From Choosing Songs to Creating Rituals

For Junayed Bin Islam, DJing began with something deceptively simple: always wanting to choose what song came next. Learning to mix transformed that instinct into something more powerful. He started falling in love with the flow—the movement between tracks, the anticipation of what comes next, and eventually, the feeling of watching people dance to something he had helped shape.

He describes that feeling as being similar to playing with Lego as a child: building something piece by piece until it becomes something larger than its individual parts. But when people enter the equation, the experience changes. Music becomes a ritual.

The Groove Is the Constant

Junayed’s sound sits somewhere around house and indie dance, but genre is not what ultimately defines his sets. What he chases are bouncy grooves—rhythms that pull a room forward without forcing it.

The sound can shift depending on the setting, the people, and the moment, but he looks for an underlying movement that keeps everything connected. Basslines, vocals, percussion, and everything else become tools for shaping that movement.

For him, a DJ set is never completely fixed. The room has a voice, and the music has to listen.

The Crowd Builds the Spirit Bomb

Junayed has an unexpected way of describing the relationship between a DJ and their audience: Goku building a Spirit Bomb.

Except the DJ isn't creating the energy.

The crowd is.

Every raised hand, every body letting go, every connection created through dancing contributes something. The DJ’s role is to collect that energy, hold it, build it, and know when to release it.

It is an understanding of performance as a two-way exchange. A DJ can guide a room, but the room ultimately determines how far the moment can go.

And for Junayed, when the time, space, and mood align, everyone gets to play a part.

Music Gives Community a Memory

Music and community, for Junayed, are counterparts.

Music can create a community, but once that community exists, it gives the music a life of its own. Different communities take shape in different ways—through rebellion, resistance, limitations, celebration, or simply the desire to have an amazing time together.

What fascinates him most is how community changes the meaning of music.

A track remains the same track, but it can become attached to a room, a city, a group of people, or a particular period of someone’s life. Music becomes a container for memory.

That idea sits at the center of how Junayed understands electronic culture: the music matters, but the people and experiences surrounding it are what make it lasting.

The Scene Was the Inspiration

Junayed never had one specific artist he looked up to at the beginning.

His earliest inspiration came from the local scene—the people putting time into music, discovering sounds, mixing, organizing parties, and creating spaces that others could belong to.

What inspired him most was their creativity in making all of it happen, including the execution.

His own style carries that same spirit of play. “Fun is the default,” he says, describing himself almost like a clown running a circus: chaos running smoothly, and sometimes a little scary.

There is freedom in that description. A willingness to let things move unpredictably while still keeping control of the bigger picture.

Growing With the Scene

Junayed sees Bangladesh’s electronic music scene entering an interesting stage.

The future, he believes, will come from people building their own version of electronic music rather than simply copying what already exists elsewhere. Restrictions around venues, infrastructure, and acceptance can be frustrating, but those limitations also force creativity.

More people are listening, experimenting, organizing, and finding their communities.

The challenge now is moving beyond simply proving that an electronic music scene exists. The more interesting question is what kind of scene Bangladesh actually wants to build.

For Junayed, personal growth is inseparable from that evolution. As the scene grows, he knows he has to grow too—both behind the decks and behind the scenes.

Building the Door Yourself

The biggest challenge so far has been learning what to keep.

With so many sounds, directions, and possible versions of yourself to pursue, it is easy for everything to become noisy. Junayed found clarity when he stopped chasing a specific destination and started paying attention to what naturally kept returning.

There is also the balancing act between what he needs, what a promoter needs, and what a scene needs—without losing himself somewhere in the middle.

And then there is patience.

Some opportunities are worth waiting for. Some never arrive. Eventually, he believes, you learn when to wait and when to build the door yourself.

A Portal to the Creative Bangladesh

For Junayed, platforms like Arka offer something artists need just as much as talent or ideas: consistency.

A platform that continues to show up gives artists room to experiment, test themselves, and grow publicly. At the same time, audiences grow alongside them, discovering new sounds and gradually developing their own tastes.

That consistency, he believes, is what turns individual moments into an actual scene.

He describes Arka simply as “a quick and easy portal to catch up on the many creative sides of Bangladesh.”

For an artist who sees music as a force that creates community, it is an especially fitting description.

Junayed is not chasing one final destination. He is following the groove, learning what stays, building when necessary, and letting the scene evolve around him.

And with his promise that “Winter is coming,” whatever comes next sounds like it will be worth listening to.