SNS Interview: Devon Turnbull

We sat down with Devon Turnbull, craftsman of high fidelity audio devices, to discuss his brand Ojas, collaborations with Virgil Abloh, Nom de Guerre, the influential brand he co-founded in the early 2000s and beyond.

SNS: When did you start building speakers?

Devon: I’ve always been a tinkerer. I was probably in middle school when I started putting together sound systems with salvaged equipment. In high school I was the guy putting together the PA system at the party. In college as an audio engineering student I worked in and built recording studios. But I became really interested in high Fidelity in the early to mid to thousands.

As an audio builder I actually started at the other end of the signal chain: turntables. I spent a lot of time studying the classic components and how to get the most out of them. I still prefer turntables built from classic broadcast components rather than the contemporary high-end belt driven turntables.

By the mid 2000’s I had a personal goal of building every component in the signal chain of my home system, which of course included speakers.

At the time I was doing Nom de Guerre, and the projects I was doing in fashion that had started as passion projects then evolved into stressful businesses. And I love this too much and wanted to keep it as something I do for myself, but it didn’t really last that long.

Alex Calderwood who is a close friend and supporter of mine through the years– he’s one of the founders of the Ace Hotels and supported me from a very young age. He came to me for my first audio commission; this broadcast turntable for the Ace Hotel in New York when it opened. I think it was like 2008. By then my whole system was self built.

Since you brought up Nom de Guerre, what were your favorite collaborations with them?

Definitely Buzz Rickson’s is one of my favorites to this day. Buzz Rickson’s is a Japanese military garment reconstruction brand --really incredible, obsessive reproduction of WWII period militaria. I discovered Buzz Rickson's when the William Gibson book, pattern recognition, came out. After reading the book I became obsessed with their level of detail. They buy vintage blooms to make period-correct fabric, molds to recreate vintage Talon zippers… So I asked my friend Motoi who ran our Tokyo studio if you could track them down and get a collaboration in the works. That's really my favorite kind of project: when I become obsessed with something, track it down to the source and can convince them to work with me.

What year was this?

2003? We probably started the project in 2002, opened in 2003, and operated until 2010. I had an archive of some things because I designed all the print materials, all the invites and look books and stuff like that, so I have stashes of those things but there’s really no archive of clothing unfortunately. All we have is some pictures but there are almost no pictures of the store because it was sort of pre-internet. Now if you need a picture of anywhere you can just Google it and a random picture comes up because a hundred people just visited it, or any one person, there’s just pictures of them everywhere.

So there aren’t many pictures of Nom de Guerre out there?

Dude, I just did that interview with The Brilliance and they were asking for photos of stuff and it was the first time I really dove in and was trying to find pictures to put on the record. Even hitting up Isa and Wil, pretty much the best pictures we could find was through a Google image search and there were just a handful.

That sucks!

Yeah. There’s a couple people who are collectors of the clothes but none of us that made the clothes. I think people are more strategic these days about their legacy. You should also have a pretty solid archive if you’re making clothes but none of us did that.

(We went to Devon’s basement where he has some old bins of sneakers and clothing from this era) I’m not a master sneaker collector but it’s nice to just go back and look at these things. Nom de Guerre was a sneaker store in a sense. Here’s this pair of Red Wing x Nom de Guerre collabs. We worked for a long time on these. We had this whole deal where we were gonna have this lasered logo on the upper, and Red Wing sent them to this laser etching place in the midwest and within a day of us putting them out, it was no one’s fault, but David Z that was right upstairs from us did this exclusive collab that’s almost exactly the same as this. But they didn’t have any branding on it.

Was it the same color?

Almost. It wasn’t suede, but it was gray. It was very, very similar. In photos I think it looked like we took their boot and imprinted our logo on it. That shit happens all the time in fashion. I think it’s obviously just a coincidence but then they flipped out and said, “You guys aren’t allowed to do that! You aren’t allowed to put your logo there!”

David Z flipped out?

Well, probably David Z flipped out, but then Red Wing flipped out.

Were they still being sold?

Yeah we sold however many we had.

But they didn’t stop the project?

They didn’t make us stop selling them but we only made like two-dozen of them. The whole world of menswear streetwear was so tiny then compared to now. We stopped doing Nom de Guerre right at the wrong time if you wanna talk about business.

You guys don’t want to start it up again?

That’s a whole can of worms we don’t need to get into. It’s a boring story but basically no. That brand was a special collaboration among a bunch of people and without the full desire from everyone it wouldn’t be the same.

You were talking about Ojas. You started that company when you were what, nineteen?

