Perth DJ Andrei Mazandarani has died aged 55 after an eight-week battle with gallbladder cancer, prompting an outpouring of tributes from Australia’s music community.
Mazandarani, who performed as DJ Andrei Maz, died in hospital in Perth on Monday night. He had been admitted in July with severe abdominal pain.
His younger brother Anton said the initial plan was to begin intensive chemotherapy and reduce the tumour to an operable size, but complications led to a rapid deterioration.
“It was just brutally quick — from standing up and being fine to bed-ridden in the hospital in excruciating pain,” he said.
Mazandarani had lived with Crohn’s disease since his early 20s. Anton said his brother remained stoic and did not want attention focused on his illness.
“He didn’t like the fuss, didn’t want everybody being sad about him,” he said.
Mazandarani was a husband and father of two, and Anton described him as a private family man who tried to protect his children from what he was experiencing.
His illness had not been widely known outside his immediate family, leaving many friends and fellow musicians shocked by news of his death.
Death Disco DJ remembered for packed dance floors
Mazandarani’s career took him from Perth to London, Melbourne and the UK. At 18, he bought a one-way ticket to London, where he attended warehouse parties and illegal raves, travelled across Europe and witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall.
After returning to Perth in 1990, he co-founded the band Yummy Fur with family and close friends. The group later became known as Six Mile High, sold out venues and signed with Columbia Records.
He moved back to Western Australia in 2004 and became an in-demand DJ, drawing on what his brother described as an “encyclopedic knowledge” of music.
With Anton, he ran Death Disco at Amplifier Bar and Capitol for more than a decade. The pair hosted 620 consecutive Saturday-night parties between 2007 and 2019.
Anton said his brother could read a room and choose music that appealed across generations.
“There wasn’t a dance floor he couldn’t fill,” he said. “He’d mix it up … and just keep everybody happy like an intergenerational, DJ wizard.”
Tributes have since been shared by former colleagues, friends and people he mentored. Alex Taylor-Vivian said Mazandarani had taught him to DJ and introduced him to the wider world of music.
“He was the best teacher and mentor anybody could ask for,” he said.
Loved ones have launched a fundraiser to help with funeral costs and support Mazandarani’s immediate family. Anton said the messages from people who knew his brother, including many they had never met, had helped the family through their grief.
“(The tributes are) a record for his kids to go and see the kind of man that he was. That’s nice,” he said.
