Since launching a career in DJing and party organization in 2009, the American-born AJ (Ariel-Joseph Lim) has seen a meteoric rise to becoming one of the foremost forces in modern trance and rave culture in Japan.
In 2013, he was brought on as a resident of Ligaya, the #1 trance party of its era, responsible for debuting a multitude of globally-renowned DJ heavyweights in the Land of the Rising Sun. This list includes Alex Morph, Will Atkinson, Woody van Eyden, Estiva, and countless more ground-breaking names. The party would consistently garner 300 - 400 fervent dance music enthusiasts per edition.
AJ also went on to establish his own party in 2014, titled the Church of Trance. Though initially a friends-only gathering consisting of no more than 10 people, as of July 2019, it has since grown to fill DJ Mag Japan's #1-ranked venue - Womb - a 1000-person capacity mega-club. Guided and guarded by AJ's honed curatorial skills, COT has featured wildly popular guests such as Freedom Fighters, John Askew, WAIO, John 00 Fleming... and is only getting started. Widely accessible to both underground and mainstream audiences, in addition to boasting a highly international core fanbase, the brand displays a potential never before witnessed in Japan's long history of partying.
A universally loved DJ himself, AJ commands the decks with unmatched musicality, technique, and charisma. His plethora of nicknames, ranging from "Mr. COT" to "Bruce Lim," "The Shaman King" and beyond are but a small testament to his extreme popularity. In 2017, AJ won Ageha's hard dance music-based "AGEHARD" DJ contest, earning him the right to rock the arena of Japan's biggest club. Openly acknowledging the power of dance and particularly trance music to elevate human consciousness, AJ continues his mission to build a better world - one dance floor at a time.