and offer some visual aids taken straight from our historical and cultural lexicons. Squelching guitars, 8-bit synthesizers, wailing horns, thunderous drum-breaks, familiar phrases in a different fashion; this was our ritual to beckon the ghosts (“urvakaner”) to the dance floor, and liberate the spirits of both living and dead.