Nice Music.
001
Sunny Crypt
the duo behind esoteric label Sunny Crypt.
Read
Discogs Soundcloud YouTube
Established in 2023, Sunny Crypt is a record label living in a lullaby, operating from somewhere in Italy. The label is a genre spanning music platform, dedicated both to unearthing forgotten records that need a second chance, and releasing previously unheard music.
Sunny Crypt is run by Gabriele and Paolo, who met in Gabriele’s hometown of Massa in Tuscany. Gabriele is an avid record collector, who occasionally enjoys playing “weird tunes to small dancing crowds,” and spends some of his happiest days working in a record shop called Serendeepity. Driven by a strong curiosity towards a wide range of musical genres from different eras and cultural contexts, he co-curated the Italian Dancefloor Outsiders 1987 - 1994 project for Sound Metaphors' label THANK YOU, a retrospective compilation of under-the-radar leftfield club music.
Paolo grew up on the border between a strip of land that was the cradle for different underground movements in the '90s Italian clubbing landscape. In the not-so-distant past, he wandered through the various DJ booths in his area, sometimes staying as a resident DJ and other times organizing lost parties on happy mountains. In 2023, he co-founded Sunny Crypt with Gabriele, with the aim of proposing his vision of this “strange musical world” and giving a second life to records that hadn’t quite reached their audience upon release. He lives with an adorable cat named Maya in Castelnuovo Magra, and always hopes that a song will sooner or later change someone's life.
We first met at a memorable block party in the town of Massa (Gabriele’s hometown), organized by mutual friends who used to run a bar/community space. We pretty much instantly became friends, as it didn’t take long to find out that we had mutual interest in similar music—especially club-oriented at that time—and a lot more things in common.
The purpose that originally moved us to embrace this discographic journey is the urge to share music that has often flown under the radar when originally released, trying to bring it to a wider audience. It might also be considered an impromptu appendix to our DJing activities—less connected to a specific time and place, but more to an extemporary path, with every different release representing a different chapter.
Maybe one of the most exciting things is that, looking back at two years ago when we were doing the schedule for our first year of releases, we never thought our path would have been the one we actually followed. Some releases were scheduled for 2022 and are still in the making; some were canceled, some postponed, and some came out a year before they were actually scheduled.
We’ve learned the importance of flexibility as a means to always be on the hunt for exciting things to release and to do things in the moment when it just feels right.
We are lucky to work with what we think is the best distro around at the moment—shout out to Sound Metaphors. From day one, they’ve always been super supportive and helped us a lot in transforming our ideas into something tangible and getting the whole thing going.
Running a record label in 2025 is extremely challenging money-wise, but it is still an incredibly rewarding path to follow.
Artwork by Matteo Cerri.
Being very honest, not every release has a charming story about being an exotic find or hearing it somewhere on a special occasion. Most of the time, the whole reissue process starts late at night on the Discogs explore page, with a difficult-to-explain feeling in the gut when first listening. There’s always a mixture of different feelings that come with sliding into someone’s life and asking about a record they made 30-something years ago.
What makes every release special—apart from the music itself—is usually the interaction with the people who originally composed or released the music, getting to know more about it and hearing all the backstories from back then and diving into it. Something unexpected always comes up with these recordings. For example, when we first got in touch with Morten Søndergaard, we met as he moved super close to our hometown in the north of Tuscany, and we’ve become very good friends since then. Even discovering that members of the euro-dance band Scooter were part of the recording team behind Nine Minutes to Cairo was pretty funny.
However, we don’t think we will strictly focus on reissues in the years to come. There’s still plenty of fantastic music from the past that needs to be brought to a wider audience, but we’re feeling more and more the urge and excitement to become a platform for previously unreleased music by up-and-coming musicians, or even helping new acts that are starting from scratch develop their ideas into something real. These days, we’re very excited to be announcing our first previously unreleased record, an LP by Milan-based collective/eight-piece digital folk orchestra UFOBAR.
The whole aesthetic and design of our releases – except for the first one, which was done by Gabriele –are curated by Matteo Cerri. He was introduced to us by a mutual friend, as our main need has always been to have a more spontaneous and free approach to work, and Matteo is a true artist in this craft.
The creative process takes place in close connection between our vision of what we would like to represent for each release and Matteo's creative flair. We could say that a small part of us is present in some of the covers.
For example, the SCR-003 (Nine Minutes To Cairo) cover stems from the idea of representing a sort of spaceship landing in a futuristic, dystopian city, where a traveler observes a galactic ray from the top of a sphinx resting on a pyramid. On the SCR-004 (Mortal - Excerpts from Deco) cover, we have a representation of an ethereal and abstract entity that represents a real universe, with its architecture (on the back) inspired by the cathedrals along the line of San Michele. Meanwhile, on the SCR-005 (Digital Imagination - The Essence of Thought) cover, you can find a visual representation of the genesis of thought relating to imagination – from a pixel to a heterogeneous figure.
Your logo is also very intriguing.
The logo was created by Chicco Aiello, a painter and artist originally from our area. The encounter with him was completely random; we just entered his studio one evening while having a stroll in the center of Sarzana, and we immediately felt he could be the right person to match the aesthetics we wanted to represent with Sunny Crypt, especially since the name itself is an oxymoron.
The logo is nothing more than an ancient and ancestral representation of the figure of the sun, contrasting with the darkness of the stroke and the ambiguity of the figure, which is reminiscent of a kind of small alien. We were fascinated by Chicco's creative process and are still captivated by his aesthetic vision.
And finally, please tell us a little bit about your mix?
This mix aims to showcase a part of the more dancefloor-oriented side of things from our record collections; it is basically a mixture of stuff we might play at a party. We included all-time favourites, forthcoming music from the label, stuff we’re spending days and nights trying to license, upcoming tracks from Vol. 2 of the Italian Dancefloor Outsiders compilation, recent finds, and music that was introduced to us by friends – shout out to Fogo!
Nice Music.
A new mix + interview series delving into the minds behind the labels we love.
Read
Newsletter
META.
Bye, girl. We’re phasing out META and shifting to direct channels. Sign up to our Newsletter for monthly updates by email, or get everything live via Telegram. No spam. No ads. No algorithms. Nice.
Newsletter.
Telegram.
Subscribe