SOUND

The atmosphere inside HiFi Pursuit Listening

Room Dream No. 1 at Lisson Gallery in New York City is more like a tea ceremony or a guided meditation than what most would associate with a music listening session. Visitors’ shoes are scattered on the ground outside the door, removed out of respect. There is a sense of anticipation as Devon Turnbull, the master of ceremonies for this spiritual gathering, aptly un-sleeves a record from Brian Eno’s Music For Installations and places it on the neon turntable. The first track breaks the room’s silence, flowing through the show’s 10 purpose-built pieces of Ojas hifi equipment, and it’s evident why the listeners behave the way they do. The sound is special. Immersive and dynamic, as Eno’s music oscillates and drones through the massive gray speakers, it washes over you in waves. This is a sound bath, not a hang out, and show attendees are experiencing Turnbull’s audio enlightenment.

If you recognize his name, it’s because this is far from the first time Turnbull has appeared in the cultural zeitgeist. By his account, this could be his fourth creative lifetime, although he corrects himself by saying his close friend, the late Virgil Abloh, wouldn’t agree with that assessment—it’s all one body of work. The name Ojas, under which he now operates his bespoke audio practice, has been around since the beginning: first as DJ and graffiti writer, later as co-founder and designer of influential streetwear brand Nom de Guerre, and now as speaker sculptor and sound guru. The Lisson show will be closed by the time this piece is published, but it’s far from the only place that Turnbull’s work is installed. His handmade monolithic speakers can be seen and heard in Saturdays NYC and Supreme stores, at the New York City Ace Hotel and Public Records in Brooklyn, while earlier this year two high profile openings—Nine Orchard in Manhattan and Virgil’s Figures of Speech exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum—offered more people a chance to discover his work.

“MUSIC IS THE MOST POWERFUL ART FORM, SO WHY DON’T WE HAVE ANY VENUES FOR APPRECIATING IT? WE HAVE CONCERT HALLS, WE EXPERIENCE LIVE MUSIC, THAT’S ONE REALLY COOL WAY TO EXPERIENCE MUSIC, BUT FOR A LOT OF MUSIC, THE RECORDED MUSIC BECOMES THE MASTERPIECE.”

Sound

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE HIFI LISTENING ROOM DREAM NO.1 TO SOMEBODY THAT DIDN’T HAVE A CHANCE TO SEE IT?

The listening room is a part of a group show of sculptural works. To use the words of a mentor of mine, Herb Reichert, “It's a shrine to music.” The hardware is the work. In that sense, it's a sculpture but it's also a venue for music. In my work, form always follows function, but the function and the form are both extremely important. It's sometimes frustrating to me that so many people discover my work through pictures. This was my first real opportunity to properly present a sonic sculpture...that's it. That's what it is.

YOU’VE DESCRIBED YOURSELF AS A “HOBBYIST,” BUT EACH OF YOUR RECENT PROJECTS FEELS FAR BEYOND WHAT A REGULAR PERSON MIGHT CONSIDER A HOBBY. WAS THERE A POINT WHERE YOU FELT LIKE YOU CROSSED A THRESHOLD INTO THE ART WORLD?

When I originally set out to build my own system, I was still doing Nom de Guerre, and my vision was to be a folk artist— one of those guys that works on something for his whole life. Then maybe after his death it's discovered that he made incredible things and no one knew about it. It’s the recognition from other people that contextualized it as something other than a hobby for me. But hobbies are fucking everything. If you don't have a hobby—shit that you like to do for your own sake, for selfish reasons, and just because it makes you feel good—I worry about your mental health. Maybe your hobby is doing puzzles, maybe your hobby is playing video games, but whatever it is, it's a pursuit that you get a lot of satisfaction from. I'm lucky that at this point my hobby is my work.

WHEN NOM DE GUERRE SHUTTERED IN 2010, YOU WERE EXHAUSTED. WHAT IS IT ABOUT OJAS IN ITS CURRENT INCARNATION THAT BROUGHT YOU BACK TO LIFE CREATIVELY? The timeless quality of it. I feel no obligation to—just for the sake of a business cycle—get rid of my stuff and reinvent it every few months. It's heartbreaking to pour yourself into something and for it to have a one-month shelf life. I made a commitment to myself early on that I would be doing this until I can't hear anymore; to run this thing in a way that it'll stay fun. It is very hard to do that in fashion. It becomes an exhausting cycle. If I were to do clothing again, it would be that if I didn’t want to make a collection this season, just wouldn’t.

COMMITMENT TO DOING IT ON YOUR OWN TERMS. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR UPCOMING PROJECTS THROUGH THAT LENS? There's a new room we're opening at Public Records that is truly on my terms. It's not an Ojas venue, but they gave me carte blanche with the audio aspect. I [decided] to build a two-channel hifi system at a large scale that is for listening to music on. There's not the murmur of someone ordering a coffee drink and then milk getting steamed in the background. There's not someone shaking a cocktail, there's not even the distraction of just drinking something. For me to really do my thing, to be like, this is my work, purely, there's nothing else happening. Because that's how I use the stuff. Music is the most powerful art form, so why don't we have any venues for appreciating it? We have concert halls, we experience live music, that's one really cool way to experience music, but for a lot of music, the recorded music becomes the masterpiece.

