When I catch up with Ariana Paoletti in one of Kreuzberg’s many gentrifi-cafes, she’s just broken the internet. Performing as Volvox, her lauded techno alias, the DJ played the Pornceptual x Boiler Room live stream that had to be taken off air for being nothing short of pornographic. “The clue’s in the name, to be fair,” Volvox laughs. “The guy editing it just couldn’t do his job quick enough — they’d move the camera: dick, and then move the camera: boob.” It was too graphic for YouTube, but it’s all in a night’s work for Volvox, who, despite growing up in the US, is now a regular fixture on the Berlin club circuit — and plays Berghain almost every time she’s in town.
Now a hardened New Yorker, and a spearhead of its underground techno scene — from the fabled Unter raves to her JACK DEPT parties at notorious nightspot Bossa Nova Civic Club — Volvox came to Brooklyn via Brazil, Buffalo and Boston. Born in São Paolo, Paoletti moved to America as a child following the financial crisis in Brazil. “It wasn’t my parents’ plan,” she admits, “but I feel lucky to have grown up in Buffalo. It’s a small city, but it has a large music scene, and I met lots of edgy alternative people.” This is a word which crops up a lot during our hour-long conversation — “alternative” — and it’s something the DJ considers almost intrinsic to her identity, or at least her journey to finding her identity. “I was always part of a ‘scene’,” she explains, “I had a long strong goth phase — I’d wear 7 inch platform boots and purple lipstick to high school everyday — and I gravitated towards electronic music even earlier.” As an 8th grader, Paoletti supplemented her Madonna-tinged pop radio listening and Paula Abdul cassettes with electronica — Orbital, The Prodigy and the electronic wave that was coming up at the time. “There was a lot of pop house on the radio at that time as well — Rhythm is a Dancer, all that stuff, so my introduction to dance music happened quite naturally.” The harder stuff, she says, came later, and for that she’s indebted to the early-internet. “I basically taught myself the history of industrial music through Napster,” she admits, “and mp3.com was a thing then! As soon as you discovered something, it was just there to download.”
Though it’s perhaps industrial techno for which Volvox is best known — “I’m more of a Fall/Winter DJ!” she claims, even though she’s currently in the midst of a sunny European festival tour — her taste has always been eclectic, and unashamedly so. “As a teenager, all my industrial friends used to tease me for listening to ‘cheesy’ stuff,” she remembers. “I didn’t care.” When it came to underage clubbing, Paoletti’s experience is all too familiar — hanging out at 16+ events, hiding in the bathrooms and sneaking into the over-18 club nights that happened afterwards. Her hangout of choice was Buffalo goth club The Continental, an underground establishment just a couple of blocks from the city’s Red Light district — “that’s the first real place I went where I felt part of a scene”. Decked in head-to-toe Hot Topic, with a “big big” high black ponytail, Paoletti instantly resonated with this alternative crew. “I just loved it,” she says. “I felt like I belonged.” Since then, clubbing has played a pivotal role in Paoletti’s life, even solidifying her choice to move to Boston for college, rather than Chicago — “the clubbing age in Illinois was 21!” she insists, “I was like ‘hell if I’m gonna put my clubbing on hold for 3 years!’”
And if Buffalo was the site of Paoletti’s underground education, Boston was her playground. “I was so much a part of the scene there, I knew all the people and all the bouncers. I was 18, but you had to be 19 to get in — I had to be sneaky.” Working both as a promoter and go-go dancer at Man Ray — “an institution” of goth-gay-fetish-industrial underground in Boston, Paoletti paraded the club in handmade LED dresses and spandex bodysuits. “I was in art school! That’s what you did.” It wasn’t long until she began DJing too, thanks to a group of friends who clubbed together to buy her a piece of kit for her birthday. The rest, as they say, is history. “I was DJing about 5 times a month and getting paid 100 dollars a show — that was about as much as Boston could offer you.”
It was during these formative Man Ray years, and the new rave, electro-house years that followed (“2006,7,8,9”) that Paoletti sort of tripped and fell into her queer identity. “One day someone told me I was queer and I was like “oh cool — alright’,” she laughs. “I couldn’t argue with that.” Despite being deeply immersed in a subculture that’s now intrinsically queer, or queer-inclusive — at least in places like Berlin and in the burgeoning underground scenes of Detroit, Chicago and New York — Volvox had never aligned herself with the “queer scene” as such. “The scenes I came up in were pretty hetero, but they were goth,” she explains, “goth is not that hetero. All the men I hung out with had long flowing hair and wore eyeliner and lace and latex and fishnets, and I wore military pants and looked like G.I. Jane. So, I think that’s actually why the whole queer development made sense to me.” She took the idea, and ran, and it’s now a word she happily ascribes to herself, too. “My own identity has grown into that,” she affirms. “I love it now, I think it’s beautiful to see people express themselves and I love how gender is being deconstructed.”
By the time she reached New York in 2011, armed with a crew of Boston friends and a built out warehouse in Brooklyn, Paoletti was ready to be Volvox, and make DJing a viable career. But, New York proved difficult ground to break. “I didn’t DJ for like a year and a half, because nobody was really willing to lend a hand,” she remembers. “I just felt like it was this shoulder-to-shoulder situation and nobody was really interested in helping me in.” The ‘in’ turned out to be a gig promoting for a small bar/club hybrid in Brooklyn, filling line-up slots with local DJs — “instead of begging to play, I had gigs to offer,” she explains. “It was great, I met so many people, and the bar always packed out.” But it was when John Barclay, owner of Bushwick’s Bossa Nova Civic Club, came to a warehouse party thrown by Paoletti+posse that everything really changed. “He heard me play and invited me to come and play at Bossa Nova,” she remembers. And so, JACK DEPT came to be.
In the years since, Paoletti’s career has gone from strength to strength — Volvox is a household name in the New York techno scene and a sought after booking for clubs across Europe, Australia, and more recently, Brazil, where she’s been reconnecting with her roots and heading lineups along with friend and colleague, Amanda Mussi. “It’s a bit like a homecoming,” Paoletti admits. “I speak Portuguese, and my dad lives in Sao Paolo, so I feel at home there. Everyone’s so welcoming, and the underground scene there is so DIY and so cool — it’s great to be a part of it.” But while now she’s jetting around the globe, packing out clubs and running a label, Paoletti’s one and only dream came true years ago. “Playing Berghain was it,” she explains. “Once that happened, I was complete.”