The Mix 042: sooyeon

It’s been a year of development and introspection for sooyeon, although her latest artistic decision - changing her artist name from Oh Annie Oh to her Korean-born name, sooyeon - runs much deeper than being just another creative choice.

“I am going to give that little girl a voice and make her feel proud,” she asserts, reflecting on her younger self. “I wrote an essay, because I wanted to tell people around me about this change. It was important to me for them to have context as to why it wasn't just: ‘Oh, I don't like it anymore’. It’s actually quite important. So, I wrote this mini essay. It took half an hour, and it just kinda came out of me.”

Whilst still contemplating where to house said essay, sooyeon’s intention moving forward rings clear as she chats with Mixmag – she’s unapologetically embracing every element of herself, ending the year with a crystal clear vision of where her artistry is heading.

Fresh off the back of releasing her debut genre-bending EP ‘Block N Delete’ via Jamz Supernova’s label Future Bounce, and 10 years into DJing - the London-based artist held three-year residencies at Reprezent Radio and Rinse FM in that time — it’s a long way on from the young sooyeon who used to skip school to get front row at rock gigs.

And while the darker elements in the EP might unintentionally pay tribute to those days as a concertgoer in Toronto, where she grew up after relocating with her family as a child, the EP more broadly traverses soundscapes of techno, bass and UK garage. It chronicles the cyclical creation and destruction of a romantic relationship in the digital age, paving way for 2025, which is gearing up to be a productive year for sooyeon; expect further solo releases and even a possible venture into pop music production.

We sat down with the musician to chat about her poignant decision to change her artist name, her no-holds-barred, truth-first approach to creativity, and immersion in music since childhood. She also contributed a cutting-edge mix exploring full-throttle club sounds, to reflect her current empowered state of mind.

A few weeks back, I clocked that you shared on social media about you embarking on intent self-reflection and discovery. We’re chatting today and you’re using your new artist name, sooyeon; am I right in thinking that this is a product of that aforementioned self-reflection and discovery?

100%. I’d just released my first project where I'm making music and putting that out, and when I told my manager that I wanted to change my name, she just looked out from her laptop and went “Annie, no, not now!”. That was just her manager brain, and obviously timing wise it would have been perfect if I did this discovery and change before I released my project, and that would have been my artist name from the beginning of the music. However, life is not neat and tidy like that and I felt like I needed to put something out there under Oh Annie Oh – I would see my name on streaming platforms, or I’d see little bits of press coming out and see my name, and I just felt like it didn't sit right. I couldn't work out why, and I put it down to that it was the first time I was putting myself out there in a different way to DJing and mixes. You put something out there to be judged, essentially, so I put the feeling down to being vulnerable in a different way. But the feeling just kept happening, and I just couldn't work out what it was.

I've kinda played with the idea in my head that I wanted to incorporate my Korean name 수연 Sooyeon into something, I thought it feels more like myself. Whenever I saw my old DJ name, I didn't feel like I connected to it at all. When I was thinking about changing the name I kept writing it down, and the more I wrote it down in a message, or on demos, it just worked. It was easy and it made sense. You know when your nervous system is like: ‘This is actually what you should be doing’?

Totally. And you’d been using your previous artist name, Oh Annie Oh, for a while until this point, right?

Yeah. Whenever people have asked me ‘what can I call you? Can I call you by your Korean name? What do you prefer?’ I’ve always connected to both. I was born in Seoul, and my family moved to Toronto when I was six years old. When I was at school, the teacher and the children could not pronounce my Korean name. I think the cultural sensitivity to everything is quite evolved now - obviously ways to go, but it was different in the '90s - and I got so frustrated that I just watched the movie Annie, picked that name and wrote it on a piece of card, stuck it on my desk and told my teacher: ‘That's what you're gonna call me’.

I never actually changed my name. But now it's on my passport, so I don't really know what happened there. Turns out it's really easy in Canada to just fake your name! But, because of that, I always kind of had a connection to that name as well, because it was my decision. No one told me straight up to change my name or anything like that. I did it out of my own will, and I chose the name.

However, thinking back to that six year old, I didn't know any English. I was six, and even though I didn't understand my surroundings and the adult would, I understood that feeling of being inconvenient or different and that's so sad for a child trying to make sense of those complex feelings. [Moving to Toronto I was in a situation where:] Everything's changed, none of my friends are here, there’s so many physical changes. And then to think that because people couldn’t work out what you were called by your family - who I was - that that’s what I decided to do… I do connect to the name Annie, but this can change in the future. I don’t know. But when I think back to that child who didn't have the vocabulary or a fully formed brain to actually comprehend that complex situation, I want to give that child a voice. You actually can just call yourself that because that's who you are. And it's not up to you to make other people feel comfortable enough to learn your identity. You are Korean, and you should be proud of that. You can present yourself just as who you are, and that's enough.

