David August

David August is a composer, pianist, DJ, and the founder of the record label 99CHANTS. August bridges experimental composition, electronic music, and multidisciplinary art. Trained as a classical pianist, he rose to international acclaim in the early 2010s. In 2018, he founded his label 99chants, creating a platform showcasing boundary-pushing artists, formats, and initiatives. His releases, from the beatless DCXXXIX A.C. (2018) to the post-rock influenced D’Angelo (2018), were the starting point of a continual redefinition of his artistic identity and conceptual explorations. Vīs (2023) marked a turning point, blending philosophy, mysticism, and sonic experimentation into an ambitious multidisciplinary project. With its own alphabet, interactive website (www.vis.earth), and a live show where choreography, scenography, and music complemented each other, Vīs symbolizes August's most ambitious project yet. Expanding on this, Workouts (2024) reconnected August with the dancefloor for the first time since 2020, taking influences from early dubstep, breakbeat, and bass music. While Vīs examined movement from a metaphysical angle, tracking the evolution of life and sound, Workouts makes this abstract idea more physical with a series of studies that search for rhymes between timeless drum patterns and contemporary club forms. Vīs Reinterpretations (2024) invited 13 artists (e.g., Aho Ssan, Marina Herlop, and Flora Yin-Wong) to reimagine its themes of history, transformation, and metaphysics. His genre-defying performance, Vīs Live at the Barbican 2023 (2025), was released in video and audio formats in October 2025 to mark Vīs’s second anniversary. With over 400 performances worldwide, including venues like London’s Roundhouse, Barbican, Berlin's Volksbühne, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, and festivals such as Primavera and Montreux Jazz, August continues to explore the intersections of sound, imagination, and human experience.