CHELO: I don’t think there was one single moment. It was more of a slow build. I started playing drums early, ten years of practice, sheet music, Jugend musiziert. It was fun, but also exhausting, almost like doing something because you are supposed to. I felt it more when I played at home.

Later, playing in my own band, I could bring in my own ideas. When I started DJing, a new layer appeared because you get direct feedback from people. Even if it is not your track, you communicate with them, and I always loved that. Then you begin producing your own music and watch how people react at shows. That is another step again.

So no big moment. But very early on I knew that music is something magical. And with every project I keep rediscovering that feeling.

C: I have been DJing for a long time, around twenty years now, and the landscape has changed a lot. Back then everything felt very defined in my head. There was hip hop, rock, pop and then everything else. Hip hop felt like its own world, with its own parties and a very specific style.

Today the boundaries are much softer. Genres blend into each other, which I actually really like. I am open to a lot of sounds, but my hip hop roots are still the foundation. When I play, I try to bring that spirit with me: classics, RnB tracks people might not hear anymore, mixed with whatever feels current. I want a set that a 21-year-old can connect to, but where a 35-year-old also feels understood. That is the range I naturally move in.

Influence-wise, Pharrell Williams was a major one for me. He had the perfect combination: his style, his taste, the productions he worked on, it all felt exactly right to me. He was ahead of the curve, also in fashion. Later I had a project with a live band that pushed me back into a more rock-oriented sound, and I was playing drums again. That shaped me too. Pharrell always stayed a reference point. A sexy motherfucker. Maybe not as much today, but still a lot.

C: Da Rockwilder by Method Man and Redman.

C: It is still pretty new for me to go back to playing vinyl, and at the beginning it is honestly very exhausting. But it is a completely different way of playing and experiencing time, of letting go, of moving. When I play digitally in a club, everything feels as fast as life today. People listen to thirty seconds of a track and already wait for the next one. It was not like that back then.

With vinyl I try to bring that feeling back, where you actually listen to a song from beginning to end. The appreciation for the music returns and the whole room relaxes. The pressure, the expectations, the energy shift in a really nice way. I did not know what would happen when I tried it again, but it became something special. A different way of going out, of dancing, of listening together.

Even the volume changes. It is not as loud as in a club, and the energy in the room becomes something calmer and more intentional. I am not sure yet where this will lead, but I felt something in that room, a very particular energy, and I really liked that.

C: At first it happened by accident. For the first sundaiitape I sat on a stool because the idea was to keep everyone on the same level. No stage, no hierarchy.

In Paris we did not have a stool that made sense, so I said I would sit on the floor. And the atmosphere changed immediately. The circle felt tighter, more intimate, almost sealed. The energy became something else.

From the outside it can look strange, but once you are in the room it clicks. Whether you are playing or listening, there is a quiet closeness that forms only in that setup. That is what I want sundaiitape to be: an intimate space where the music and the moment carry everything.

C: For sundaiitape it is always about the room, the people and whatever feeling is present in that moment. I can only prepare on site. I need to see the space, feel the energy. Most of the time I am still putting the set together two hours before, while guests are already arriving. That is the only way it works for me.

What surprises me is how this very intimate atmosphere somehow translates digitally. The feedback I get is often that people can feel something through the screen, which is crazy because the setup is so small, quiet and a bit magical. Usually, the presence of cameras destroys that feeling.

But we only use one camera, and it is always the same person filming – Kwami. Just him. No crew, no production energy. I do not feel comfortable with ten people behind a camera; it changes everything. With one person, you barely notice the filming, and the atmosphere in the room stays real. I think that is why it works on video too. The energy stays untouched.

Simone: I don’t have so many memories of being a kid; but in my house there was a very good sound system. With a record player, cassette player, CD-player, and so on. I started making mixtapes as a child, using songs from the radio. I wasn’t aware of what I was doing, I was just collecting music – which I guess connects to DJ-ing. It was a nice way to spend my time, it made me feel accomplished. Like writing, or drawing. But with drawing I’ve always been too self-aware. Music, on the other hand, was something I never felt judged with.