To me, when I called myself my previous name, Oh Annie Oh - ‘Oh’ is my mum’s maiden name - it was a playful wording of my name. But when I was teetering with the idea of maybe changing it, I thought about the admin of changing my name and that I'd just released something, so maybe it’d be more convenient to keep Annie. But I thought that if I keep it, I'm doing exactly what I did when I was six years old. I'm not honouring myself. I'm literally keeping it to be convenient, and wasn’t going to do that again. I am going to give that little girl a voice and make her feel proud. And for other people to confront the name – it’s not what they see all the time, so just take one second to learn it. It's not my place to make it easier for you to understand my culture. I always felt that because we were immigrants to Canada that we had to then assimilate and fit in, in order to survive. This is an act that most immigrants feel they need to do, while expats rarely if at all, ever do. But this is me being like ‘no, you can learn’, and if people can't be bothered then they’re not the kind of person that should be listening to my music. I will honour myself.

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How does the thought of people seeing your real name on line-ups and future projects make you feel?

I'm really excited. I feel really proud of it, and I can't express how disconnected I feel from my old [artist] name. I do a podcast called Don’t Call Me Exotic which was born out of that pandemic and Stop Asian Hate. That was my release for a lot; the pandemic really forced everyone to look inward because there was so much racially heightened tension globally, and also because we just had so much fucking time. The podcast was my way of doing that. It’s me speaking to other people of colour who are in the creative industry, having a chat and understanding who they are, why they do stuff, the challenges they face and all those things, and it was very therapeutic. I haven't done it for a year or so because I was focusing on music production. But I think for the revival of the project I want to do a monologue, and just talk about why I did it and why I feel it's important, because if I had something like that which I listened to when I was younger, or in a different part of the journey of discovering the relationship to myself and my culture, it would have been really inspiring to have a tangible situation that I could look to and think: “They did it so I can do it – it's not that big of a deal admin wise, you can do it”. It'd therefore be amazing to have something that I can put out that someone can reference. I've also spoken to others, because I'm part of a lot of East and Southeast Asian communities, some of them specifically for music as well. There have been people in my life who have embraced their cultural name, too, so they have changed their names back to their born names rather than using their English names that they either picked or were given to them, and that's been really inspiring to see. I'm just hoping that I can do that on a different scale. It’s been something that's been bubbling in my community, I'm surrounded by it in little pockets, and I just find it so beautiful seeing people bloom. It's such a heavy thing that once they go through it, I just see them, and it's beautiful. So going back to your question about seeing my name, I couldn’t feel more free, because this is me. And that is fine.

I’m so excited for you, you’ve not stopped smiling from ear to ear explaining how ready for this shift you are. I’m sure we’ll be seeing you on line-ups aplenty with us now being in club season, particularly if your summer diary is anything to go by?!

Summer was so good. It was all such a blur.

We need to talk about your final Sunday set at Glastonbury Festival.

So I had two sets on the Sunday: one was at 4:PM and the second was 4:AM, and I was honoured to close Rum Shack in The Common on the Sunday. I played that stage last year on the Saturday night, but to close it at the end of the festival was just amazing. It’s the most reaffirming place to play. People have mixed feelings about Glastonbury - accessibility is really difficult, we all know how hard it is to get tickets - but to close that stage was just unbelievable. I went into that set knowing the first track I was going to play and the last track I was going to play, and the rest of it was just feeling the energy. It was the most amazing thing. One of my favorite producers who's absolutely killing at the moment, Hamdi, was there, which I didn't know, and I'm kind of glad I didn't know until after! But he told me afterwards that it was one of the best sets he'd seen over the weekend, which was crazy. The whole energy of Glastonbury actually is crazy. I find some festivals can be quite intense in terms of the energy of everyone. But at Glastonbury everyone is almost on the same level, there for the music. Everyone's just like gassed and feeling lucky to be there because it's a fucking amazing place to be. But it was hard waiting until 4:AM – I drank a lot of tea!

You’ve just released your debut EP, ‘Block N Delete’. What made you want to dive into producing?

Producing always was something that I wanted to do. When I first started playing 10 years ago, I loved edits and remixes, and I still love a good remix, but I always wanted to do my own stuff. I'm kind of surprised that I didn’t for so long but I was focusing a lot on radio and the podcast. Other things took priority up until now. But then at the beginning of this year, I'd been single for like six-and-a-half years, and I am a serial block and deleter. I blocked and deleted the last man earlier this year and I was like ‘do you know what? I'm just not gonna date, I'm not gonna even talk to anyone. I'm just gonna do my own thing and focus on me.’ It turns out that when you're not wasting time dating, you have more time, mental headspace and peace. It was the perfect time to start producing, so I started in March, April time. I know the DAW software somewhat because I was editing podcasts and radio shows and stuff on it, so it wasn't a total beginner start. I was working with a producer, Adam Curtain, and he's amazing. And we were working on this on the track ‘In Luv’ - that's the only track that has like an audible vocal bit, that’s like: "In Love" - so I thought, well, we have to call it ‘In Luv’. All of a sudden, I thought - you know that meme with all the like numbers and stuff? I just saw the whole thing come together - it's gonna be about blocking people and my dating life. From there, it came quite quickly.

And the EP has ended up rather circular thematically…

I spoke to Jamz Supernova because it was released on Future Bounce, and I had three tracks. She wanted four, so I made what actually turned out to be my favourite one, ‘Obsessed’. It's so sexy. We sampled a woman climaxing. What better sound in the world is there than a woman climaxing?! And then the order was gonna be like the story of like, basically dating.

