DJ Sun and conductor Marlon Chen team up for ‘Loveletter’ show
Houston’s DJ Sun will be doing a live show July 23 at the University of Houston’s Moores Opera House that will double as a record-release party for his latest album, “Loveletter,” dropping the same day. You could also call it a 30th-anniversary bash, considering that this year marks the 30th year the veteran DJ and producer has been spinning records professionally.
“I think I started in the summer of ’92, doing a beach party that I was invited to do,” remembers Sun (given name: Andre Sam-Sin). “And, then, it just didn’t stop from there. I remember being booked after that and being talked into about doing certain business projects.”
During those early years, Sun worked on finding his lane as a DJ. His trips to New York, attending club nights, such as the funk-and-soul party Soul Kitchen (which is also celebrating its 30th anniversary this weekend), started influencing the music he would spin regularly. “I was playing a lot of the music that was definitely coming out of England, coming out of New York — the old-school hip-hop, the jazz-influenced stuff,” he says.
From then on, Sun became a prominent figure in Houston’s DJ community. From doing various residencies in clubs and other venues around the city to hosting the now-defunct KPFT radio show “Soular Grooves” every Saturday night to dropping his own mixes, EPs and full-length albums on CD and vinyl, Sun is an “elder statesman” — as he calls himself — in this record-spinning game.
“Loveletter” came about when he was looking to do something after his 2016 album “Qingxi,” a project that had the mixed-race Sam-Sin venturing to China to explore the Chinese side of his roots. “After doing such a personal-life journey,” he says. “I was a little stuck as to what am I going to do next.”
Just like he did in his younger days, he went back to the Big Apple for some inspiration. “I heard sound, I heard music. I had just seen a lot and heard a lot of sounds, which kind of opened my mind. The music was very love-inspired, because of that era,” he says.
Hanging out in Red Hook also took him back to his days growing up in Rotterdam, Netherlands, where he was born. As he says of his hometown, “I only have love for that city.”
According to Sun, “Loveletter” is “a memoir of love,” inspired by French New Wave and ’60s soul, combining lo-fi aesthetics and lush textures and sounds. He also says the album has been ready since 2020. “COVID’s been very unfortunate, of course,” he says. “But it did give us some time to pause and be able to conceptualize how to present the album.”
One idea that stuck out was performing the whole album live, creating with musicians the beats and sounds he made in the studio. “I was just thinking this through and wanting to perform what I’ve composed in a drum machine, and have it be represented by world-quality musicians in a live setting for the first time.”
So he teamed up with conductor Marlon Chen, who serves as the principal conductor of the Manila Symphony Orchestra in Manila and the Aperio Music of the Americas ensemble in Houston. “Andre is great, he is the calmest focused cat I know,” says Chen. “We sat in his studio for weeks just talking about how to translate the album’s electronic sounds into a live orchestra. And then we coined a new term — ‘nontranslatables’ — all the things that we could not translate but would have to do to keep his original vision of a sound landscape.”
Joining Sun, Chen and the Loveletter Orchestra will be Chris Dave & the Drumheadz, Fat Tony, Tim Ruiz and others. Artist/performer/Sun’s daughter, Khaili Sam-Sin, will recite some romantic prose alongside the music. A pre-show reception happens at 6:30 p.m., featuring music from Oakland’s DJ Platurn and artwork from visual artist DUAL. (Half of the proceeds from DUAL’s artwork sales go to Austin DJ Chicken George, who has been battling cancer.)
With times being as both stressful and hateful as they are, Sun believes both the album and show are very much needed right now.
“In a very general sense, you can also say that, today, the world needs a love letter,” says Sun. “And I’m also writing a love letter to Houston. There’s nothing super-literal about this, but it’s very much the sentiment that’s represented. And that’s going to be represented in this show and, I think, through the music as well.”