Ojas was just a name I used since I was in High School for like if I was DJing. We had a little crew we called Ojas for a while. I guess when I first started making graphics and putting them on clothes it was just the first thing I thought of because I didn’t really have a name, it was just a name I had been using. I also wrote Ojas when I was younger. It was kind of my graffiti name. Everything I’ve done creatively I just used it as a pen name or pseudonym so when I started making audio stuff I signed it as Ojas and now that’s kind of getting resurrected as this signature brand of audio components and whatever this whole thing is. Whether it’s artwork or selling products. Everything I’m making is still like an artist’s edition of something because I’m not mass manufacturing anything outside of my studio. I still just consider it to be an extension of this one body of creative work from writing my name on the street to making clothes to making this audio work.

__It’s all one-of-a-kind items. __

Yeah.

I recently saw that you were collaborating with Virgil Abloh on the speakers. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

For sure. I met Virgil shortly after we stopped doing Nom de Guerre. I should also preface that toward the end of doing Nom de Guerre and when we stopped, most of us were super burnt out. Wil was still in footwear, but Isa and I just fully checked out. Neither of us was following streetwear or menswear, so that was around the same time Virgil was establishing himself. I knew Heron (Preston) since he was probably still in High School. We had a close mutual friend that worked at Nom de Guerre. I knew about BEEN TRILL but only because it was one of the homie’s things, but I wasn’t up on it. Virgil obviously started becoming pretty well known at that time and he would tag me every once in a while on his Instagram as an early influence of his, or he posted a picture of the mural I painted on the outside of the Nom de Guerre store and cited me as an early influence. But I wasn’t following fashion closely enough to familiarize myself with his work or become the massive fan I am now.

He got my phone number from somebody and just cold called me one day and just wanted to catch up and see what I was up to, and to explore creative common grounds. At the time I told him I was on a fashion hiatus and that this audio work is really what I am into right now. We quickly discovered that we also had a shared passion for audio equipment and music, so we talked about a lot of projects for a number of years before we actually did anything together, but we just became friends. Then he came over here (to my home studio) several years ago, and I had this one pair of speakers downstairs and he thought they were amazing. He said “I’d really just like to buy this pair of speakers from you.” And I said this one pair is really special. What a dick right?! I said this one pair is really special, I have a lot of sweat in these things. I’d love to make something for you but I can’t sell you these. So I made him a pair for his home. A much smaller pair of speakers, and he got really excited about supporting this work. This is a long time ago, early Off-White days. He said I wanna support this project of yours as much as possible and collaborate in some way. He works really quickly and this work takes a really long time to produce. There are a lot of projects I couldn’t get with. Like he’d have some event he was doing and wanted to commission a big audio system and I’d just say there’s no way I can do this in that time.

So during this time while I was on hiatus, my wife and I became really obsessed with vehicle-based long term, long distance, travel. It's a world that's commonly known as overlanding now. We drove down to the bottom of Mexico, up and down the Pacific coast just surfing, and Virgil would call me to see if we could just collab on some graphics. I’d say, “Dude I’m in Baja! I’m in Mexico! I don’t even have my laptop with me! I barely have enough electricity to talk to you on the phone! I’d love to but…” At the time I still didn’t recognize how significant his work was, but by then I already really really wanted to work together--just on a personal level. He’s just one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and I think in large part that’s one of the secrets to his success. Anyone that comes into contact with him and works with him it’s like a contagious thing that everyone in the crew is just so sweet and generous and open.

When Virgil commissioned the speakers for the Figures of Speech show I was so honored. The first time you see your name on a wall plaque in a museum is so surreal! I decided that I wanted to include the original speakers that he’d seen at my home and, like I said, were extremely personal to me. So instead of making him speakers on commission we did an art trade. The whole thing was an extreme honor and a highlight of my career… life? Man for so many reasons I feel eternally indebted to V.

We’ve also done a bunch of graphics together. Mostly stuff that references what I did with Nom de Guerre, particularly that typography with leaves and branches. I did a Louis Vuitton treatment like that. In his first collection of Louis Vuitton there’s a whole bunch of t-shirts with the type that I did. Before that I did the same style of typography with his first women’s Off-White collection. That was the first time I’d done anything in fashion for like six or seven years. Now it feels like we’re always playing with a few ideas.

When I started doing the kit project, he hit me up and wanted to sell the kits on Canary Yellow. He said that’s what Canary Yellow is basically for, to showcase the art stuff he’s doing and showcase his friends that aren’t designers, creative people or artists they want to showcase. So they used that as a home for the kits and that turned into having this Ojas page on Canary Yellow, which is amazing.

How do the kits work?

