Since trading in his job as a university lecturer to become a DJ, Ajax has taken his electro mashups from local clubs in Oz to the world, gathering a large fanbase in his wake. More recently, he has launched record label Sweat It Out. We chat to Ajax from Melbourne ahead of his upcoming slot at Warehouse.

What are you up to at the moment?
At the moment I’ve always got to get up early because I’m doing lots of stuff with overseas for a record label, so I have to work when we’re both awake. I’m always in the office early in the morning which kind of sucks because on the weekends when I finish DJing at 4 or 5am, I have to get straight into it. So my body clock is just whack.

Take me through the process of creating a new mash up.
I grew up playing hip-hop, so hip-hop is a big influence in my life. What I’ll do is go to a hip-hop A cappella site which is basically dry vocals. I’ll take the A cappella and drag it into my iTunes and then I put it through this other program and find the key of the vocal. Once I know that I can match it to another track, like a backbeat, or another song that’s in the same key that I might like. Then I’ll change the tempo and I also might cut up the vocals, so instead of it being a straight vocals I might arrange the words differently or change the chorus. So it’s not just like lying a whole vocal of a new track, it’s a whole process of editing and rediting. It usually takes about two hours to do that but you don’t always get it right. Sometimes it just doesn’t sound good so it’s just a lot of trial and error.

Who are you most looking forward to seeing at Warehouse?
Skrillex for sure – I’ve actually seen him online a lot. When you punch in Skrillex, a thousand things come up on Youtube and he looks like a definite showman. He also used to be the lead singer of a punk band and he was quite well-known as doing that, so apparently he sings over his tracks so I want to see how that all goes down. He’s like the new showman producer – for so long it was just DJs standing behind decks or producers standing behind computers, and now there’s like this craze sweeping America where there’s guys like Skrillex and they’re real typical Americans who stage dive and throw bottles of water and take their clothes off so yeah, I’ll definitely be up for seeing that.

What should punters expect from your set?
Well I’m actually working on it now. I don’t do sets where I just go in and play records or just play whatever. I carefully construct my sets – every track I play is re-edited, which basically means I’ve cut the track up the way I want to play it, and I might add new sounds or new vocals or something like that. I always want to give people an experience they might not have heard before. I actually spend a lot of time working on my sets beforehand, because when you’re playing a festival you’ve really got to perform. If you crash and burn in front of like 5,000 people, that stuff will haunt you. I remember I played a set about four years ago that had technical problems and I was devastated for like two weeks. So I’m pretty carefully prepared like a good boy scout these days.

How did your name come about?
It’s not very interesting unfortunately. My real name’s Adrian, and you know when kids are pretty creative at extracting a nickname from a real name so I was Adrian, then AJ then ‘Aje’, and then when I was younger there were always Ajax commercials so everyone just ended up calling me Ajax. So it’s not very techno and not very cool – it’s just a nickname I had as a kid really. Everywhere I go people come up to me and go ‘Hey, Spray and Wipe’ and they always make cleaning remarks. It was funny for like a year but ten years later it’s kind of like, “Yeah…I get it.”

Catch Ajax at Warehouse on Tuesday 26th April at AIS. Tickets available from www.ticketek.com.au.