Best of 2014 The DIY List 2014: Causing ‘Tremors’, SOHN

SOHN is at #65 in The DIY List 2014. Following everything here. Interview originally published in DIY Weekly, May 2014.

For SOHN to call his debut album ‘Tremors’ seems very fitting. This is a musician who’s been dealing with the aftershocks of endless internet hype for a year and a half. On the buzz band richter scale, breakthrough track ‘The Wheel’ was off the charts. Keeping stock of everything that followed - because the Vienna producer didn’t have any other songs at the time - this former Londoner has been playing catch-up ever since, his life progressing on out-of-body autopilot.

Somebody should pinch him as he sits down to take stock on a whirlwind eighteen months. Since ‘The Wheel’’, it hasn’t just been his own material that’s struck a collective nerve. He’s also been hailed as a go-to producer for major label hopes, someone capable of adding an indefinable edge to the music of Kwabs, Banks and many more to come. There’s no sign of any of this stopping. Looking understandably dazed, his customary hood-and-wooly hat attire can’t successfully cloak his sense of excitement. “I do not understand - I actually do not understand - that there’s a record out and that I’m signed to 4AD,” he stresses, a month ahead of the album’s release. “When I think to watching other artists putting out a record on a label like that, I see it and think ‘I know what that would feel like if it was me’. But it doesn’t feel real.

“The main thing actually that’s surprised me about the way it’s gone into my brain. Because it hasn’t.”