When you order the kit you get everything you need to fully build the speakers with almost no tools. I came up with the idea because it was early days of quarantine and I thought how can we make anything right now with just one person in the shop? Even a small speaker, to fully build the cabinet, to paint the cabinet, there’s a lot of hands involved in the process. But making the parts for it, especially now that we have CNC technology it’s become fairly robotic. My head cabinet-maker who I collaborate with on a lot of this stuff, he’s made all these kits basically by himself. You just take a sheet of plywood and load it onto the CNC machine, the CNC machine comes and cuts out all the parts, pushes them out and you organize them. Then we package with all of the components and hardware. All the insulation is pre-cut to size, you have a certain count of all the hardware you need, so you can build it at home with nothing more than a screwdriver handle. We use this joinery system by a Swiss company called Lamello so you don’t even need clamps. The whole cabinet is glued up like a normal speaker cabinet I’d make. But instead of having to do the whole glue up at once like normal where you’d have to use a dozen clamps while the glue sets, inside of the cabinet you use screws that draw it in and give you joining strength without clamps. I would guess it takes most people like two days. Because you spend a couple of hours just getting into it, like getting yourself set up and making sure you’ve got all the parts and that you’ve got everything, and at first people usually get really timid and go slowly and it takes them another hour or two to put the cabinet together. They finish it and then need a break. Then they come back to it the next day and finish it in like twenty minutes to build the second one. Some people who are pro and work in audio, like I have one customer who’s an engineer and is a professional installer, sound engineer kind of dude, and he hit me up and said, “Oh I’m finally gonna get to work on my kit today. I’m just opening the boxes now.” Like two hours later he had a video of him listening to music. Granted he’s pro and can do it efficiently, I’ve had quite a few customers who’ve opened the box and then that day are listening to music.

__So it comes with everything, the wiring and the drivers… __

Yeah, I can show you the speaker. It comes pre-cut, pre-drilled, you don’t really need anything but it’s much easier if you have an electric drill because it’s just faster, but normally even if you’re gonna build a kit speaker you need a little bit of a home shop. Most city dwellers don’t have a little zone set up with a bunch of clamps, glue, sandpaper, and a drill. Most traditional speaker kits you have to cut the wood yourself, like you’ll get the plans and stuff. Or the wood’s cut but you still have to drill holes and do a lot of joinery stuff like that. Literally I did the demo video right here on that stool.

It’s an 8” coaxial speaker?

Yeah, it’s an 8” coaxial unit but the cabinet is like 14” wide, 16 ½ ” tall, and 12 ½” deep. So it fits on a bookshelf.

How much do these go for?

$1,950 for the whole kit. The drivers, the whole kit with all the plywood, everything.

I remember when quarantine first started I saw you’d posted pictures of it.

When I first thought of it I was sitting on the stoop feeling pretty defeated by Covid and thought what am I gonna do with myself? I thought one thing I could do was explore that DIY option because it doesn’t take a lot of people to make one of those things. You could safely make it by yourself, or a few people working by themselves in their own spaces. So I called up a couple of the distributors I work with that I’d need to get the parts from and they were like oh yeah I have plenty, I have twenty of those things! I thought well maybe no one would do this, or maybe five or ten people would wanna do this. My original idea was that there’d be five or ten people and we’d do a Zoom virtual workshop. I did a post about it and asked if anyone wanted to build a speaker and this is how much it’d cost. And I’ve never had a response to anything like that. I had like three hundred and fifty people just on the post who were like, “That’s a great idea and I’d love to do that!” Then I was, well I’m definitely gonna need more than ten kits. It’s been wild! The first round we did really quietly because I knew it’d sell out right away and we haven’t done a whole lot to promote it. The first time was word of mouth and the second one Virgil did a couple posts one morning, but there hasn’t been much marketing. It’s pretty much just people building their kits and I’ll re-post their pictures. It’s been amazing. I’m also very lucky to have some pretty creative people as friends. Every few days someone does a different paint job or sets it up differently, and I’m just like, “Damn that’s amazing!”

It comes in gray?

No, it comes in unfinished plywood. It’s on you to make it look however you want it to look.

So everyone just paints it the color they want?

Yeah. That hammer gray color on the speakers upstairs, I’m producing a bunch of them to look like that, but people do all kinds of stuff. People stain them and paint them. I know Heron’s (Preston) gonna try and do a pair upholstered. I have a friend who has a wallpaper brand and he wallpapered them. That customization aspect is a huge part of the concept.

That’s amazing!

