SONN
East London producer Sonn is making music for the feeling of being in-between.
Interview by Alex Free
East London producer and musician Sonn is quick to laughter; warm, friendly. In the hour we spend on the phone, talking about memory, control, and the tomato plant he’s been nurturing all through lockdown (his quarantine hobby), I get the strong impression of someone at ease, grounded within themselves. A trait that makes sense in the context of his latest release, Something Safe: an album for times of transition and the feeling of being in-between.
It’s morning in LA (where I’m calling from) and just hitting evening in London; at times I can hear the hiss of traffic outside the flat that the 21-year-old producer shares with his girlfriend. People heading home, the sun in a last flare of vibrance before its slow dip in the western sky. He’s telling me of his daily routines and the acclimation to normalcy that we’re all experiencing with continued lockdown.
“I usually wake up, make coffee, go straight onto my laptop, and then attempt something,” he says. “Usually in the morning I can feel if I have an idea, and from that point it changes. If I don’t feel like there’s anything I can do [musically] that day— which is sometimes the case, sometimes you just wake up and you have nothing— I just try to fill my time doing other things that can help inspire me. Make artwork or make small videos, stuff like that.”
“I try to make a song everyday, or to make something everyday. That doesn’t alway happen, but my goal is to get an idea out, or put lyrics to a song, or put finishing touches to a song,” he says. “I try to make it as disciplined as I possibly can.”
Discipline and thought are the name of the game for Sonn — real name outside of this project Jed Stewart-Ng— who spent a year in his second home of Penang to write and record Something Safe.
Sonn spent the year in his old house on the Malaysian Island, among friends and family and memories. The artist was born in London to a multicultural household—his mom is Scottish and his dad Malaysian-Chinese—and the family moved to Penang when he was two. He spent his childhood and adolescence between the two places, spending the school year in Penang and his holidays in England, always in the company of family.
“Nowhere really feels like ‘this is home,’ because I spent so much time in each country,” he says, talking about feelings of ownership and belonging. “At some point they kind of just fuse. They become one. I guess it’s just who you’re with that you can decide about at the time.”
Sonn moved back to London when he was 18 for school, where he says he started really making his own music. For two years he worked on music daily, flirting with the diverse styles of hip-hop and lo-fi and indie and grime that the underground scenes of London presented him with in abundance. He started producing for artists like Ayelle and British rappers bbno$ and Yung Gravy, finding community in the pooled music scene, and developing a free-standing sense of self in the mix.
Over summer holiday after that second year, Sonn was back in Penang— the small island, its attraction of color and greenery, bright blue natural pools, the pull of memorized and little- known places, life among his friends and family operating at a slower tempo: the music was coming fluidly and Sonn made the decision to take the year out from Uni.
“At the time I was like, ‘I’m not really going to have the opportunity to do this again,’” he says, no trace of wistfulness, no remorse in his voice. “It was just me packing up everything, moving to Malaysia, and working for a year straight on music.”
This is perhaps legible in the fluidity and ease of Something Safe. Sonn’s singing voice is smooth, mature, lightly yearning as he sings lines like “just give me something safe to hold,’ with a barely discernible British inflection that comes more from his years in the Penang international school system than his current life in London. The production has evident lo-fi underpinnings, over which ricocheting backbeats, fluid melodies and elevated harmonic elements ping back-and-forth in slow motion. It’s like drifting, blinking lights in a blank, black canvas. Bright points, things to take notice of in an otherwise empty span of time or space.
“Going back to Malaysia was more about the emotion behind it rather than the sound. I think the EP gets split up into two sections, where the sound and all the audio is inspired by all the people I’m surrounded by in London, and all the culture in London, and the emotion behind it is is mainly stemming from Malaysia, or my time there.” Sonn says, “There’s a lot of emotions that are related to nostalgia with this EP. I felt like the best place to write music like that was somewhere in my past, and that place happens to be Penang.”
Asked where home is now, he says, "I think home is wherever you’re comfortable, and wherever you think your closest people are with you.” At the moment, “that’s London,” with it’s mix of ideas and influence: everyone coming together to trade art capital, but also hustling, on their own track, leaving each other in relative anonymity with their eyes fixed on some personal bright point.
We spend a lot of time talking about control of creative expression. Everything the young artist has made so far under his own name has been self-produced, with vocal features from a friends (Lontalius, T.Evann, and Tamu Massif) on the debut, and the rest a long process of experimentation and refinement. “I just kind of like having full control over everything, whatever’s in my head I can get out as fast as possible, without any other second opinion or whatever.”
Something Safe, taking its title from the idea that “everyone has their something safe they keep close to,” is Sonn’s personal landmark, something that he’ll reference as a definitive point-of- origin for the run of this project. It’s a statement of identity as much as it is a timestamp of a particular moment. It’s no wonder he wanted as much control over the final sound as was within his technical grasp.
“No one knows the meaning or the feeling or the direction I’m trying to go with music as well as I do because I’m the one who’s making it,” he says. “Each song had probably ten different versions— they were mixed a little bit differently, or the arrangement was different or the production style was different—but I had full control, and came to the conclusion of sound that is now the EP.”
Sonn also takes creative control over his image, working with visual concepts on his musically- off days and experimenting with shooting film and video sketches to find one that fits. If he’s going to roll with a concept or release images on mainstream platforms, he’ll pass off execution and final edits to someone he trusts, but Sonn stresses the significance of “accurate representation,” and getting it right when it comes to his own thoughts and feelings. “Just because I know the music best,” he reiterates.
Nowadays, he’s taking a “first-thought best-thought” approach to his music, working at a faster clip to develop a consistent rhythm of production, learning to quickly demo ideas that he can map out and refine over time.
“It’s nice to know from here on out I can do what I want to do, musically” he says. “Just exploring ways of making more music and getting more inspiration from other places and putting it into certain sounds.”
When I ask what’s been inspiring him recently, he says he’s been picking up the guitar a lot more lately, and mentions film photography as a major source of inspiration, something that really captures the mood of a moment and the people present in it.
I ask him if he thinks his own music accomplishes something similar, and he’s quick to come back with descriptions of what that is: “Highways, fast-flashing lights, looking out the car window while you’re driving.” He pauses, thinking. “Being in-between places and seeing things around you.”