IT’S hard for Canberra DJ Ashley Feraude to get the excitement out of his voice – he’s one of a small handful of musicians to join the line-up at New York’s SummerStage festival on Saturday, August 18, and will leave this weekend for the Big Apple. 

So how did it happen?

Well, he reports to “CityNews”, the popular outdoor event decided to have an Australian component and needed a DJ to pull it all together. Enter Canberra music producer, Frank Madrid, with whom Feraude has worked before on dance and music festivals, and who, approached by the event’s producers for ideas, suggested Feraude. “The rest is history,” he says.

Feraude, who describes himself as “primarily a DJ,” comes from a strong musical background. Brought up in Poland, with its rich musical culture, he emigrated to Australia at age 10 with his family and retains a tinge of Polish enunciation.

Deejaying came initially as a hobby, but turned into a profession over 10 years ago as he conquered the lounges and bars of Canberra and beyond.

Feraude is not a performance DJ in the hip-hop sense, where creative scratching and sampling is the order of the day. Rather, he sees his skill in mixing between types of music to create “structure and flow and to take listeners on a journey–I like performing other people’s music.”

He loves dance music of the 80s like English pretty-boys Duran Duran or dance band New Order, and also admits to enjoying a lot of different music, including cinematic classical, bossa nova and synth pop. In short, he is happy to be tagged as “retro” in taste.

He is equally happy if people consider him, as DJs go, to be subdued, smooth, reserved and melancholic, joking about the moody, brooding look of his publicity photos.

Over the years, Feraude has used vinyl, CD’s and digital technologies, allowing the layering of tracks to give a more sophisticated feel. He produces under the alias Magnifik (“magnificent”) under which he and his band of friends have released singles and an album, “Amateur.”

But there’s nothing amateur about Feraude, except in the literal sense that he “loves” what he’s doing.

In New York he expects to meet high end DJs. “I’ll get to mingle to talk to musicians and other people aboutAustralia,” and wants to show a non-stereotypical version of Australia, which he believes is “ quite a nice melting pot.”