W.I.G.: When did you start DJing?

Gulia: I started doing radio about two or three years ago at my school Carnegie Mellon. At the time I was doing strictly Arabic music. When I moved to New York, I hadn't done radio for awhile. I had never spinned out. But I had just come back from Egypt and I had all this music. I was playing this music on an individual basis to everybody anyway, so it just made sense to start playing it for a large group of people. [At first] I was just laying the Arabic stuff. I wanted to mix it up with hip-hop, but I wasn't even doing that yet because most of my Egyptian stuff was on cassette, so I had to go through the process of editing everything and getting it down to DAT. I got my own turntables just a couple of months ago and that's the first time I've really started mixing beats aggressively.

What does the stuff you're playing now sound like?

I'm mainly spinning drum and base and hip-hop, and I throw some Egyptian stuff in there. The first place I started spinning was at the Soundlab. Then I did some stuff at the CoolerÑnow I'm playing in a band Mack Diva.

How do people react to the Arabic music?

I've mostly gotten really good reactions. Part of the reason I'm doing it is my own love for it, but also, there's a lot of cleaning up to do. A lot of people have left messages in terms of how they've used Arabic music. Like Peter Gabriel with North African music. Maybe these people do it with the best intentions, but it doesn't always turn out that way. I feel like I'm presenting North African music in a different way, not sort of traced out, "world beat," whatever. This is very real, very aggressive stuff. You hear these southern Egyptian beats, and they sound like the fathers of hip-hop.

How do you think people react when they see a woman DJ?

I think people take women in stride. I always think that what I'm putting out there has nothing to do with whether I'm a man or a woman, but it's pure vision. At the same time, there's a part of me that's can't help but get a little tingle, especially, when I'm really aggressively mixing beats. Being a woman and doing something that's very macho gives you a double perspective on things.

Is it harder to get gigs being a woman?

It may be even easier [being a woman] starting from the underground because usually the underground supports minorities, women, whatever. In hip-hop it's harder. I [can be] coming in with my records and they're like, "Can you use that equipment?" It's cool as long as I have enough confidence in myself.