You can't perform [the Beatles’] Magical Mystery Tour There's way too much going on in the record. You're meant to sit and listen to it. With jazz, it’s about capturing energy, and tapping into a collective consciousness between different players. That can only happen once. And we're lucky enough that a lot of those performances were captured in a really special way. You need a two-channel high fidelity music system to listen to that stuff.

WHAT ARE YOUR GO-TO RECORDS FOR TEST DRIVING A NEW SYSTEM LIKE THE ONE AT PUBLIC RECORDS? usually put on the track “Mule” from Kenny Burrell’s Midnight Blue. I'll listen to something by Miles [Davis] or [John] Coltrane. [Herbert von] Karajan conducting Beethoven's 9th is just insane. And then, I'll usually throw on some Aphex Twin or Squarepusher. These kinds of systems are not designed for playing dance music, but I want to be able to listen to electronic music, and that's got to be satisfying.

AS YOU WORK THROUGH MORE HIGH-PROFILE AND TECHNICALLY DEMANDING PROJECTS, WHAT ELEMENTS REMAIN CONSISTENT THROUGH ALL OF THEM?

There’s certainly an aesthetic that has been a continuous thing. And there's a sonic aesthetic. The term “presence” is a big part of it. Modern music is very compressed. Music of bygone eras and usually the music that audiophiles are interested in is very uncompressed. All this new spatial audio stuff like Dolby Atmos is an effort to make you feel like you're more engulfed by music—high efficiency speakers do that extremely well. To make a fashion parallel, Visvim is a brand that references design traditions and heritage materials, and then re-approaches them in an updated way. What I'm doing is more of that, than being nostalgic for the fact that I use a tube made in the 1930s. It's not meant to be old-timey, it's that those things, in my opinion, have never been beaten. I think that a lot of people feel that way about vintage denim, right? It's not that it looks old, it's that it just looks better.

AS YOU GAIN RECOGNITION, IS THERE A DANGER IN OJAS BECOMING A WIDELY RECOGNIZED NAME?

Only if I have to start making stuff that I don't like. I have two goals. To be able to find venues to express the kind of systems and equipment that I want to build. I have vowed to be making one-off things. Those become my fine art. The other goal, which is completely different, is to promote the hobby of DIY hifi. The highest mark of my success for me is more people doing what I'm doing. I'm so inspired by this almost deceased culture of audio building in Japan. There was a moment of it in New York in the '90s, and there's a small culture that's active in Europe. I participate a little bit, but I am decades younger than the next person who's doing it. I'll be incredibly satisfied if in 20 years there's four or five or 20 other people making this kind of work in some way. It’s like we're the Jedi, and we’re making sure the Force isn't lost.

Men’s style is hot for sportswear. Not the basketball shorts or rugby shirts that have pervaded menswear since dawn, but rather the obsession with codes that define hobbies and activities such as cycling, skateboarding, golf, and tennis and how they can be fashion-ified.

Take Demna Gvasalia’s Balenciaga. It got the ball rolling with nods to the mundanity of life and normcore tropes attached to soccer and running, and now it leads the pack, as a marathon of designers push for a sportier aesthetic. But it’s not all about irreverence and purposeful self-awareness. Palace’s collaborative partnerships with the cycling juggernaut Rapha or Adidas’ tennis division make a case for the line between fashion and sporting attire becoming increasingly blurred, with luxury materials and playful graphics combined with workout-ready cuts and technical fabrics promising a “work at five, gym at six” ensemble.

The burgeoning vintage market— which has brought back Marlborobranded merchandise and Wimbledonready skirts—has become a mainstay for many contemporary brands, too.

Take Casablanca for example, a brand that celebrates terry toweling, polo tops, and racing. With this, sportswear is not just reflected in modern style, it has become a part of our uniform. And this couldn’t be truer for lifestyle sports, which sees the average Joe’s performance look now become a source of inspiration. The resurgence of golf, something Jordan Brand has been championing with more daring footwear styles, has played into this as well, as has spectator sports such as boxing— Human Made and Dior have referenced it in recent collections and for athletes, respectively.

Sportswear and fashion are old friends. But what separates today’s understanding of sportswear from the sweaty notes of cheap polyester that terrified our childhoods? We have recontextualized the dress codes and uniforms of society to a point of no return. Self-care is at the forefront of our minds, sitting adjacent to work-from-home flexibility, and the smash of luxury fashion’s antiquated connotations of an old aesthetic loaded by generational wealth. In a TikTok era where everything has vanished after 20 seconds, people are searching for nostalgia, authenticity, and comfort—and this couldn’t be truer for the clothes we wear.