Music

DJ MoCity aka Mo is an award-winning selector, promoter and co-founder of South Asia’s first online community radio – Boxout.fm. Born and raised in Baghdad, he spent his early days as a hip-hop loving teenager in New Delhi. Mo is now an experienced musical tastemaker, fostering creative communities across Asia and the Middle East.

A global citizen, Mo has used his multicultural heritage to facilitate artistic exchange across countries and regions. He has worked with notable bands such as the 264 Cru (Dubai) and the Reggae Rajahs(India), with whom he developed the Goa Sunsplash into a globally reputed festival featuring reggae and dancehall communities across the world. Mo has also produced an award-winning podcast Motellacast.

Since 2016, Mo has built South Asia’s first online community radio – Boxout.fm, which supports under-represented independent and alternative culture in India and across the region. The station also runs its own record label called Boxout.fm Recordings. 2018 saw Mo invited to curate a monthly hip-hop focused residency called Off-Air at Auro in New Delhi, featuring urban sounds from around the globe alongside local talent.

Through the pandemic, Mo liaised with cultural institutions and grants to work on a number of online events to support the creative community. He also put together a one of its kind 72-hour radio fundraiser that saw established and emerging musicians come together to aid India through the COVID-19 crisis. In 2021, Mo ran residencies across various radio stations from Radio Alhara, Worldwide FM to his own boxout.fm, completing over 100 hours of broadcast in a single year.

2022 has seen Mo organizing one of the first post-pandemic open air 3 day music festival in New Delhi, Jazz Weekender, to creating the official Indian website and programme for Fete De La Musique and bringing together a large scale cross-continental project Delhi to Derry: Together In Sound with the British Council and Celtronic Festival.

Read on DJ MoCity’s research trip here.