Ask him who he is and the answer arrives in layers.
“I would introduce myself to people who I meet personally as Isaac. But overall, I guess I’m Champa. My DJ name has been DJ Prozak since 1994.”
Three names, one timeline. It starts with a kid and two cassette decks.
“I used to DJ on cassette between two tapes and make my own radio shows.”
Dance music arrived at fourteen. By sixteen he was on turntables, playing jungle and garage. The year was 1994.
The nineties treated Prozak well. Techno. Progressive house. Hard trance, hard house, the sound that decade called psychedelic.
“Every genre I moved into, I kept my credit. I was looked after by promoters.”
Then the decade ended and the thread frayed. He tried commercial trance, funky house, happy hardcore. By his own account he was searching.
The search ended by a river. At an illegal outdoor party in London, walking through the woods toward the sound, he heard it.
“I thought, wow, what is this? This is the true trance I’ve been looking for, for nearly a decade now.”
The artist that night was E-Ject. His friend Enrico ran the Antiworld parties, and there he heard Astrix and Infected Mushroom. It was 2005. The Goa trance of the nineties had grown into modern psytrance, and to his ears the pieces had landed where they belonged.
“I found psychedelic trance, and the bass and the rhythm just fit.”
It was not only the sound that held him.
“The people are immense. Probably the best crowd out of all the dance music scenes.”
Antiworld’s promoter told him a psytrance DJ needed a more psychedelic name. He said no.
“I don’t want to change my name from Prozak. That’s my name for so many years. That’s who I am.”
Psytrance was not impressed.
“No one really cared who I was or what I did. It was like I had to start from the ground up.”
What changed everything was not a booking. In 2010 his partner was pregnant, and they decided to keep the child.
“Because that child was coming, and my career was not as strong as I wanted it to be, I decided now was the time to start my life project.”
He had touched production before. In 1999 he and a friend opened a studio in Wembley; he still owns the building, and today it houses six recording studios. So he went back to school on his own terms, every Friday for years, learning to write psytrance with Protoculture in his ears. Early in 2012 the first release landed: an EP on Neurobiotic Records, then a single on Ganja Tree, then a home at YSE Recordings. The new music carried a new name, taken from the incense. Champa.
His first gig abroad under that name was an underground club in the Belgian mountains, for the label now called Green Tree. He travelled with Mechanimal, a friend, an influence, and a teacher. Northern Ireland came after, small and underground. Then Munich, around 2013, playing for DJ Shamani.
“Playing Germany felt like, now I’m doing something.”
From there the map fills in. Moscow. Yerevan. Mozambique, three times. Cape Town. Brazil. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal. Writing with Talamasca he calls his biggest highlight so far. Tropical Bleyage, from Serbia, are the artists he loves most.
Ask him about the industry and the warmth drops out of his voice.
“It’s not really been about the music anymore. It’s who you know, how popular you are, how many fans follow you. It’s a shame, really, because there are so many talented artists out there.”
He watched it from the inside. From 2013 he was with YSE Recordings, working harder for the label as the CD money died. He asked about a bigger role and learned the seat was taken. At the end of 2016 he left. His favourite label made him an offer written for a beginner. So in 2017 he started his own.
Enterrec. Enter, plus Recordings. One hundred and six releases on, the label does what he founded it to do: give talented artists the break the industry stopped handing out. The motto is his thesis in six words.
“Growing psytrance for generations to come.”
His own third album, Goosebumps, lives there. A fourth was written for 2020. When COVID emptied the calendar, he released it as singles instead, to stay in people’s eyes while the world was closed.
The sound refuses a formula on purpose.
“Each track changes. The rhythm changes, the bass changes, the kick changes. I don’t like to have a uniform sound, although I do feel that someone should recognize it’s Champa when they hear the music.”
The DNA is nineties: drive, energy, uplift, harmonics, emotion. People have spent years telling him to chase the fashion. He has an answer for that too.
“Many people told me to develop my sound over the last 16 years. I decided to stick to what I enjoy most.”
And the two names still divide the work.
“DJ Prozak could be myself, but basically other people’s music. And Champa is my own music that I perform.”
When the sets are over, what he watches is the floor. Somewhere in the last twenty years, he says, crowds turned to face the booth.
“It was like, we’re finally the stars who are getting the attention. But I quickly realized that people stopped dancing with each other. And that’s such a shame.”
“We used to dance with each other and feel connected as a tribe. And that means one tribe.”
That is the mission now, at every party he plays and every event he runs.
“I want people to come and dance with each other. That’s what makes them feel connected and ultimately, at the end of the event, feel happiness. The frequency between each other is what makes us stronger.”
He has been doing this since 1994. Thirty-two years, by his own arithmetic. Would he change any of it?
“Life is the lesson. I am who I am now, and I’ve made my mistakes, and I’m still making them.”
There is more Champa music coming. The nearer chapter is a dance floor of his own: Holy Pendragon, Friday 9 October at The Hairy Dog in Derby, seven acts deep, running from 7pm to 3:30am. If you have read this far, you already know what he wants from you when the kick lands.
Come and dance with each other.
