For the young boy that I once was, there were few joys greater than being at the lunch table. Crowding around with your friends, chatting about something egregious, eating certain foods that we can only reflect on with a certain flavor of disgust. It is a joy that can only be amplified, however, by one of those friends pulling out the phone he snuck out of his locker that day and opening the app that we would all inevitably open once the bell rang: SoundCloud.
Cathartic is too weak an adjective. It could have been anywhere in the world, the head bobbing, the foot tapping, the impromptu adlibs to words that we were too young to understand, and yet it was hard to forget that we were all there.
Ogi Ifediora and Anoop D’Souza, the creative duo behind sunandmoon, do not make music for SoundCloud kids, but were happy to share with me that theirs received some head bobs as well. When Ogi’s brother played it for his friends, the response was immediate, yet much quieter. Some nodding, followed by the adlibs being replaced by words of affirmation.
The old feeling had simply found a new room.
It is easy for me to conceptualize the creative sessions behind the duo’s music, very much because it was easy for me to sit at that lunch table. They are not musicians that make music out of desire, out of a desire to repurpose it into content, out of a desire to fulfill the title of “artists” that they have declared themselves as.
That much has been settled.
Their first two singles, “in the movies” and “circles”, embody this. They are both reflective, the former a nostalgic tune in which Ogi walks you through your longing for those you don’t miss anymore, the latter defined by its maximalist, powerful production from Anoop, intriguing you before it breaks. In our conversation last week, both Ogi and Anoop emphasized they had no words to define these singles and the process that they undertook. Circling around adjectives – “unique”, “necessity”, “yo” – for longer than our allotted time, it was clear that whatever they were looking for had already found them.
Perhaps it is easy for them, and for me, to conceptualize because there are no words that truly contain their work. The words “sun” and “moon” are inherently contradictory, and despite what they insisted to me, a large portion of their process seems to be successful due to these contradictions. Anoop may be the creative engine, but Ogi is the filter. Anoop is the instigator, but Ogi may be the realist who puts ideas into action.
The other portion, though, that 1% between artist and musician, tends to reveal itself elsewhere. It may just be why they attracted attention from household-name industry greats. It may be why they bonded over growing up in immigrant families in middle America, feeling as though they had both everywhere and nowhere to run. It may be why they were able to put together an entire project in just a week, turning the pressures of daily life not into inspiration, but into the product itself.
And it may be why, when I asked them about these contradictions I had heard, they couldn’t put a single word to what sunandmoon is.
Later that day, though, those boys around the table will go home, dap each other up once more, and forget about the day’s events. They will forget to mention it to their families, waltz through their routines, and banter with their siblings until the next morning, when they will run out the door to the bus, dap their friends up again, stretching their lips into a smile as they think about sneaking their phone past the teachers just as they did their parents that morning, as they think about bobbing their heads once more, this time to something of their own. It’s almost like they had no choice.