THE SCRAPE - ISSUE 1

DJ Ashé - By Aaron Taylor 

The seduction begins with a light rhythmic beat whispering in your ear. Deep bass licks jump on the groove to dial up the heat and tickle your nerves. Dopamine releases in abundance. The energy is felt everywhere, giving back to your body the feeling of power, authority, and sovereignty - the Spark of Life. This is the type of experience enjoyed when attending ecstatic dance sermons orchestrated by DJ Ashé.

"Ecstatic dance... moves through 5 phases. I like to explain it like sex. Like you start slow, you build all the way up, you peak, and you come down. I feel like if DJ's do it well, they're really... crafting an entire experience," DJ Ashé describes to the Zine, "My wife and I just bought a farm about 30 minutes from [Portland]. So we're thinking about doing some Summer sets out on the farm under the stars."

With DJ Ashé, the music goes full circle. As she further explains to the Zine, "So I grew up in the Black Church, and one thing that was interesting for me now being a DJ is that when I grew up, we couldn't listen to anything... Don't have sex. Don't be gay. Go to church. A lot of prescriptive rules. So what's been interesting is like trying to find my own feet, in a space that I was forbidden from for so long, and now I'm meshing it all together."

To close out with Scrape Zine, DJ Ashé follows up, "I really see music as an opportunity to reconnect to our body if we allow it to. So that's what I'm hoping to bring. I have no idea what I'm gonna play. I don't know what the set is gonna look like. I don't know how [the] spirit is gonna move me, but I promise that I want to bring people into their bodies and like, let's have a good time."