Lunch with Louise Chen

For Louise Chen, conversation over a Springtime menu offer a moment of respite amid a busy schedule. Off the back of international festivals and gigs, away from energetic sets and sweating crowds, the peace of dining welcomes a rekindling with homely pleasures – the cocooning embrace of a Tekla blanket, the crisp salt on seared asparagus, and the smell of blooming flora. Today, the Luxembourg native is in Edinburgh for her first Boiler Room set. Sentimental and affable, the “half French, half Taiwanese DJ and Producer” is also a “proud NTS Radio and Corsica Studios ‘Small Talk’ Resident, with a career rooted in multi-genre sets. Chen speaks with candour about her current plans; In the wake of a “two-year COVID inertia,” her life is starting to resume. Everything is “feeling quite surreal,” she begins. “It’s like its 2019 again, and it’s thrilling to say the least.” She has a busy Summer, playing Glastonbury for the first time, and bouncing between the likes of Copenhagen, Arles, Sicily and New York for this year’s festival season. Accompanied by a table of lavender thistles, vintage China and blushing peonies, the music maven has an alluring magnetism, constantly stamped with a beaming smile. The day has been slow, with cantaloupe melon, hand torn burrata, cut basil and fresh tomatoes paired with oven baked bread prepped for mealtime. The avid Vinyl collector and E.T superfan is a foodie, it must be said. In between bites of grilled artichoke – Chen is rather impressed with the spread, actually – she details more about her upcoming plans, sitting down with SEVENSTORE for a midday lunch. Music was always present in Chen’s life. Her Alsatian mother and Taiwanese father were a formidable influence – note her first, still owned and operating Fisher Price deck, (the real deal) – with her father eventually teaching her to make mix tapes in the 1990s. “Growing up in the pre-internet 2.0, you really had to go out your way to seek culture – and more specifically music – and concerts taught me how to direct my curiosity,” she begins. “Dad and I really learnt how to bond over music and pop culture… it became the language we used to overcome the long distance whenever he had to travel back to Asia.” The partnership her adolescence had with music encouraged her “to make friends, and grow into adulthood,” playing on chords of emotion that aided support amid feelings of confused youth. In music, “violence and anger were there when I was a teenager going to hardcore shows, reflective and analytic sounds when I listen to hip-hop…” she says, and subsequently, DJ-ing proved her yellow brick road. Chen is a fervent disciple in the religion of sound. With “Marvin Gaye, Motown and 90s RnB” within her personal idolatry, her music is a melodic amalgamation of soul, disco and house: groove-laden, feet-moving, arms-throwing. Additional orchestral interludes of Gospel offer an energetic potency. “The common denominator to all genres I love is jazz – jazz drumming, jazz chords… that’s what makes me tick, and melt,” she admits. With her finger on the pulse to capture the zeitgeist of nightlife reeling from the depths of the pandemic – albeit a turntable, too – fun is the aim. “It sounds basic but it’s sex, sensuality, and very direct emotional human expressions of life that fuel my music,” she begins, candidly. Her connection to sound is like air to a lung, or a note to the brain – “it is my language… with mixing genres using a wide range of my vocabulary.” Further, it is a creative process she has spent years honing. In 2012, Chen co-founded ‘Girls Girls Girls,’ the answer to a questioning of the male dominated Parisian DJ scene, and eventually ‘Chentertainment’ – see what she did there? – for an intimate, genre defying space “for music nerds.” Since then, a lot’s happened... Copywriting: Meg Parrott Creative: Amy Bajenski Food: Olivia Joan Brown Styling: Amy Bajenski and Olivia Joan Brown Photography: Jay Johnson