When Sascha Deng and Wesley Park graduated from Northwestern in 2022, they’d already started work on the debut album by their shoegaze band, Sunshy. They finally released I Don’t Care What Comes Next last month, and it marks them out as one of the most compelling bands of the ongoing shoegaze resurgence. Sunshy’s concise, direct songs combine intimate vocal duets, shimmering blankets of guitar, and aggressively syncopated drumming. Their colossal riffs make expert use of one of the genre’s best tricks: they pick the perfect moment to explode into the stratosphere.
“I’ve always liked noisy guitar music,” Park says. “I’ve never really gotten the chance to do [it] before Sunshy.” He’s from Orange County, and he started recording in his bedroom as a high school student, making indie pop under the name Wes Park. Deng grew up in Shanghai and Massachusetts, and she played in a band in high school too. The two of them met at Northwestern’s radio station, WNUR. “We would record live bands and play them on air,” Deng says.
“When we first met, we found out that we had the same pedal, which is this Keeley pedal,” Park says. “It’s the My Bloody Valentine ‘Loomer’ pedal, and we bonded over that.” Deng started playing guitar on Park’s solo material, and about a year before graduation they began working on I Don’t Care What Comes Next.
“We actually worked separately,” Deng says. Each would write most of a song, then show it to the other to add finishing touches. After graduation, this parallel process was often a necessity: Park was looking for a job, shuttling back and forth between Chicago and California. When he settled in Chicago in spring 2023, he set about booking gigs for the band—and recruiting musicians to back up him and Deng onstage. Sunshy brought aboard college friend Gwen Giedeman on bass, and Park met Blinker drummer John Golden at an Empty Bottle show. The band debuted as a four-piece at Cole’s in June 2023.
Sunshy got a boost from local shoegaze group Precocious Neophyte after Park learned about them on Reddit and reached out. (Bandleader Jeehye Ham hadn’t yet moved away.) “It’s rare to see other Asian alternative-rock artists in Chicago, let alone a Korean shoegaze act—and they’re really good too,” Park says. “I was going crazy and DMing them. We finally met last year. We’ve been really good friends, and they took us out on our first out-of-town date in Milwaukee.”
“They’re so imaginative,” Deng says. “Wesley and I took a lot of inspiration from their songwriting too, when we were writing the newer songs on the album.”
Park says he spent at least a year obsessively mixing I Don’t Care What Comes Next to achieve the sound he heard in his head. To help Sunshy pull off the same effect in concert, the group recently added a new member: Jordan Zamansky, who plays synth, sampler, and tambourine. “Having that synth really made our sound feel so full when we’re performing live,” Deng says. “That’s [been] the missing piece in our live performance for a while.” Sunshy open a show at Cole’s with Zastava, Harvey Waters, and Ira Glass on Friday, November 8; tickets are $13, and the show starts at 10 PM.
Sunshy recorded their debut at the home studio of founders Sascha Deng and Wesley Park.
On Saturday, November 9, the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Union Hall (1340 W. Washington) hosts the 20th and final CHIRP Record Fair & Other Delights. CHIRP Radio founder and general manager Shawn Campbell promises the station will continue to host record-related events, just not a big annual fair that gathers dozens of vendors from around the midwest. This is due in part to shifts in the record-buying landscape. “There weren’t many record fairs in 2003—vinyl collecting was still kind of a niche thing,” Campbell says. “In the years since, a whole bunch of record fairs have sprung up across the city, and they tend to be smaller and a little different than ours.”
CHIRP Record Fair & Other Delights has always been a fundraiser for its namesake station. Customers pay a small entrance fee ($7, or $20 for early admission), and vendors pay $100 for a table. “Some of these new record fairs, they don’t charge admission,” Campbell says. “The dealer fees, if they charge any at all, are probably smaller. At the same time, it’s also gotten harder for this to be successful as a fundraiser. So we decided that 20 years was the right time; we’re leaving the city in good hands, with plenty of record fairs.”
The “Other Delights” portion of the fair includes surprise DJ sets and live performances (nobody’s been announced yet). This year, local musicians—including Ariel Zetina, Pinksqueeze, Serengeti, and Desert Liminal—will attend to sell their own merch. At the hour the fair begins, Campbell is usually hosting a show on CHIRP, so she tends to get to Plumbers Hall when it’s already bustling. “When I walk in, I always say, ‘It feels like Brigadoon.’ It feels like it just rises up from the mists,” she says. “And when it’s done, it just sinks back down. And the next year it’s back. So it’s weird—it won’t be rising from the mists again in 2025.”
Early admission to CHIRP Record Fair & Other Delights begins at 9 AM, and general admission starts at 10:30 AM; the event ends at 5 PM.
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