In mid-August, Ploy hosted the first of a new party series at Venue MOT in South London. He kept the lineup under wraps and said he wanted to give the DJs "ample space to stretch out and work up a sweat." Dwayne Parris-Robinson, AKA Parris, one of Ploy's closest friends, needed no encouragement.

"[Ploy] and I are so close, so I knew I would just play whatever I wanted," Parris says about the party. "There's very few places I could play a set like that and just be silly." Opting for a 140 BPM set inspired by the dance floor's recent appetite for fast, bright Copenhagen techno, Parris later threw what little caution remained to the wind, opting for a Hex Hector remix of Melanie C's 2000 trance smash "I Turn To You." "It felt like the right place to do it," he says. "Who doesn't want to sing along to that?"

Parris and I are sitting in the corner of one of his favourite Caribbean food joints, Daphanie's in Peckham, on a sunny October afternoon as he recalls that Mel C moment. "It's so fun when you think, 'This is what I want to give people and I'm psyched,'" he grins at me over a polystyrene container of fried fish, white rice and coleslaw. "'Let's fucking go for it.'"

Three days later, it's Sunday night and we're buying cans of White Claw in twos (mango for him, raspberry for me) as we wait for Charli XCX to come on stage at Lafayette. Like me, Parris is a primo Charli XCX stan, and what makes Charli XCX so special to her fans encapsulates much of what Parris is drawn to in the music he makes and DJs. He wants it to be a bit weird but a bit functional, inaccessible but accessible, taking something familiar and then turning it on its head. Most of all, Parris wants to have fun. "I'm there to have a vibe," he says. "Everyone wants to have a good time, so play some bangers, play something weird, play something fun."

Parris has been releasing music since 2014, and on Resident Advisor, his listings date back to June 2012 (a night at Cable with Zed Bias, Phaeleh and Pinch in the main room). In the years since, he's been on the grind, working away in the background at what he calls his "slow rise," gradually picking up bookings and putting out EPs, earning himself a solid reputation in the UK underground as an astute and dependable DJ.

In December 2020, boosted by the support and encouragement of his friend and collaborator Joe (Call Super), Parris tasked himself with writing and completing an album by June. Now, as the nights draw in and 2021 comes to a close, Parris has released his debut LP, Soaked In Indigo Moonlight, on can you feel the sun, the label he started with Call Super in 2019. "If I'm going to do this, I would rather we do it together," he'd said to Call Super when they first discussed the idea. To me he simply says, "I trust Joe enough."

Parris grew up in Hackney. When he was about 15, he moved to Tottenham, where he stayed until his mid-20s. Working various unpaid (or barely paid) music jobs, he found he wanted to get away from the familial pressures of making a steady income in the traditional job market. "I think it's a bit harder when you live at home," he says, "whereas if you live out, and you're paying your own bills and you don't ask for anything, your parents think you're doing something right."

While he didn't grow up in a particularly musical household, Parris associates hearing rap and pop around the house with staying at his dad's, and R&B and garage with being at his mum's (his parents split when he was young). His mum encouraged him to commit to learning an instrument, but he was "too fidgety" and lacked concentration. "It's ironic really," he laughs. "I got kicked out of tuba and trumpet for not behaving, but eventually ended up back in music." Going to school in East London meant that Parris heard a lot of hip-hop and grime through his peers until one of his friends, who had a fake ID, started going out to drum & bass parties at clubs like Herbal. Since Parris didn't have ID, he couldn't go out raving; he began his education by getting music off his friend's iPod instead.

On his 19th birthday, Parris went to Playaz, fabric's legendary drum & bass night. "Everyone normally ends up at a Playaz rave for their first fabric," he says, "but as I was into other stuff [rather than drum & bass], I started going out to other things here and there. I used to go out a lot by myself."

By making a habit of going to parties alone and hanging out in record stores, Parris was becoming a familiar face. And in those days, being a familiar face could open doors. "That era of music doesn't really exist anymore," he says, "but back then, a lot of people who ended up in music had hung around enough. Someone would think that they may as well give you a job." That much was true for the position Parris landed at now-defunct record store BM Soho, where he'd work sporadic shifts for a few years. Most days he would be downstairs, where the drum & bass, dubstep and grime sections lived.

It was around this time that Parris discovered FWD>>, the weekly party at Plastic People that has since become the stuff of legend. He went every Thursday, waiting for the metal gate on Curtain Road to open and let him downstairs, where he'd stay until close without fail. He recalls opening sets from a young Ben UFO, era-defining sounds from Loefah as he was moving into Swamp 81 territory, and many, many nights of his favourite DJ of all time—Youngsta—blowing his mind.

In 2013, years of being on the same dance floor week after week came to good use when Parris was offered a job at pioneering dubstep label Tempa, which shared a building with Rinse FM. The following year, Tempa put out Parris's first record, a two-track single with WEN. At the time, RA praised the duo for taking tradition and making it sound fresh—a fitting precursor for how Parris grew to experiment with sounds.

Parris was offered a role at Cargo Records some years later, which is where he still works part-time as a label manager. "They quite like me I guess," he laughs, now in his eighth year at the company, "so they've kept me around." It's a balance that has been easy to maintain so far, as he has (just about) enough time to commit to work, making music and playing shows.

