This year’s batch of first-year musicians have become especially prominent on campus, particularly in the DJ scene, with rising artist and first-year Adrijana Albijanic, musically known as DJ Pomidora, beginning to make a name for herself.
Originally hailing from Montenegro, DJ Pomidora wanted to choose a name that somehow related to her home country, even if the name she would choose — “Pomidora” — just meant “tomato” in her language. Before deciding she wanted to represent her home like this, she had tossed around some ideas in English, but none of them stuck. It seemed that no matter what name she chose, it had already been taken, and unoriginality was anything but her style. Albijanic wondered why she would copy someone if she had every opportunity to be different. “Pomidora” would turn out to be just the nexus of homage-paying and uniqueness she was looking for, so she went with that.
DJ Pomidora’s beginnings as a DJ started quite recently, just before Lawrentians returned to campus for Winter Term. Being on the basketball team, she had been stuck on campus during D-Term, and as a result had been ridiculously bored. So, she would come to think offhandedly, what better way to kill time than to buy a DJ set? As soon as she made her decision, she ordered a board to start messing around with sound, sets and mixing. In trying to beat cabin fever, she would ironically come to make her own beats.
DJ Pomidora cited John Summit and fellow on-campus DJ Tri Lopte as major inspirations to her musical work. When it comes to musical throughlines of her sets, she revealed her only theme is a lack of theme. That way, she imagines that the parties she throws will never be able to be considered boring.
“Not all the people listen to techno music, not all the people listen to Latin music, not all the people listen to rap, so I just combine everything: one song for you, one song for you, and some other song for you,” Albijanic explained.
Many of the songs she plays, DJ Pomidora admitted, are those she stole from her friends when they’re on drives. Since each person listens to something a little different from the next, the resource pool, as she called it, never goes empty. Though she tries to select tracks that are brimming with hype, genre is not at all a constraint for her. She acknowledges that no musical artist can please everyone in the crowd all the time, but she also knows they can always please some people as the songs change throughout the night.
DJ Pomidora has not played at any formal events yet, but she recently hosted a successful impromptu show in Trever Hall. As for the future, she hopes to start her on-campus crawl in the fraternity houses and move on from there. Though she has no plans set in stone yet at Lawrence, once summer vacation rolls around again, she is already confirmed to play a gig at a beachside bar back in Montenegro.
When I asked her what she wanted Lawrentians to know about her music, DJ Pomidora joked that you don’t need good transitions to have fun at her functions. As long as people are there and vibing to the music, she thinks that partygoers will have everything they could want for a good time. For this reason and so many others, Lawrentians should be on the lookout for any events she might be playing at, be it this year or her years at Lawrence to come.