A series of conversations on music, memory, and movement.
Summer is defined by atmosphere. Heat in the air, sound drifting through space, moments that blur from day into night. An extension of the Sounds of Summer ’26 campaign, this portrait series explores how cultural voices experience sound beyond music, tracing the personal frequencies that shape their season.
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Zaid Seddiqi is the co-founder of Dubai-based Banou Studio, a design practice exploring the intersection of sound, materiality, and regional craft. What began as a personal pursuit has evolved into a wider investigation of how sound can be physically held, shaped, and experienced through custom hi-fi audio systems and listening rooms.
Banou Studio incorporates DesertBoard, a material derived from palm tree byproducts, as a central structural and symbolic element. For Seddiqi, the palm tree is not nostalgia, but an active cultural material that once sustained survival, and now sustains expression, memory, and contemporary identity.
On Banou Studio
There’s a Rumi quote I always think about: ‘As you start to walk the way, the way appears.’ That’s exactly how Banou Studio started. I followed an instinct that made no rational sense at first, and over time it unfolded into something meaningful and magical that I now get to share with the world.
On listening
In a world that constantly demands our attention and fragments it at the same time, listening becomes almost spiritual. It slows you down. It demands you to sit still, feel deeply, and exist fully in the moment.
On sound and memory
For the past two years, I’ve been a regular nuisance at Artem’s Audio Note listening room… A dimly lit room, a TT2 turntable spinning, glowing Conquest tube amplifiers, and nothing else except the music itself. No screens, no distractions, no noise beyond the music itself. That experience changed my understanding of hi-fi audio forever. I realised hi-fi is not about technical graphs, specifications, or over-engineered equipment. At its core, it’s about emotional presence. It’s an undeniable experience that can only truly be felt.
A sound that makes him pause
A kitten meowing that I can hear but can’t see.
A sound that makes him smile
When my fiancé calls me sweet names! I start giggling involuntarily.
On artists he returns to
John Bowtie and Paul Svenson. These two are genuinely a gift to Dubai. They’re the founders of Gate Two and Mmmmmm in Coya. What makes them legendary isn’t just the music. It’s the dedication to storytelling through sound.
If summer were a sound
If I’m in Dubai, summer sounds like my car AC on full blast. That deep mechanical hum fighting against 45-degree heat.
If summer were a shoe
Bottega Veneta’s Palazzo slippers. I love the idea that you can effortlessly slip them off and walk barefoot. That, to me, is central to the feeling of summer. Ease, softness, freedom, and a closer connection to your environment.
If he were a shoe
I’d probably be a Japanese geta. They’re authentic, functional, deeply rooted in tradition, but also mildly annoying. They make noise when they move, they demand you walk a certain way, and they’re definitely not for everyone. There’s also something beautiful to me about things that don’t fully smooth themselves out for comfort or mass appeal.
If he were a genre
Soul. Without question.
Summer in a song
“Love Comes to Everyone” by George Harrison. There’s something incredibly warm and hopeful about this song specifically. It feels sun-faded in the best possible way, gentle, reflective, romantic, but still full of movement and optimism.