Artist Profile: Facets

While the sun came up over the Danube and Jeff Mills played DJ Rolando's "Knights of the Jaguar," a young Boris Knezevic stood in the crowd at EXIT Festival. In interviews, he has called that morning a turning point. It was the moment he realized a Detroit techno track could feel as powerful as a sunrise. Today, Knezevic works as Facets in Brooklyn, where his label, Samo Records, is a reputable name in the city's leftfield underground.

Speaking to DJ Mag in 2024, he traced his musical formation back to EXIT Festival, the student pro-democracy movement that grew into the Petrovaradin gathering the wider world now knows. He has also cited Miss Kittin & The Hacker's "1982" as one of the records that first pulled him toward electronic sound.

Samo Records launched in the summer of 2016 with a party at New York's Good Room, featuring The Horrorist and Pixelife. Its first release was a Pixelife twelve-inch. The label's name comes from the Serbo-Croatian word for "only" or "just," but also nods to Jean-Michel Basquiat's early SAMO© tag in Manhattan. That summer, Knezevic told Good Room his goal was to bring together unexpected collaborators on the same record and see what happened. Over more than twenty releases, the label has gathered artists like Local Suicide, Skelesys, DC Salas, Intergalactic Gary, Anatolian Weapons, Fabrizio Mammarella, Balam, Neud Photo, Zombies in Miami, and Tutto Vetro, which is Curses's alias for his darker, moodier club tracks. In November 2025, the label hit a milestone with SAMO20, Sintex Bortexx's Ask Yourself, which included a Curses remix. SAMO021, F.U.R.O.'s Hooked, came out a month later. Each year, a various-artists compilation, most recently Hexagon in December 2024, lets the roster stretch out even further.

If there is a throughline to Facets' DJ work, it lives in the textures he keeps returning to. Dark synth. New beat. EBM. Electro. Proto-house. Acid. Italo-Disco at the edge, near dawn. His music has been described as "made for the sweaty confines of the dancefloor's fog-filled spaces, ones that flicker with strobes and neon lights, alight from the energy of the crowd." For cultured dancers, it feels like the manifesto that might have been written in the back of an EXIT program.

Before his own productions arrived in earnest, most people first encountered Facets through edits. The Denis & Denis "Ti I Ja" refit nods directly to his Yugoslav inheritance, sitting alongside a sprawl of new beat, italo, proto-house, balearic, and freestyle reworks from his personal Bandcamp page. He has also appeared on the respected Correcciones series on the Mexican label Calypso.

Facets original releases have come out gradually. Impulse was released on Dischi Autunno in October 2022, immediately bringing him attention from the European leftfield press. Raw followed in April 2024. In between, Breakable, released on Optimo Music in November 2023, featured Marija Kovacevic's Serbian vocals on the standout track "Noć." 

Since that attention-grabbing release, Facets has kept up a steady schedule. Sonic Ocean came out on KRI in October 2025. He previewed an upcoming Pinkman EP on his Lot Radio shows throughout spring 2026. His track "Cold Blooded," made with Kasbaraine, appeared on Curses's major Next Wave Acid Punx TROIS compilation for Eskimo Recordings in June, wrapping up an extensive series that started in 2021.

The other half of his Brooklyn life runs through Italomatic, the italo-disco, new wave, freestyle party he co-pilots with Rok One and Andi Harriman of Synthicide. Harriman, who authored the postpunk and goth history Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace, is a natural co-conspirator for the music in question, as it draws from the same Brooklyn lineage as Synthicide, the monthly that Harriman has run at Bossa Nova Civic Club since 2014. Italomatic has settled into a circuit of Brooklyn rooms, including the House of Yes, h0l0, and Good Room, with guest selectors including The Egyptian Lover and Eli Escobar.

His Lot Radio residency runs back to at least February 2017. Since then, it has settled into a two-hour slot on the Brooklyn container station. Over the years, the residency has welcomed guests including Manfredas, Mijo, Thomass Jackson, Harry James, Franz Scala, and others.

Running in parallel is the Samo Records podcast, a mix series on the label's SoundCloud channel that has reached 85 episodes since its launch. Guest selectors have included Belgrade's Chorbika and others from the wider Samo family, with a milestone fiftieth edition devoted entirely to a survey of the label's own catalogue.

Boris Knezevic has spent twenty-plus years making good on that Petrovaradin sunrise. The set he plays at Control Club on July 10 is a return of sorts for Facets, a homecoming to the Eastern European area where his musical compass first calibrated its nordstar. The night belongs to him now.