Five songs in five days: the rule 545 never once kept

The group’s name is a sum. Five songs, four turntables, five days.

545 are D-Styles, Excess, Mike Boo and Pryvet Peepsho, four DJs who meet in a room, stay five days and come out with a record. The rule says five tracks.

Across five records it never worked out that way. The label pages count eight, thirteen, seven, ten and twelve. The last one is called EPILOGUE, it came out in July 2026 on Perpetual Stew, of Gresham, Oregon, and it closes the run.

Listen as you read

The room, the first time

The first album was written and recorded between 24 and 28 February 2019, in Las Vegas. Five days exactly, as agreed. Eight tracks came out of it.

The credits list who brought what, and they are a sharper portrait of the group than any description. D-Styles turns up with a Pioneer S9 mixer and a Vestax PDX 3000 turntable. Excess with a Traktor Kontrol Z2, an F1 and a Stanton Str8 150.

Mike Boo puts a Vestax Controller One on the table. Pryvet Peepsho a Rane TTM-57 and another Stanton. Mixed by Excess, mastered by Michal Eprom Baj.

Bangkok, and the count goes up

In October of the same year the group moved to Thailand. They recorded between 21 and 28 October 2019, in two places: a rented apartment and Tha Beatlounge.

The record is called Khruang Phrung! and came out at the end of 2020. Thirteen tracks, with calligraphy by Santi Rupa in the credits. What survives of the rule is the method, not the number.

The credits say only this: who wrote and produced it, where and when. One place, one week, four people and their turntables.

When there was no room

545 WFH came out in 2021, and the initials say it: work from home. It is the only record where the four are not in the same place.

The credits list them one by one, each with his own city: D-Styles in Las Vegas, Excess in Levittown, New York, Mike Boo in San Francisco, Pryvet Peepsho somewhere he calls Buki’s Cave, in California.

Machines appear that the other gear lists do not carry: a Roland SP-555 sampler, two loop stations, a Realistic reverb unit. Seven tracks.

It is the record that shows what the deal really was. The five days can be posted; the room cannot.

Thirty songs in Hawaii

At the end of October 2021 they flew to Oahu and shut themselves in a rehearsal studio for five days, the West One in Kaka’ako. From the first to the fifth of November.

The record is called 545 808, after the Hawaii area code, and came out in June 2022 with ten tracks. On the label page the group says how many they had recorded.

In the beginning our goal was to simply make 5 songs that we were all happy with. However, we tend to record more than 5 songs. For this project in Hawaii we actually recorded 30 songs.

Thirty in five days, and ten kept because they belonged together. The constraint was not there to cap the output: it was there to close it inside a date.

San Diego, and two years in a drawer

EPILOGUE was recorded in February 2024 at Penguin Studios in San Diego. It came out in July 2026, twenty-nine months later, mixed and mastered by Johnny Morgan.

Twelve tracks, and the twelfth is labelled for what it is: a bonus that is not on the vinyl. Artwork and obi strip are by Nadeneco.

On the album page the four write that this is their final transmission as 545, their fifth LP and the closing scene of their sonic story. The goodbye is not in a press release: it is a note of a few lines on the album page.

Bandcamp Daily, writing it up, describes a blend of slinky hypnotic drum breaks, rhythmic cuts and atmospheric samples. It points to spacey sci-fi synths on “Abnormal Heights”, a Tropicália lilt on “Honey Game”, buzzsaw bass on “Luke’s Broken Amp”.

Where this way of working comes from

The method does not begin in 2019. The four come out of the years when scratch music stopped being a contest and started being composition.

In 2002 at the Knitting Factory a scratch album was played live by a turntable ensemble: D-Styles’ Phantazmagorea, and according to Gray Area it was the first time that had happened.

The same year brought Scetchbook, which Mike Boo made with Ricci Rucker. In 2003 that idea went on the road across the West Coast, as the Bastard Language Tour.

In 2005 Mike Boo released Dunhill Drone Committee on Los Angeles label Alpha Pup, mixed and mastered by Daddy Kev. It is built entirely on vinyl and turntables, with minimal software involved: every drum hit and every texture is scratched off records.

545 are the continuation of that line. Not a supergroup of battle DJs, but four people using the turntable the way an instrument gets used, which is to say for writing.

Never live, until November 2025

One detail says a great deal about how this group holds together. For years 545 had never played live.

The first time was 15 November 2025, in San Francisco, at a Gray Area night. More than six years after the first record, with four albums out and the fifth in the works.

The same evening marked the twentieth anniversary of Dunhill Drone Committee, pressed on vinyl for the first time. The event page explains why the occasions have been so rare: the four live in different time zones.

One city is left without a record: among the session locations Gray Area lists Abu Dhabi, which appears in the credits of none of the five albums.

What remains is the deal. Five days are not enough to polish, and they are enough to finish.