Onyee Lo is still nervous. She has spent half of an hour talking about Sunny Day Sets Fire, the band she started with Mauro Remiddi in London five years ago, when she reveals that this has been her first substantial interview about her band for any sort of media.
“I did something on the radio live for maybe five minutes,” says Lo. “But the questions are [ones where] you can get away with answering with a joke. But this is like, Oh my God, it’s like a statement.”
Born and raised in Hong Kong before moving to London in her late teens to study fine art, Lo began SDSF years later upon meeting Remiddi at the local art-house cinema where they both worked. While Lo spent her formative years studying classical piano and working with theater groups, Remiddi, a native of Italy, had spent his time writing soundtracks for films and later endured a brief stint as pianist for Broadway shows while visiting America.
Within a few months, the pair began writing songs together and playing occasional gigs as a duo, performing songs that Lo describes as short, free-form, and “disco-y.” However, it wasn’t until after a two-year hiatus that Lo and Remiddi transformed SDSF into what it is today.
“After this two years, Mauro came up with this series of new ideas, which were more song-based and quite a lot more pop,” says Lo. “So we started to do this demo together and we realized that we needed more people helping us, so we started to look for more musicians.”
SDSF’s Brianless EP is four tracks of multi-instrumental pop that vacillates from the near-bubblegum pop of “Brainless” to the spaced-out wonder of “Green Clouds.” The sound is very much rooted in classic melodic songwriting, with Lo on vocals and drums, Remiddi on vocals, guitar and keyboards, Ed Howat on bass, and Max Zoccheddu providing additional guitar. Varied textures are provided by electronic accents, brass inflections, and the occasional odd instrumentation (check out the traditional Chinese instrument, the Erhu, on tracks 2 and 4).
For Lo, music is also very much a visual experience. Although the first record she ever bought was Simon and Garfunkel, she envisions SDSF as more of a “playful collective,” taking cues from bands like Blonde Redhead, Beirut, or Deerhoof. She sees SDSF performing in unusual venues like galleries or cinemas, and hopes to have the band incorporate various animation, artwork, and props into its work. SDSF is currently at work on its first full-length album. All together, the band has written over 20 songs, varying in styles from “Brainless” to the moody “Lack of View,” a new track the band recently posted on its Myspace page.
“We would like to make it into a show that is almost like a journey, through the different atmospheres of the music we are doing,” says Lo. “Sometimes it could be power pop, but sometimes it could just be interludes, so it’s like we want to make it into a musical, visual journey.”
The band recently signed to new California independent, I Am Sound Records; however, while the band has previously released two 7” records on small UK labels, it does not currently have a record label in its home country. Thankfully, because of its strong songs, the band has been gathering a buzz, helped by Internet word of mouth.
“We are actually really happy that a lot of blogs are writing about us,” says Lo. “It’s real. It’s not media hype. Real people. They listen to [the music] and they like it and they write. We like it. Happy. Very happy.”
~ Frank Valish
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Sunny Day Sets Fire's Brainless EP is out now on I Am Sound Records.
