Former Angeleno Sevyn 0000 knows a thing or two about motion: the pulsing churn of a long night’s drive on the freeway, the propulsive skid of a beat as it blares through sturdy club speakers, the thoughtless flow of one's body moving during the wee hours of a DTLA or Bushwick afters. Her debut project, typeR, is a pure expression of kinetic energy, a synthesis of all the NY-by-way-of-LA DJ-come-producer has learned during her meteoric ascent.
Helping define the brutal, joyful, singular sound of LA’s post-pandemic techno wave, Sevyn 0000 has now made the fateful leap from DJ to producer though true heads will know this is nothing new. “If you know me personally you know I play a lot of my own things in my sets,” she tells PAPER.
With four songs that range in style from the perilous death march of “Hard Cover” to the relentlessly syncopated spiral of “Industry Plant,” typeR is a gift and a challenge, a provocation to see how far you can take yourself while rolling on the bender. With cover art designed by the star designer, close friend and collaborator Victor Barragán, the project evokes the spirit of community that shaped the rising producer: the colleagues, collaborators and faceless masses in LA, NYC and around the world who lost themselves and connected to her spirit on the dance floor.
Below, PAPER chats with the DJ, producer and model about the process of becoming an artist, the scenes that formed her and the lessons of Los Angeles.
This marks your official debut project as a producer after having an established DJ career. What was that process like?
I started DJing and producing at the same time when I was in high school, but before that, I’d been playing piano and guitar and writing music since I was a kid. When I moved to LA in 2019, that’s when I started asking a lot of questions about what I wanted my sound to be because I always loved all types of music, not just electronic and techno. It was the pandemic that pushed me to take DJ’ing seriously because underground parties were the only thing keeping me alive at the time.
For years, I have been consistently producing work that I only showed to friends who I shared a studio with. I cannot exaggerate enough how much music I am actually sitting on — it’s so overwhelming. Honestly, I just got to a point where a lot of people around me were saying shit like, “Sevyn, what are you doing? People need to hear this.” Most of it is techno, but a lot of what I make is very melodic, emotional and more ambient. If you know me personally you know, but I play a lot of my own things in my sets. I never have actually wanted to go down the artist route, it’s too much hyper-visibility for me. I’ve been waiting on my own time but it all just feels right. This project couldn’t have gone smoother for me.
You've been a staple of the LA scene for years before recently relocating to NY. How did SoCal and the scene there inform this project?
LA is everything. I owe so much to that city and the people in it. So many long, aimless drives in the middle of the night, so much heartbreak; so many special parties I threw or played that helped shape a new history in LA nightlife. Everything in my time there just moved so quickly. I don’t know if I have even had time to process it all. One day I was so confused with what I was doing, the next day I was playing a rave for Kanye West. I feel like a lot of what I do now and why I keep going is that same community that I have seen grow so much. LA is so vibrant; the people I have come to call family are the ones who made everything possible.
The cover art was designed by star designer Victor Barragán. Tell me about your collaborative relationship with him and about the process working together on this project?
Me and Victor met last year in Mexico City at a friend's film debut, and we instantly clicked. When he moved to LA, we started hanging out a lot more and he would come to the studio while I was working on tracks and my future sets and we would show each other our work. In September, he asked me to come to Mexico City to walk his show at the Aeropuerto Internacional Felipe Ángeles and I was really inspired to see him pull off something so major, using fashion to create such a political statement about Mexican and American identity and relations.
Recently he had been working a lot with AI, often making images involving needles and sharing them with me, and he designed a one-of-kind shirt for me that says "Tranny." So when we brainstormed a lot of ideas for the cover, it only made sense for him to be a part of that because a lot of my feelings about the project felt linked to the imagery he was already creating. Everything flowed naturally from there.
How is New York informing and inspiring your next chapter of creativity?
I think New York has been really good for me. I've been able to see amazing sets from artists I never knew, and I've had some perfect nights here recently, just being on a dance floor surrounded by people I love and listening to some of the best music I've heard in a while. Every time I play here it revives me — you see the music move in so many different ways. Those inspirations and collaborations are what built something like typeR, so I know by the end of this year a new product I didn’t know existed in myself will be born. I think to let myself really create I need changes of pace and, honestly, I get bored really easily. I have always been pretty nomadic, and I want more of that this year.
Photography: Jaden Walker
From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
