What were your early music experiences?

I was six years old, very young, when I moved to Australia. I was born in Chile, in Santiago, although I was made in Peru [laughs]. I have a Peruvian mother and a Chilean father, and I feel just as much Peruvian as I feel Chilean. The reason I say that is that my mother was perhaps the most influential person in my early musical life. She was an amateur singer. She liked to sing a lot of folk music from Peru and that really stuck with me a lot. I didn’t realise the implications when I was young. But soon enough I started creating my own melodies, some of them quite influenced by the folk music she would sing to me.

Daniel Rojas

How did you come into contact with Western classical music?

I remember one very fortuitous day we were running around the markets, and for some reason, this big collection of records just caught my attention. I asked my dad to purchase it for me. It was a lot of light classics – including some not so light classics – some Stravinsky, some Beethoven...