the sound chalk makes sculpts dance music out of found sound

"I fundamentally believe that all of us live the same life,” says The Sound Chalk Makes. “And when you're living the same life, whatever experience you have is essentially somebody else's experience in a mirror."

We’re sitting tucked away in an undecorated brutalist lounge at Elsewhere, perched on top of the backrest of a concrete couch. This is the fourth and final SCM show in 30 days here in the USA, and Kabir Parekh is unbothered by the menacing feng shui, shooting his portrait photos in the hard-edged environment before sharing a short and sweet moment with his best friend and fellow artist, Seven Blair Angels. Hanging out with the 20-year-old, it wasn't hard to see how his fun-yet-thoughtful music reflects his in-person demeanor.

This past winter, a makeshift snippet of his February single “Manmade Manmaid” made swift rounds on social media. If you’re anything like me, you were drawn not only to the track’s warm, fuzzy synths, but also Parekh’s honest lyrics that so accurately encapsulated how February winter feels. “I hate you in the morning / I'd love you if I was boring / I'd kiss your cheeks if you were nice to me," Parekh sings gently. "But you're just a dream and I never sleep / I'm too awake to like your face.”

When we talked, Parekh told me he sees his music not just as a way to coalesce his own life experiences, but as a vehicle for validating those of his listeners. The Sound Chalk Makes’s music is focused on fleeting moments of youth, everything from missing the bittersweet comfort of home on "FU: ILY," to a lover’s goodbye at an airport on "CSM for Bullshit," and even a song on quitting weed like his 2025 single "Marijuana 2die4)."

“My friend Pato said that my music reminds him of like this feeling we share, and I feel like a lot of young people share, which is like we are young and we're moving around all the time. We're at airports, taking flights, and going places and doing things. We move to study for university; that in itself is a transformative moment," Parekh explains. "Just understanding this feeling of rushing through the world and seeing many people and many things happening at the same time.”

His February 2026 EP Re: captivated a younger online audience amidst an oversaturated indie-tronica wave sweeping the algorithms. On tracks like “Love” and “China Place” Kabir crafts his build-ups and bridges to be just as infectiously danceable as his choruses— giving equal attention to all the facets of his stories. Then "Electronic Eyes" hands off to "Man," which trades rich synths and heavily chopped samples for this gently devastating acoustic-electronic ballad.

Before his final New York show, The Sound Chalk Makes sat down for an interview with The FADER to talk about bringing songs to life from his notes app, using music as a shared experience, as well as the warehouse parties he throws back home in Mumbai.

The FADER: You just dropped the single "FU: ILY", can you tell us the story behind that song? 'cause you've spent the past month in between cities, playing shows in NYC and LA.

the sound chalk makes: I finished it literally like the second day I came here, but I was working on it for a month or two before that. So it's pretty much done by the time I came here. It was recorded entirely in my bedroom in London, and then kind of mixed, and whatever post-recording things happened between London and here. But yeah, finished off the video and everything out here, which has been pretty interesting, 'cause the song, to me, it's very tied to London.

In my head the song is a letter, essentially, to London. It's about the love-hate relationship that I have with that place over the last two years of living there. [...] Generally speaking, London is a great, fun city, and it's given me a lot of opportunities. A lot of things to do, a lot of great people I've met, all my homies. It's a beautiful thing.

At the same time, sometimes it feels like the scene is kind of beating you down. It feels a little bit stagnant and not as forward-thinking as some other major cities. [But] I think the thing is, in any city, you have to create that. You have to break out of that stagnant piece somehow, [and] have the agency to do it. And I'm very happy with me and my friends, and what we've been doing in London, 'cause it feels like we're on the dawn of some new frontier, that even we don't really know what it is yet. But we're grasping, and we're kind of reaching there.

Can you tell me a bit about your life growing up in Mumbai and your introduction to music production?
I grew up in Mumbai. My parents just loved music, played music all the time, took me to a lot of shows when I was a kid. I just loved live music, and the most random people came to Mumbai. Like the most random Irish instrumental, Celtic band, or traditional Indian music, or some random cover band, [even] Jacob Collier. Everybody would come [laughs], to Mumbai when I was a kid. And just watching the diversity of things made me really appreciate a lot of different types of things.

