It was Friday at Reading Festival 1998, and Symposium were being dragged off stage. The British pop-punk band had taken to finishing their set with a snotty cover of The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” and this far into their tour it was a party piece: limbs everywhere, throats shot, manic kids overwhelming security. After they exhausted the song, these five nice-looking kids just beat the hell out of everything, every guitar and cymbal stand and monitor and cab. Security personnel were deployed to drag the band off as the crowd chanted their name; eventually, realizing that there wasn’t much left to destroy, most of Symposium did disappear backstage. The only one left out there — lying on the ground at center-stage, being manhandled by eight furious guards, clasping a floor tom as if it was his last earthly possession — was the band’s guitarist: Hagop Tchaparian.
Twenty-four years later, Tchaparian again found himself on vast stage. Spiritually a world away from the Reading riot, at an all-dayer in London’s Finsbury Park, he was alone in a DJ booth. He was focused, even a little nervous. He was playing songs from his debut solo album, Bolts, a vast and otherworldly techno album that embraces both his ancestral home, Anjar, an Armenian village on the Lebanese-Syrian border, and the late-night London club scene to which he’s devoted himself since the dissolution of his life in a rock band.
“It’s such a massive stage in Finsbury Park, it’s like you’re not really there,” Tchaparian says now, calling in from San Francisco, where he lives with his wife and daughter. “I was worried I was going to come in and ruin everything. But it wasn’t as bad as Symposium getting pelted with cups in an indie club.”
Born and raised in west London, Tchaparian was immersed in music from a young age. His father, Movses, was forced to flee the Musa Dagh region of what is now Turkey by Ottoman forces in the late-1930s. His family was among those that rebuilt their town and their culture brick-by-brick in Anjar before eventually settling in London.
He made sure that Hagop and his sisters absorbed Armenian traditions, many of which involved song. He’d play concerts at Armenian school and, in church, chant from scrolls written in Old Armenian.
Though he admits it wasn’t always “pleasant,” Tchaparian says he understands why his dad pushed him to engage with these rituals. Movses is too young to remember fleeing Musa Dagh, but the damage of displacement lingers. Those who fled had to pick up whatever they could carry: “Maybe it would be an idea or a theory or a thing that isn’t necessarily material. I think that’s what makes [my dad] so like that.” Movses encouraged his children to embrace their heritage because, as a refugee, “that’s all you’ve got: your culture.”
These churches and chants, that immaterial connection to Armenian tradition, the dusty streets of Anjar, and even the room in Tchaparian’s house where he and his sisters used to rehearse around a piano, are all familiar to me. Movses and my maternal grandmother, Lucine, both fled Musa Dagh for Anjar. They both eventually settled in London, and they were friends until the end of my grandmother’s life. Our families have been close for generations. When I was a kid, my mum would take me to the Tchaparians’ house, where I would try to think of something cool to say to Hagop from behind my bowl cut, awe-struck.
He was a rock star. Symposium formed at high school in west London and were shot to fame overnight. One of their first proper concerts, at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, had to be shut down with the room overheating and sweat dripping from the ceiling. The first show they played after signing a deal was at the 20,000-capacity Wembley Arena, opening for Red Hot Chili Peppers. Teenagers fawned over them; Melody Maker called them “the best live band in Britain.” They were the first band I ever loved.
They crashed as quickly as they blew up. They quit their label, Infectious, in protest after Rupert Murdoch took a stake in its parent company. A year later, another label that promised to take them to even greater heights went bust before they could sign the paperwork, and the members of Symposium found themselves in a terrifying amount of debt. Tchaparian had spent his late teens traveling the world with his best friends, playing the songs they’d written together to massive crowds. He blinked, and the floor disintegrated beneath him.
He picked up shifts flyering outside clubs in London, feeling beats through the concrete for eight-hour stretches, and soon worked his way inside. He embedded himself in the scene through the influential London club Plastic People, becoming friends with a community of musicians including Hot Chip and Kieran Hebden, a.k.a. Four Tet, whose Text Records released Bolts.
“That world was a savior," he says. “I was bummed out on music. Being in a band took its toll. So that music really means a lot to me – going to Fabric or going to festivals with Hot Chip, things like Sub Club or Optima, seeing LCD Soundsystem.”
It opened up the world. He became Hot Chip and Four Tet’s tour manager, traveling constantly and absorbing new sounds by osmosis. He also periodically traveled back to Anjar, retracing his father’s footsteps. It was on those trips that, as he pulled out his phone to record ephemera, Bolts began to form.
Tchaparian has always recorded random sounds, even before the Voice Notes app was in everyone's pocket, the same way people take pictures of the most mundane things. But some of these recordings imparted a familiar energy. “That vibe in Anjar, where this guy is banging the drum and they bring in that droning zurna,” he says, “is a bit like being in a field at some festival in Europe somewhere at 2 a.m., where there’s this weird electric vibe. Everyone unites.”
Bolts is given over to this search for a communal experience, both through its samples and the dancefloors it’s aimed towards. “GL” opens with a wailing zurna before cutting to unrelenting drums and a thudding kick, “Right to Riot” twists the zurna into a siren over a rapturous beat, and “Ldz” is dominated by a joyous fireworks display. Even when the rhythms dissipate and the whirs of Tchaparian’s samples overwhelm the mix — on the euphoric “Jordan” and the starkly meditative closer “Iceberg” — Bolts never wants for warmth.
Without the communion that’s so clearly present behind Bolts’ scaffolding, Tchaparian would never have released music again. He started working on electronic tracks years ago — some in collaboration with friends like Hebden — but he never considered releasing anything. The end of Symposium, he says, left him with something like trauma. When I ask him how he resolved to release a record under his own name, he pauses for a few seconds and stares into the middle distance. “I’m getting quite emotional now,” he says before laughing a little to break the silence.
Tchaparian had been working on some of the songs that would end up on Bolts, and he felt he should finish them for his own sake. He went to work on them at the San Francisco studio of friend and longtime Caribou collaborator Ryan Smith, better known as Taraval. He sent those off to Hebden, who suggested an EP, but Tchaparian had soon tweaked a handful more ideas into full-fledged songs. Hebden was convinced they constituted an album.
There is a deep trust inherent in the relationship between Tchaparian, Hebden, and the circle of musicians that includes the members of Caribou and Hot Chip, and Sam Shepherd, a.k.a. Floating Points. But there is another layer to these relationships for Tchaparian. The industry left him broke and bereft when he was still a kid, out of love with music. This community of artists, over the course of two decades, inspired him again.
“If it wasn’t for those guys, I don’t think I would have been able to do this,” he says. “The way they look at music is so healthy. It’s just part of their life.”
Whatever wounds were left open by Symposium’s demise have scabbed over too. Last year the London-based indie Cooking Vinyl approached Symposium with an offer to get their old music onto streaming services, and they all had to be in one place to sign the deal. It was the first time they’d shared a room since the band broke up. “The main thing for me is just meeting up with those guys and seeing that everything is cool,” he says. “It’s like a weird dream.” They’ll play their first reunion show later this year in London.
Tchaparian wants to play more shows under his own name too: “I don’t want to jinx it, but hopefully. Because its fucking fun, man.” After all the riots and reunions, the late nights in London and Anjar, and the hours of hours of phone recordings, Hagop Tchaparian has found himself at home in music again, even if that idea isn’t necessarily material.