Harpaul Alberto Kohli – the owner and CEO of Abora Recordings – was born in Washington, DC, in 1980, to a father from India and a mother from Ecuador.

He grew up surrounded by music from different cultures, and attended almost all the children’s programming at the National Symphony Orchestra. For seven years he took piano lessons, plus served as his piano teacher’s assistant and page turner at various concerts; his teacher felt he had promise as a pianist. But after 7 years he quit piano due to a lack of time and never imaged he’d get involved in music professionally.

However, he really loved sharing his favorite trance music with others, and once he started recognising this passion within himself he started considering becoming a DJ.

He waffled back and forth until the deciding moment in 2009: after a Paul van Dyk concert he ended up spending 2 hours driving a trio of lost evangelical Christian girls back to where they were staying. Aside from helping them, most people would consider those 2 hours a complete loss of time. But in the car he played them his favorite trance tracks. He decided that if he was happy to give up 2 hours of his busy schedule to spend an hour sharing his favorite music to complete strangers, then he had to be a trance DJ.