Following the Caught / Collide EP with WEN, Cargo's flexibility helped facilitate a series of solo EPs in 2016 and 2017 released on Idle Hands, The Trilogy Tapes, Hemlock and Ancient Monarchy. In this time, Parris's music was regularly commended for its skeletal elements, the quaking sub-bass, and his use of space, aligning with that distinctly-Bristol blueprint of dubstep-meets-techno. But while he recognises that people enjoyed what he was putting out, Parris looks mildly stern for the first time in our conversation as he says: "I don't listen to [my first releases] now because I don't like them at all!" Dubstep and grime are a big part of his musical lineage, he says, but there's an element of discomfort when he's so often associated with those genres. "I'm keen to reiterate this," he adds. "There are people that do those genres really well and know them a lot better than I do."

The mood lifts again when I ask, half in jest, if the reason early Parris records are so spacious is because he didn't know what to put in them. "Honestly, that was pretty much it," he chuckles. "A lot of my early music may not have had kicks or snares because I didn't know how to use them. My music sounded that way kind of by accident, I was learning from scratch."

But practice makes perfect, and in late 2018, Parris released Puro Rosáceae on Idle Hands. With two specific tracks in mind for inspiration (Source Direct's "Complexities" and Photek's "Complex"), he found new confidence in his creative process. "I felt like I had an idea of what I wanted to write, and I achieved it," he explains. "It was one of the first tunes I really liked."

Finding that musical focal point led to a frustrating writer's block that lasted more than a year; the pressure of wanting to recreate something had brought Parris to a standstill. As it transpired, the answer to defeating writer's block was also the answer to many of Parris's qualms and queries—his friendship with Call Super.

By beginning to write records together (2019's CANUFEELTHESUNONYRBACK and 2020's Design Of The Body Sublime) and launching their own label, Call Super helped Parris figure out where he wanted to be musically. "My music sat in two different places," Parris explains, "functional and non-functional. Eventually I realised I wanted to write functional records."

"Functional" is a word Parris uses a lot in our conversation when explaining his intention in music. Functional for him means relatable, dance floor-friendly and fun, but with a little room left for elements that are weird and surprising. For Parris, it's the difference between playing club shows and playing festivals like Meakusma, which defines itself as "celebrating the unclassifiable." "I think what pushed me away from experimental music is that it's way too serious for me," he says. "You want to make people dance. You want people to have a good time. You can play stuff which is a bit weird but still fun."

It's this meeting point between functional and weird that has most informed Soaked In Indigo Moonlight, which came out on November 19th. "You can experiment with ideas but make them in a way which people can listen to and connect to," he says, thinking about how he hopes listeners will react to the record. Soaked In Indigo Moonlight brings together everything Parris has done so far and adds new twists and turns; the space, bass and polyrhythms remain, with added colour in how the time signatures change ("Crimson Kano"), an infectious pop hook ("Skater's World" featuring Eden Samara) or ethereal ambient textures ("Movements" with Carmen Villain).

"I think it sounds like who I am as a person," Parris says. "I guess I've made my own sonic tag over the years." But as much as Soaked In Indigo Moonlight might sound like Parris, it's also shaped by the people around him. "It's about just hanging out with friends and doing day-to-day stuff," he says. The record was mixed by Ploy, who Parris says "mixes a lot of my tunes to help them become the best they can be." "Skater's World" was born from lockdown spent learning to skate with Peach and her partner, and "Laufen In Birkencrocs" is an ode to a time Call Super and Parris were in Berlin, debating whether or not the latter should get a Birkenstock tattoo (despite, Parris says, not actually owning any Birkenstocks at the time).

Looking forward, Parris says that he and Call Super want to use can you feel the sun to help create positive change in dance music. "I don't really speak about these things on record," he says, "but as a Black person, I've been used to being one of the only Black people in the rave for a very long time, and I don't put any expectation on anyone to do anything." Parris describes himself as having a "do it, don't say it" mentality, something he hasn't seen enough since last year, when vital conversations were happening within dance music following the murder of George Floyd. "I know it sounds bleak, but I have no expectation of anyone to change. I have hope, but no expectation. It's down to whether people have the willingness, whether the scene has the willingness, and whether there's an openness that people want to make that change."

It's about learning, and understanding the communities whose space you are entering, Parris continues. Growing up in a working-class household in Hackney in the '90s and '00s, he says, he had few interactions with the LGBTQI+ community. Now, going to raves like Adonis and Chapter 10 with his friends, Parris impresses the importance of offering support to the people around you in a way which feels comfortable to them. "Sadly, a lot of people can't do that," he adds. "But then I think, 'Don't be in spaces if you don't want to understand those spaces.'" Again, he credits his friends with helping him to educate himself. "If [change] happens, good," he says. "If it doesn't, then I'm doing my own thing anyway, and I'll do it with people who I feel understand and respect what I do."

can you feel the sun exists because of Parris and Call Super's understanding and respect for one another. On Saturday, November 20th, the pair assembled a lineup full of friends for their first label party, which they hosted at The Cause. "It was great to put together a lineup with people who have given us a real lift at various points over the last year," they said in a post on social media. A day after the release of Parris's album, he and Call Super were joined by Peach, Ploy, Anz, Will Bankhead, Shanti Celeste, A.G. and more.

The party was a roadblock. At 5 AM the main room was still heaving, sweat dripping from the ceiling and the odd t-shirt waving wildly in the air as Call Super and Shanti Celeste's selections grew increasingly headier. After dropping "SIREN," Shygirl's Happa-produced ode to '90s club classics, Parris finished off his set at 2 AM and spent the rest of the night flitting between rooms, bopping in and out of each DJ booth to say hi and give out hugs, making sure to catch all of his pals in action. As I saw him leaving the club hours later, en route to the next destination with Peach and the rest of the crew in tow, I could think of no better way for him to celebrate his album being out in the world.