S: I think, yes. I think I could do it very intimately, too. I could do it wearing headphones, so I could be in my own universe quickly. It’s something very immediate, like when I am skipping the guitar, or with Ableton. You can do something and are immediately in its feedback loop.

More than not feeling judged I felt that music was a language I could share more easily with people. Something they could understand. I felt like no one would like, for example, the books I liked to read when I was young. De Quincey, Oscar Wilde,… With literature, paintings, and drawing also, I am more into abstract, dark things. With music, I felt like I could share that aspect more easily.

S: Like Isolationism? Nowadays I think more about Isolationism, I think because I am more aware, maybe. I think I also got more into it because of Raf Simons. Last year I got more into his work again. I felt that Isolationism was an interesting culture, in its own right. Especially when contradicted with big-city life.

S: I completely agree. Nowadays we also have many more ways to distract ourselves, technologically speaking.

S: I revisit images from the past. I also dream a lot, especially recurring dreams; which I hate. They’re torturous. So some themes also stem from these recurring dreams that I elaborate on and get rid off in that way. I think another theme right now is avoidance. About not seeing things the way they are and looking the other way.

As an artist – and I use this word because it can mean many things – in this case, in the context of music, it’s best if the vision comes to you without you deciding on it. It’s great, when this atmosphere simply comes to you. Usually these themes consider a suspension of sorts, a certain type of mystery and oddity. When you feel like things are fine but not quite the way they’re supposed to. Eerieness is definitely a good way to describe what influenced the atmosphere of my music, from time to time. 

And on the other hand, there are quite simple moments, too. When I am watching a movie and can easily translate what a scene wants into music – without making a clear reference, it’s just for me.

S: A lot of my interest also comes from musique concrete. It’s a tradition of doing sound recordings, from the fifties in Paris. The group called GRM, which still exists today, started to record the sound of objects. It’s really inspiring to me, because it approaches music from a different angle. They used to record conversations and opera singers and sounds of objects, and put that together.

This is definitely an influence. But sometimes I also work without thinking about anything. That was the case for the sound design of the fashion film “Work Drains My Soul But I Love It” that I worked on – we actually won the “Best Sound Design” Award from ASVOFF 16 in 2024.

I think a lot of how I see music is about doing it as much as possible. Ideally every day, Ideally all the time. I can’t, obviously. 

S: When I studied sound design at the fine arts academy in Milan – NABA – my department was connected to the fashion department. At the end of a year, we got to do the sound design for the Antonio Marras show. In the end, it didn’t work out as well as we hoped – there were too many people working on it. One teacher and seven students… but there definitely was this idea of putting sound and fashion together. It intrigued me. I always thought fashion would be a good place for the way I think about music and sounds. 

For me and my friends, fashion was always very important. We started with skate culture when we were teenagers. Then at some point the electronic French Touch thing came in. And more than French Touch, French Electro. So things got more sleek. I started wearing skinny jeans when no other man in the village was wearing skinny jeans. So it goes back a long time. I was also making clothes with a friend of my mothers, she was repairing clothes as a job. And I still make some clothes. I also got into clothes because of magazines. When I was eleven, I bought magazines and cut out the advertisements to put on my wall. I thought it was art like any other. Back then, I didn’t know that it was fashion, or that you could buy these clothes.

Talking about sound design: It’s not something you can really apply for. Most of the time, someone in the team knew my work already. I think as a sound designer you can not really have strategy. If someone tells you the opposite, they’re lying. 

S: I thought it was a great name! But to be honest, I never chose to be underground. If what I did were mainstream, I wouldn’t mind. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding with being underground in general. I think in the past the underground scene was so important; in the eighties for example. New wave, punk, etc. But that also became mainstream at some point. But nowadays it’s very difficult to understand what’s underground, when everything is online already. 

Still, underground is not a choice. I’ve been to hundreds of underground events and most of the people I interacted with there would like to be recognized. Which artist doesn’t want to be seen?