Everyone's got turntables and a mixer these days. And everyone's got a DJ moniker. So, how does one tell the dime-a-dozen DJs from the star DJs?
First of all, the star DJs jet between continents for shows, have armies of slack-jawed fans where ever they go and are followed by beefy security details. And in the case of Chozie, Taipei's only bonafide international star DJ who meets all the above criteria, his fame is further confirmed by the fact that he has to watch out for those sneaky Next Magazine photographers. When we meet at Eslite Bookstore in downtown Taipei, he whispers about the paparazzi and sneaks occasional glances over his shoulder.
It's a bit hard to take seriously, so before long, I'm pressing him on the stars in his rolodex. "Just name one, any one." Karen Mok (莫文蔚)? "Her number's right here in my phone. She's a good friend of mine." Faye Wong (王菲)? "She'd always come to my parties." Madonna? "A friend of mine." Dr Dre? "Yeah, I've met him." Obviously, there's no stumping Chozie on this score.
Perhaps even more revealing of celebrity in one's midst, Chozie also has an abundance of that intangible star quality that's in part boosted from being selective about the facts he hands out to the media. He says it's for the sake of privacy, but we all know it's intended to add mystique. Take his age, for example. "The papers recently have me pegged at 25, so I'll go with that," he said with a smile. He's also fond of going off the record when telling a particularly salacious story, of which he seems to have many.
So what we do know for sure about him is that he was born in Australia as Timothy Ma to a father originally from Hong Kong who taught martial arts to Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude "the Muscles from Brussels" Van Damme. He followed in his dad's footsteps in his tender years, becoming a bad ass himself at kickboxing and eventually winning the Australian national junior title in the sport.
"The night after I won the kickboxing championship, my cousin took me to a rave to celebrate. I discovered a whole new world there," he said. The rest, as the cliche goes, is history.
Having found a "new world," kickboxing fell swiftly by the wayside when 15-year-old Timothy bought some turntables, a mixer and six records with his remaining few dollars and started learning how to mix.
"It hasn't been a straight line up over the years. I've crashed and burned several times, but that's part of the process," he said. Aside from an abortive attempt to take on New York's rave scene in his teens, it's hard to see where he crashed at all.
In the 10 years since turning on to electronica -- if we're to believe he's actually 25 -- he's played before 100,000 people in Holland, received an award as the best DJ in Asia and spent two years in Beijing laying the foundations of rave culture in China. He's also shared stages with the industry's giants like Paul Oakenfeld, Carl Cox, Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin, the list goes on and on.
Now Chozie, whose catchy DJ name is a nod to his heritage as a Chinese Australian, has dropped in on the Taipei dance scene, offering some much needed diversity to the city's trance-dominated rave culture.
"I spin a lot of funky house and break beats, which is different from a lot of what you hear in clubs here. I've been trying to open people up to more fun, up-beat music."
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