Funnily enough, I'm actually with someone now. But there you go. As we first started dating I was like promoting the record, so I’m there going ‘fucking delete, fuck him!’ online, haha. But yeah, it’s order just worked out: there’s the obsessed stage, the falling in love and rumination (obviously like my favourite fucking hobby) and then inevitably hating them, and then delete and then start it all over again.

Poetic! It’s a super interesting mix of genres, musically.

Over the years, I’ve started playing a lot harder, and rediscovering my love for techno, bass, UKG and house, and I think this really came through when making the EP. I would just start with an element I liked and build on top of that, and I guess it all just merged together. It wasn’t my intention, but it’s very me.

You mentioned your musical taste, and I’m actually curious where the whole ‘music thing’ began for you?

When I was younger, I went to quite a progressive art school in Canada. I was playing piano privately, but then at school you had to play piano and a second instrument as well, and we were put in bands; I was in a marching band! The school was like random as fuck, we did mime class for like five years, but I was so grateful to attend. I was really immersed in classical music. And then the first concert I went to was Sum 41 – I was basically obsessed with music. When I got into high school I met a friend who also makes music now, and we were obsessed with bands. We would literally skip school to go line up at like 1:PM until door, I was that girl. That was like my thing, skipping school just to get to the front, because we had to be at the front.

There was a Radiohead show that we went to and that was the gig. That shifted my love for music - before it was a love for going to concerts - but when I saw Radiohead perform, and saw that they were like a rock band yet incorporated so many electronic elements into their music, my tiny brain was blown. Rock bands were rock bands and DJs were DJs, I never saw them come together. Then, as I grew up, I would always sneak into clubs to go see DJs. Sorry to my parents, but I used to lie and say I was sleeping over at a friend's house, and I would go to clubs. I really found an escape. I love Toronto, but I never really felt that it was home to me. Music was therefore not only my obsession, but it really gave me a purpose.

Because of that I dabbled on GarageBand when I was younger and then moved to London, which was always my dream. Within a few years of moving here I was working in a bar with my friend, and we just went: ‘Should we DJ? Why not?’. At this point I didn't even know how to set decks up or anything. We started doing a club night and then I worked at a talent booking agency, before deciding to quit and pursue music full-time. That was eight years ago.

There's literally nothing else in the world that I want to do. It's the best job in the world. Yeah, I work hard for sure. But I'm so lucky to be doing what I'm doing and to be able to express myself in that way. I'm so grateful, it's so amazing and it’s crazy that people are listening to and liking my silly little ideas.

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Beautifully put! So with that in mind, knowing what you’ve learned thus far, and as you step into this emerging chapter of your artistry, what would you say to the sooyeon of back in the day?

This name change is my gift to her. I am now able to provide confidence and comfort, and tell her that she is enough just as she is, and she doesn’t need to change. You're not inconvenient. It's gonna take a few decades, but you will get there and I will give that back to you because she didn't have that at the time.

I think my name change is literally going full circle and providing everything that I wasn't able to understand back then. What I felt I had to do back then was to assimilate, whereas now I'm like: ‘This is who I am’. This is who I am and I'm not gonna make myself small.

What does the future hold for sooyeon?

I'm working on more music. I’m planning my next few records now; I did want to just focus on my own body of work before dipping my toe into remixes but this month I’m self-releasing a fun remix of an artist I love. I'm jumping into the studio with some cool people - and not ones you would maybe expect from me - and potentially working on a co-production for some pop music. The podcast will also evolve as a continuation of exploring the topics we’ve spoken about; it feels like the perfect place. I’m also playing Drumsheds for the first time this month. But looking forward, I just wanna make some bangers!

With that in mind, can you tell us about your mix?

Changing my artist name marks a pivotal moment, not only in my career but also in my personal life. To celebrate this shift, I wanted to create a mix that reflects the empowerment I’m feeling during this time. It's packed with attitude, confidence, moodiness, and high-energy club vibes. You’ll find a track from my debut EP ‘Block N Delete’, as well as an unreleased one coming next year, among tracks I’m loving playing in my sets right now.

‘Block N Delete’ is out now, get it here

Niamh Ingram is a freelance writer, follow her on Twitter

Tracklist:
Syz X Yushh - Fuzbidun
I. JORDAN - Hey Baby
Cash From Hash - Workout
sooyeon - Obsessed
INVT x Introspekt - SEISMIC ACTIVITY
Villager, Waleed - Pig
Yesca - Are They Staring At Me?
J Wax - Limes
Gina Breeze - Into The Light
MoMA Ready - SOUNDS LIKE TECHNOLOGY
Eric Cloutier - Heuristic
DJ ADHD & Papa Nugs - Buss It (ft. Blapps Posse)
Hodge - Head Drop
Syz p Headspin
Mulholland - trip3
sooyeon - Out out
Spray - Ratenplan
DJ Spit - Heavy Breathing
Aloka - Mind Wash
Shortage - Heavyweight (Phasmid Remix)