Picking through a big scope of things made it easier to understand what I identify with now. And it's cool 'cause now when I'm making music and listening to it, I see different influences from my mom or from my dad like slowly coming into what I listen to, and therefore what I make.

Can you describe your recording process?
For me personally, the impetus is something that's in my Notes app, something I'm thinking about or have been wanting to write about. From there, it's like building the bones of the composition around that. I have however many samples just saved on my laptop, random shit on my hard drive, that it’s a mix-and-match kind of thing. It's like weaving a strip onto a carpet. You're to weave this pattern, and you're borrowing threads from every single place you can find them.

You know what assemblage is? Assemblage is this form of sculpture where people take found objects – so like, you would take this Red Bull can, and this speaker, and some shit on the road, and literally build a sculpture out of that. And it would represent something bigger than all those things individually because it's about the relative meaning [between those things]. My work is kind of like that. That's how I treat it, like sonic assemblage. I'm borrowing this and that, and taking from like these places that are not necessarily connected, but to me they're connected in the sense that they mean something to me. And when that's on a Logic project, that becomes the carpet that's woven.

The "Manmade Manmaid" reel you made half a year ago kind of blew up. Did you know there was something special about it?
I've been making music since I was 14, so I've gone through every single imaginable phase of, "This is so cool now." And then this is gone. "This is cool now," and then it's gone. When I made "Manmade", I was very sure that this is the most honest I've been in a song. And when I played it for basically anybody else before that reel was out, it was a bit of a learning curve to understand what I was doing. There's sometimes where you open a project and shit is just sounding so good, and there's sometimes that you open a project and you've really put a lot of work into it, and you know how it sounds, but you need to train your ear to that. And that made me feel really good about it because it's like if I can't understand it fully right now, that means that something new has happened. Obviously you never know what a song's going to be, but I just felt very comfortable in what it was and what it meant to me. And I think that's why it was able to resonate with people the way it did, it's because of that base honesty.

Do you find you write best when you have a sense of comfort?
Not necessarily. There's the most comfort for me in trying to be the most myself I can be, and that in itself is an uncomfortable process. To be able to reckon with yourself and be like, "Yeah, I fucked up here, and I did this thing wrong, and I've been feeling this way and treating this person badly, and I've been looking at this part of my life wrong." That's an uncomfortable process in itself, but at least that honesty is vulnerable. At least that honesty is real, you know? And I think there is beauty in that discomfort, and it eventually ends up becoming comfortable. Because you live with it and you experience it fully.

Do you have a memory of the craziest party your crew put on in Mumbai?
The first actual party we threw in 2024 was at one of our friends’ mom's clothing studio, this warehouse in the middle of fucking nowhere in North Mumbai. And you have to be 25 in Mumbai to throw these things, and we were all 18. So we had set out this amount of money for the cops in case they came, and just BYOB and hiding the liquor in random places. There was no AC, there was one shitty bathroom, and everyone was just sweating. [Laughs] And I think my favorite moment— I have these two homies who just got way too excited, and we had a very rinky-dink, DIY audio system just plugged into one socket on the wall, and they kept fucking jumping on the same socket every single time! The audio disconnected like four times the whole show, but it was beautiful because it was during my set, and there's this moment that I distinctly remember when I was performing this one song, and the audio cut out during the chorus, and everybody kept singing. I was, for the first time, like, "Whoa!” Like, “that's insane." There's this video of me, and I'm just dead laughing as it happens, going like, "I cannot believe this."

There's one more from last summer where we heard the cops were in the building at 12:00, literally just as we were about to start the last set. And like 500 people are packed into this tiny-ass hair salon, and we literally cut the audio, and I'm like, "Guys, get the fuck out right now!" And 500 kids just like going down these elevators, puking everywhere. [Laughs] It was just absolutely shattered, but yeah, it was a fun time. It's always a fun time back there.

After the remixes of your EP by artists like ideasforconversations and Elish Constance among others, are you going to hop on any of their tracks?
I'm doing two remixes right now. I'm doing one for Tommy Fleece and then one for Veronica Everheart, which, I'm stoked on both. I love them. And I love my remixes as well. But yeah, I [still] want to remix "No Now" by Alex G. Not even remix, just cover, honestly. Just interpret it in my own way. It's really beautiful.