Johnny: Hi - what are you listening to right now?

Rakish: I’ve been revisiting Kelela’s unplugged album (In the Blue Light) that she released last year … that album is incredible, imagine being in a smoky, speakeasy in the 20s or 30s, super late night, hazy, you’re kind of sitting by yourself, someone approaches you and you have this furtive, sexy chat with each other. I love it, and seeing the connections between her electronic arrangements in jazz form is incredible.

Jhassic: Man, I’m going to be honest, I’m listening to a lot of Dire Straits.

Johnny: Random, but go on.

Jhassic: Yeah. Did you ever play a game called Red Faction back in the day? It’s like that 90s Blade soundtrack – techno, drum & bass – like video game soundtracks back in the day. Also because I’ve just come out of having COVID, and just playing video games, it’s got something to do with that. But what I’ve been trying to get on my USB, the recent release with Skrillex, Ahadadream & Raf-Saperra, UKG edits, and I’m working on that kind of stuff too.

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Johnny: Kerfew did a lot in 2025, I mean it’s been a few years of that, putting on artists like Baalti and a show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. What were some really special moments for you in that year?

Rakish: Yeah, I feel like between Sydney and Melbourne, Kerfew has been doing a lot. But one of my favourite things to do, particularly in Sydney, are those kind of scrappy, DIY events. 

We had this event behind Pari last year, and it’s just a loading dock, but the way that we activated it, we really made it seem like it was some uncle or auntie’s garage. We had a chill space going that was decorated with old silks and fabrics, we had incense going, we had a biryani stall out the front. 

For me, one of the things I really look for in Kerfew things, no matter whether it’s a club or in a loading dock or at an art gallery, is that sense of hospitality. It’s like, hopefully we can activate a space to make it feel like it’s somehow familiar, that you’re not stepping into somewhere that is totally foreign.

Jhassic: 100% agree, we’ve had in Sydney more DIY events, and every single time we throw one, we are gobsmacked by the community presence. So it’s not only just creating that hospitality, but it’s returned tenfold by the community. Like people come and help clean up, the soundsystem at our last event was done by people who aren’t even part of the Kerfew collective, they set up the whole thing and soundchecked it to a professional level.

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Johnny: I really think when you bring artists out, you bring that hospitality. Sometimes touring artists or putting on shows can feel impersonal – like it’s a business – even in our community. So, I can tell that the artists you bring through, really appreciate what you do, like Baalti talking about how their tour was the most fun ten days they’ve spent.

Rakish: I think whether they’re big touring artists like Baaalti, or Gayathri Krishnan, or we’ve had Ecca Vandal in the past, or smaller grassroots artists … I think everything we were just saying about hospitality when it’s for the crowd, it’s not just for the crowd, it’s for the artists too. 

There’s a real sense of making, an opportunity to be relational in these things beyond just the transaction of hey, we’re bringing you out to play music. It’s like, we’re here to create a network right? A network that people can learn from, that people can feel like they’re part of something bigger. 

Jhassic: I feel like also a lot of the people we’re collaborating with have similar values, similar childhoods and similar upbringings. When you meet these people for the first time, there’s already so much of an incredible shared identity. 

We’re putting on Surusinghe for this first one right, and I haven’t met her personally, but you go through her bio, I can pick things that are exactly the same in terms of my upbringing – of balancing your brownness with the contemporary, having to “play” more to whiter crowds … and anyone from a diaspora, you’d know Johnny, is dealing with this stuff all the time, so there’s a lot of common ground before you’ve even met them.

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Johnny: What else is coming up for Kerfew in 2026?

Rakish: We’ve obviously got the club night on the 27th of March, which we’re excited about, but we’ve got something coming up in Melbourne early April called Zor. But hopefully lots more experimentation with different formats of events, but I think this club night is a really nice and fun way to kick things off.

Jhassic: I think that’s a really exciting part of Kerfew, being able to experiment. But the reason why the 77 event is special and exciting is because it’s just a pure club night. It’s in one of the greatest establishments of all time in the Southern Hemisphere, with an insane soundsystem … so it’s going to be really cool to put the DIY stuff on the back seat, and just curate and play and enjoy a pure club night. 

Club spaces are really important to inhabit, we belong there too. The amount of times I’ve been there as a punter thinking “damn, I wish I could do this,” or I belong here too, or what would this track sound like on the speakers – like we get to do that, which is exciting, and knowing that there’s people out there who are having their formative club nights now, that’s such a good bar to set.

Rakish: Some of the most formative and memorable Club 77 events I’ve been to have been taken over by people from our neck of the woods. I think about when Yung Singh played his surprise Wednesday night set and the club was heaving … to be able to bring our flavour to the space and build on its legacy, is fucking monumental. I’m really excited to introduce part of the Kerfew audience who have not been to 77, to get acquainted with the space through us.

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Johnny: I didn’t realise there were quite a few of them who had never been to Club 77!

Rakish: I mean the Kerfew audience is so multigenerational. We’ve got people coming out who are older than us and have been going out for decades, and then also people who are 18 or 19 who are showing up, and they all exist in this space together.

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