“A journey with music”. This is how Aghnes and her female collective: “SheMade”, describe and exhibit with pride the strength of women who take people’s fun really seriously.

When asked how did you choose to dj for a living, Aghnes giggles: “It’s been a long time since I discovered electronic music” and shares this image with us: a sixteen years old on a summer evening is brought to her first techno party and remains still, through the crowd busy dancing, through the pulsing lights of the room, and with a lucid dream realizes she’s stunned by the dark energy of those beats, and instantly falls in love with the atmosphere, so much she decides to take this fascination forward and turn it into a path, into her day to day life… to make people feel the way she felt. “This is how it started, pretty much”. As usual the first time you do anything important, you can never forget it, and especially if it means so much to you.

In fact, that sixteen years old had time to grow and make a couple of considerations.

“Maybe people don’t know only 17% of djs in the electronic music scene are female” she says. And this is why in 2012, Aghnes and another female dj named Ameliée funded SheMade, together with two more female musicians and promoters called Erika and Sarah Siu.

“It’ started more like a game” she reveals. “But it’s so much more now”.

SheMade, literally “made by her” as in a woman or a girl, is an entirely female composed collective and a brand for events that was then exported by the members from sunny Rome overseas to Northern Europe, in massive music scenes such as London, Berlin and Amsterdam’s. The collective supports females not only in electronic music, or music in general but in all creative fields, like design, fashion and all arts that become live performances at SheMade events. “Women have a natural inclination for the aesthetics of music” argues Aghnes, “…for creativity in general. We support women and we try to create something new, something magical. We are all about performing and music”.

In fact, Aghnes herself is obsessed with music in the most positive and constructive way for what she does: as a hobby she finds record stores, scouts for new tracks and collects records, that she’ll share with crowds, first chance presented. It’s a proper hunt and it makes her thrive with life, thinking of how the public will be pumped for these new beat. Her positivity isn’t spoiled even when she reveals a weak spot for Joy Division, a banner band for down-beat vibes and post-punk thick and dark lyrics. “It’s a matter of perception, I guess” she shrugs “But I also love Punk Rock. Let’s never give in to bad vibes and remain positive!”.

And here comes our favorite question: “Where do you get inspiration from and how do you make your style choices?”. She jokes: “Well… I’ve been partying a lot” and that really helps building up an idea of how people have fun, “But I’d say mainly travelling” she continues with confidence. Like a musical sponge, she moves around Europe and gets in contact with different vibes, music experiences, to then absorb them, getting influenced by the cultures, trends and the social context of places she goes to. Being able to learn from everything she’s seen and listened to made her better at performing.

“I can read the crowd, I adapt to the feelings soaking the room. I love to see people dancing, smiling, having fun. That’s the best feeling, actually”.

But it hasn’t been easy to get this connection, these skills: at Aghnes’s first live performance, she was really stressed.

“But you have to let it go, you got to relax: it’s all about what you leave with them, you have this one chance for them to remember how you made them feel, how much fun they had with you”.

External causes can influence a live performance too, nerves excluded: such as stereo systems, the venue, the advertisement made that attracts a certain crowd. It takes an entrepreneur’s attitude to see all these different aspects and juggle with them to create the perfect conditions for a perfect party. It’s serious business to get people to have fun!

As if amazing performances weren’t enough, SheMade has big projects in the drawer for around Novemebr 2018, as soon as their studio is ready: a new record label with the same name. “We have enough experience now to be able to produce” and as she says that her face lights up: “We want to involve artists to perform with us, new, emerging and international female djs to release music under our record label and make beauty for everyone to see” or listen to for instance. This a dream coming closer to realization, since she shares with us the struggle of when she first got to London in 2015, and tried to build her life and her music career from ground up, with nothing but a feeling that she could learn and expand her way to make music from the standard of partying in the U.K.

“I think it’s been a long time coming… and when we talk about distribution, well, there’s always going to be someone dealing with it for you, but if you can truly find a smart way to manage yourself, it’s worth the challenge. As an artist you want to involve people who follow you, you want to be able to have control. And a platform like this allows you to oversee your music 360°”.

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