Based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, Pastels is the brainchild project of Annie Bui: a producer, beatmaker, and instrumentalist. For much of Bui’s life, music had been a major part of it. Her father had taught her piano at a young age and she spent her school years playing piano and violin. It wasn’t until an excursion to Los Angeles though, as part of a school trip, did she find her in love with music production and had ultimately realized this with her foray in academia. Her studies had ultimately led her to earn a B.M. degree with a concentration in Music Composition. Over the years of her musical journey and a few releases later, Pastels has transitioned from soft acoustic tracks to developing material that ventured outside of her comfort zone; she began exploring different sounds and genres. She dove into common ground with SF-based producer Mr. Hong , eliciting a dual-conceptual work: Cafe a.m., a scenic day-time audio café experience, and Cafe P.M., a instrumental round-robin collaboration that found them as nightlife curators in their own café world. Even outside of collaboration, she was determined to transform her inspirations, emotions and moments in life to portray lived experience thru her music. Pastels’ musical style takes influence from her love of jazz, film scoring, r&b, and hip-hop.
