sunnbrella

Winners of the 2024 Croradiowave Czeching Showcase! Congratulations!!! About the name of his project, Sunnbrella reveals, "I was at a festival in Prague with my Czech friends and I couldn’t remember what the English word for 'parasol' was, so I asked one of my friends in Czech and he replied 'I don’t know, sunbrella?' in English. I thought it would be a funny name for a band. I added the second N when I found out that there’s a parasol company called Sunbrella and they took all the social media handles already." tinyurl.com

Prague-born, London-based artist and producer David Zbirka works under the moniker Sunnbrella. Zbirka shares, "I was born in Prague to a Czech mother and Slovak/English father. My dad was a musician and so I was surrounded by music all my life. I started playing in bands when I was 11 or 12 and never stopped. Around the same time, I also switched from a Czech school to an international school so my curriculum was all in English for the rest of my school years. I moved to London as soon as I graduated to study film and pursue music and I’ve been here ever since, freelancing as a videographer/editor/director and making music as much as possible." My earliest musical memories are of The Beatles as my dad was a massive fan and their music continues to have an impact on me to this day. In my early teens I got into Blink 182 and started playing in Pop Punk bands. This led me to a lot of other punk and punk-adjacent bands and through those I eventually discovered 90s emo like Sunny Day Real Estate and Mineral. That lead me to Fugazi and other post-hardcore artists and when I moved to London, I was deep into this 90s alternative phase, so I inevitably discovered My Bloody Valentine and fell in love with shoegaze and dream pop. "A few years later I started listening to more electronic music and got into stuff like Moby or The Chemical Brothers and I started trying to incorporate that into my music. That pretty much brings us up to date. There are a lot of other important bands and artists that I could mention who I love and consider to be an influence like The Cure or Slowdive, but I could go on about that endlessly." tinyurl.com