Ali Mojallal
Ali has been DJing as DJ Savak since long before the festival existed, and Mechanismus started as a night dedicated to one thing: promoting industrial music, the artists making it, and the DJs playing it. In May 2018 he teamed up with the Highline for the 10 year anniversary show, MechFest, and turned a club night into the biggest industrial festival Seattle had seen, which has kept growing from there.
Ali has brought in bands like Front Line Assembly, Suicide Commando, Stabbing Westward, Leaether Strip, Haujobb, Velvet Acid Christ, Funker Vogt, Aesthetic Perfection, God Module, Dawn of Ashes, iVardensphere, This Morn' Omina, Cyanotic, Caustic, Stoneburner, System Syn, and a long list of local acts who got their first real stage because he put them on it. Ali is a truly dedicated promoter and an artist who has worked incredibly hard at building an amazing community.
Whether you've done all 5 days of a Mechanismus run, played one, DJed one, or you've just always wondered who's actually behind a festival like this, this is a conversation with someone who's spent 18 years building rooms for a genre that doesn't get handed anything.
What they get into
- Building an industrial night in Seattle and growing it into a festival that pulls people in from out of state
- What it actually costs, in money and sleep, to run a festival
- Booking local openers next to international headliners and why that balance matters
- The no-overlapping-sets scheduling philosophy and what it does for both the bands and the crowd
- Working with venues like the Highline, El Corazon, The Crocodile, and Mercury at Machinewerks, and what makes a room right for this music
- DJing as Savak while also being the guy running the whole event
- Where industrial and goth sit in 2026 and what a healthy regional scene needs to survive
- What's next: the 16Volt and Acumen Nation show on September 7, and the 2027 festival already in planning