Knowing how to DJ is one of the best skills you can have in New York. It’s the difference between attending your friend’s show and sharing the turntable with them, and you never know who you could meet. Anyone can learn how to DJ in a day. All you need is an expert scratcher with the patience to teach you the basics, and you’re set. DJing is fundamentally about giving back to the community. We wouldn’t be playing at the shows and making the music we do if we hadn’t joined the DJ community, because our networks exploded once we got involved.

The founding members of SHLVES all met while working together at Turntable Lab, an East Village DJ store. We’d hang out after the store closed and sit around and make music, discovering shit we would’ve never come across. Eventually we started daydreaming about a type of music and style that we wanted to hear and see but couldn’t find, and we especially wanted to see people of color like ourselves represented more in what we do. It felt like we were embracing the dawn of a new frontier for music, and we wanted to leave a mark for other people interested in DJing. So one thing organically led to another, and we formed a group. 

The fetal planning stage of SHLVES began in January 2020, and by the time we were in our groove and making tunes and establishing a vision, quarantine hit. Full lockdown meant Zoom was the best option for rehearsing and making music together. Sometimes we wouldn’t sync up, or Zoom would kick us out when we were nearing a breakthrough. We’d have to save all of our progress forty minutes into our session, only to load it back up again after restarting a call. But the abnormality of building music this way encouraged us to play around with all kinds of bells and whistles — new textures, new plug-ins, new sounds we would have never stumbled upon if we were all hanging out in person.

The main focus of SHLVES is creating music for runway shows. As DJs by trade, we expect the audio and visual components of our shows to go hand-in-hand. Music seems to be the one element of a runway show that isn’t specifically created for fashion itself, unlike the clothes, platforms, and culture itself. We can’t figure out why a lot of the music at fashion shows are DJ-curated playlists instead of original soundtracks and mixes that speak for the clothes and made in collaboration with designers. How can your goals for a show be to suspend disbelief and envision an entirely new world for the future of fashion if your DJ throws on a bunch of pop songs everyone knows? Designers spend five, six, seven months pulling references from paintings, cinema, and visual art, constructing beautiful and elaborate pieces from hand-sourced materials, and working tirelessly all day and into the night only for a DJ to whip up a mix in less than a week. If a collection is entirely based on references from previous time periods and modes of thinking, why is Dua Lipa in the mix and not the obscure older artist from the bottom of the vinyl pile? We want the whole experience to be as creative as possible, so we want to work with designers to create original mixes that truly uphold the integrity of their pieces.

The new terrains of DJing and audioengineering link conceptually with those of fashion design. Remixing old vinyls is just like upcycling discarded clothes into designer pieces. Looking to the future, SHLVES wants to work with environmentally friendly designers who know how to make practical, fashionable, and wearable clothes. The idea of upcycling is thrown around a lot, to the point of terribly greenwashing parts of the industry, so we’re partnering with designers who know that method and process are just as important as message and intent.

SHLVES approaches music like the fashion industry, basing each big release off the infrastructure of runway seasons. This means we can refashion our identity every season, giving listeners something completely new for F/W compared to S/S, both sonically and visually. Listeners shouldn’t expect any particular style or sound from us for the same reason we don’t expect them to wear shorts in the winter. We set out to break this box from the very beginning so that we could combine as many technical elements as we want into a shape that fits us. 

That’s why the name “SHLVES” works so well for us — each one of our S/S and F/W releases is its own compartment, it’s own shelf on a much larger bookcase, all connected to each other but still holding their unique identities on their own. “SHLVES” carries no predisposed notion of itself, a mundane word for an everyday object. Now it’s our task to define the idea of SHLVES in the mind of the listener before they ever hear the music. When you walk past a show poster for bands like Cannibal Corpse or Morbid Angel, you know immediately what they sound like, without being any bit familiar with death metal. We have the creative challenge of making SHLVES ubiquitous with this entirely new genre of electronic music, while also using the unfamiliarity and mundanity of our name to its advantage — What is SHLVES? I guess I’ll have to click on it to find out.

Some of us were kinda surprised with how friends and fans reacted to our very first S/S release, “BOY.” We’d hear people say, “Yo, this shit is crazy!” and our response would be, “You don’t even know — it’s about to get so much better.” While we generated upbeat club tracks for our S/S season, F/W will explore slower, more intimate songs. We’re playing around with darker ambience and textures and want to base the tracks around the vocals. It’s exciting to have no limitations or expectations as new artists.

We see ourselves excelling in the industry because we know we have what it takes to make good music. If you’re getting into art, you have to have a little bit of I don’t give a fuck or else you’ll never maximize your full potential. Being around people with the same attitude will help you stay true to yourself. Everyone in SHLVES has grandparents or uncles who were DJing or performing in bands, and now our moms listen to Grimes and Thundercat, so we feel motivated to keep the music flowing. We want to partner with first-generation curators and creators with little to no college education in fashion or music who are motivated to build an artist community that encourages self-learning, experimentation, and growth. 

SHLVES wants to explore performances that are entirely immersive, ones in which the audience is so focused on the environment that they don’t even see us. We want the whole set to be the world that you step into, one that really stretches the limits of an audiovisual experience. Maybe we’re hiding in the rafters, or maybe we’ve designed an augmented reality that allows listeners to control the music with bodysuits. Anything that takes it to the next level. We want our audience to turn to each other after they leave the show and say, “Damn, I have no idea what that was, but that was cool.” 

The SHLVES experience comprises the various auras each of us bring, which means we draw a dynamic audience that deserves space for a full range of expression. We’d love to play a showcase at a venue with multiple rooms, like a gallery or hotel, where each member of SHLVES gets their own booth, and the audience can ebb and flow through each of them. But we know it’ll take time before we get the chance to bring the experience we want. We aren’t rushing to play our first post-Covid show at the first available venue just to establish SHLVES in the nightlife scene. “Can’t sit this up there, gotta end at this time, only this many people.” For now, we want to focus on distributing the music we made during quarantine, including our F/W release. The fashion and gallery parties will come back eventually, and when they do, we’ll be ready.

That’s why we’re proud to be in New York for the post-pandemic era. We know New York isn’t dead, so we’re cool with the media pushing that absurd message if it means driving out all the people. At the beginning of 2020, New York had reached a melting point, where rich people were chasing culture, grabbing and consuming it to the point that the city was about to die. There was too much money involved with shit. Now, a fundamental shift in the value of art will allow New York artists to flourish. They say this city resets itself every twenty years, so now is the best time to be here as an experimental artist. New York is gonna come back better than ever, all joy, no drama.