I don’t think I’d have done the project if it weren’t for Covid, so I can’t say I think the project could be better, but I also think it’d be really fun to have days where we’re set up and people just come in, listen to them, and just do a whole workshop with people. Virgil and Heron do a lot of stuff like that with clothing and sneakers, like workshops where kids come in and draw on sneakers, but I’d love to make that culture more of a thing. We just got this workspace a couple weeks ago and it’s working pretty well for now but we’re gonna push this wall about seven feet that way and it’ll get considerably larger and then I’m gonna do a bunch of sound abatement stuff, paint it, hopefully replace some of these windows, paint the floor, and put an insane sound room like the one in the top floor of my house. It’ll be a workspace primarily but also kind of a hangout spot and crazy sound room.

Let’s talk about the Public Record speakers.

I feel so lucky to be partnered with Public Records. I didn’t have an existing relationship with anybody at Public Records when they came to me with the concept but I could tell these guys were really serious about what they were doing and really passionate about music. So they came over and listened to some of my hi-fi work and were really impressed by it and asked if I wanted to do a venue scale version, and I said absolutely, it sounds super exciting without any hesitation because, like I’ve said before, what I do is mostly taking very high quality professional equipment and figure out how to refine it so that it sounds good in a hi-fi environment, but most of the components I work with were designed to do that in the first place. It wasn’t something I was super nervous about because I was excited to bring the hi-fi concept to a venue type space. I think it’s also worth noting that I don’t come from live sound, or even you know like a lot of people into classic disco type sound systems or the lineage of Jamaican type sound systems, and if they see my work they sort of assume that I do as well because there’s a lot visually and functionally in common with those things, but what I specifically have always been interested in is hi-fi, like jazz, folk systems from Asia- really natural sounding systems. The shortcomings of those systems being like very deep bass. So systems like Public Records or even the installs I do in Supreme stores forced me into what’s been a really critical thing for me, which is learning about how to properly integrate subwoofers into these really musical, mid range (frequency) driven sound systems that have the obvious shortcoming of no sub-bass. Now you can do that poorly, or you can take advantage of modern subwoofer technology that does it really well. So as opposed to trying to augment a sound system to do sub-bass, I instead supplement it by adding additional drivers and cabinets as opposed to trying to get more bass out of the very beautiful mid-range focused designs. I choose to take something that has been designed for decades to play natural instrumentation and vocals really well and then supplement it with properly integrated subs and really that’s the kind of key component so that you can get the best of both worlds. You can have this special, musical, dynamic mid-range. I think people immediately identify that the musical part of it sounds different than anything they’re used to. It’s not painful to listen to, it sounds really natural, and musical. But then you can also play modern electronic music that has a lot of sub-bass material and you can feel it the way people expect to in a modern venue environment.

So you did Public Records and you did the Supreme store. Are there any other places in the city?

Saturdays, I’ve worked with them for a really long time. They were one of my early commissioners. I’ve built speaker systems for all their stores in Japan and I’ve recently installed some stuff but unfortunately no one’s really seen it because they reopened the Crosby store just before Covid shut everything down. I built some stuff for some cafes early on but I don’t think any of that stuff is accessible or even there anymore. It was quite a long time ago. The Turntable at the Ace Hotel, but Public stuff is most of it.

So Public Records is one of your biggest projects in New York?

Public Records is my biggest project period. Those subs that I showed you are my last component to having this building block system so that I can produce modular components that can build systems to that scale. I have a couple of clients but they haven’t been installed yet. Hopefully I build a bunch more systems to that scale but for now Public Records is the only one that’s that big.

How did the Supreme store come about?

My relationship with Supreme has been more transformative than most people realize. There’s the obvious marketing value, but James (Jebbia) also introduced me to Jason Ojeda, who has been an absolutely critical partner on all of my pro installs ever since.

Supreme asked me to come talk about sound systems. I had a couple of meetings with James and he was really excited about the work and asked if I wanted to build something for the Brooklyn store, which was about to open. I was like absolutely, the only thing is I know that you guys need a really professional level of service and install, and at the time at least to be totally honest that’s not really what I do. Building an installed sound system like that is a big job and my primary field of interest is two-channel home hi-fi. So I told him I definitely want to do this but we need a third party. We need someone to take what I do and make it work in an environment like the Supreme store. And James said, “Cool I think we can find that person.” Someone had recommended Global Sound Systems by Jason Ojeda, and James said why don’t you have a chat with this guy? He might be that third party that’s kind of that fit between a kind of commercial environment and what you do. So I started this really close working relationship with this Jason Ojeda and he helped build Public Records with me. He’s a really good partner for me. Whenever I do a system with Jason I’m a hundred percent confident that the install is gonna go well, we’re going to nail the tuning and the system is gonna sound amazing.

Interview by Cody Simons Photos by David Jacobson