Andrei Mazandarani (DJ Andrei Maz)

In July 2026 Mazandarani was taken to hospital with severe abdominal pain and was diagnosed with an aggressive gallbladder cancer. Doctors initially planned chemotherapy to shrink the tumour so it could be operated on, but complications followed quickly. He died peacefully in hospital in Perth on the night of Monday 21 September 2026, aged 55, about eight weeks after his diagnosis.

His brother Jerome announced the death in a written tribute published on 24 September, and 7NEWS, PerthNow and The Music Network reported it in the following days. Because he had kept his illness largely private, the news came as a shock to many in Perth's music community, and tributes followed from friends, fellow DJs and people who had danced to his sets for years. The family set up a GoFundMe appeal to pay for the funeral and to support his partner and children. Funeral arrangements were not made public.

Andrei Mazandarani was born in 1971, the eldest of three brothers. His younger brothers, the twins Anton and Jerome, were five years behind him. The family emigrated from England to Australia and settled in Perth, keeping close ties with grandparents in England. His brother Jerome remembered him at about twelve vanishing for hours in Kowloon, Hong Kong, during a family stopover, on a mission to find a ZX Spectrum computer. He went on to champion the Commodore 64 and the Amiga and stayed devoted to video games all his life.

As a teenager he was, in his brother's words, a handful. In December 1988, after a family Christmas trip, his parents left him in England, and he spent most of 1989 there, first with an uncle in South London and then in a squat in Lewisham with older friends. He went to warehouse parties and illegal raves, wandered London during the poll tax riots and hitchhiked across Europe to Berlin as the Wall came down. Throughout that year he sent mixtapes home to Perth, full of acid house, early rave and British and American indie bands such as the Pixies, the Stone Roses, the Smiths and the Fall, which his brothers later described as formative.

Andrei came home to Perth at the turn of 1990 and agreed to sing in the band his brothers had started with school friends. Called Yummy Fur, after Chester Brown's underground comic, and later Six Mile High, it played its first gig at The Old Melbourne in Perth, sold out local venues and signed with Columbia Records. The band later moved to Melbourne and, in 1998, to the UK. Its members remained friends long after they went their separate ways.

He moved back to Western Australia in 2004 and turned to DJing. With his brother Anton he founded Death Disco, a weekly Saturday night party at Amplifier Bar and Capitol in Perth, which ran for 620 consecutive weeks between 2007 and 2019 and became one of the longest running DJ residencies in the city's club history. The brothers used the name with the permission of Creation Records founder Alan McGee, whom Anton knew through his work with Pinnacle Records.

After Death Disco ended he held several residencies across Perth and played clubs, pubs, bars and private events. Anton said he could read a room and knew what to play for any crowd, and that there was not a dance floor he could not fill. He also worked as a music curator for Audalize, a background music company, which said after his death that he had shaped the sound of thousands of rooms. He was self-employed and kept DJing until a couple of weeks before he became seriously ill.

Mazandarani lived in Perth with his partner Louise and their two children, Ruby and Jude. His brothers described him as a devoted family man who spent most of his time away from work at home with them, watching films, playing games, cooking and making things together. Despite a career built on entertaining crowds every weekend, Anton said he was actually a fairly private person.

From his early twenties he lived with Crohn's disease, which brought chronic pain, hospital stays and surgeries, though few people outside his family knew. In later life he was a keen player of demanding video games such as Dark Souls and Elden Ring.

Death Disco's run of 620 consecutive Saturday nights made it one of the longest running DJ residencies in Perth, and for many people in the city it was the soundtrack to their weekends for more than a decade. Younger DJs credited him as a mentor: Alex Taylor-Vivian said Andrei took him under his wing at 21 and taught him how to DJ. His brother Anton said the outpouring of tributes would serve as a record for his children of the kind of man he was.