Amid the four-on-the-floor pulse of San Diego’s Proper NYE festival, a small dance floor moves to a different signature beat. Tucked away from the stadium event’s techy main offerings, a rain-soaked balcony on the concourse rumbles to life with bassline-led garage and futuristic breaks.
Perched backstage at around 6PM, Player Dave watches dancers trickle in and nods along to the sounds of Coffintexts, a DJ he booked for this New Year’s Eve stage takeover from Daisy Chain, his San Diego-based label and events brand. In a few hours, he’ll unleash his own leftfield beats on the hometown crowd. It is cloudy and raining in San Diego, but the future is bright for Daisy Chain. And after years of patient reinvention, PD is exactly where he’s supposed to be.
Born Charlie Sahm, the San Diego producer and DJ emerged in the experimental bass scene a decade ago, known for his swingy bedroom beats, brain-tickling basslines, and collaborative work as a rotating member of Lab Group.
Though he’d stepped into the bass arena, Player Dave’s productions have always played in a different part of the sandbox—leading melodies, danceable percussion, and airy vocal samples over the thunderous low-end of his contemporaries. Entrenched in a scene dominated by heavy music, he envisioned a different ecosystem for his sound. And with Daisy Chain, he’s spent the last four years building it.
Since 2022, the party has connected attentive local audiences with revered and rising artists who work in dance music’s lesser-reached corners. Daisy Chain Recordings, launched in 2024, has released music by over a dozen producers whose disparate signature sounds are linked by their unconventionality. Few new labels have so quickly developed a sound so distinct yet sweepingly diverse.
And after a cosign from San Diego’s top house and techno promoter, FNGRS CRSSD, on the New Year’s Eve takeover, and another from Lightning in a Bottle last May, Daisy Chain and Player Dave are breaking into more of the spaces he’s dreamed of.
“It’s hard to change a first impression, especially with art,” Player Dave tells EDM Maniac in Daisy Chain’s stadium suite-turned-greenroom at Petco Park. “I don’t know any other type of art form where you see somebody’s name next to another one, and you’re like, ‘Oh, they must do the same thing.’”
To pivot from experimental bass beatsmith to clubland genre-weaver, he says, “I turned down a lot.” To recontextualize his sound beyond the bass scene, he trusted his gut and made calculated decisions about the gigs he took and the artists he worked with. If a project didn’t complement his vision, PD was out.
“I want to be intentional about what I’m putting out,” Player Dave explains. “I don’t just want to put out a collab with a homie just because. I want to make sure that we’re both in the same lane, or at least that our names living next to each other makes sense for both of us in the trajectory we’re trying to go.”
An extension of his personal taste and solo direction, Daisy Chain is where those trajectories collide. Since its first show with sumthin sumthin and VCTRE at San Diego’s Music Box in 2022, the party has evolved into a moodboard of sounds that both influence and inform Player Dave’s artistic universe.
Across 25 shows, bookings range from deep-bass architects like Mr. Carmack, Eprom, Truth, and Hamdi to West Coast house legend Justin Martin; bassline beats from Nosaj Thing B2B Jaques Greene, HiTech’s ass-shaking Ghettotech, and jungle revivalist Nia Archives. In February and March, Daisy Chain 26 and 27 will feature D&B legend Alix Perez and Ivy Lab’s final headline set in San Diego.
The idea for Daisy Chain struck Player Dave behind the decks less than a year before its launch. While playing a show with his late friend and collaborator CharlestheFirst in August 2021, he recognized a developing audience that shared his own niche taste. After securing financials and consulting his friends at Atlanta’s DEF, he relied on event knowledge gained as a touring artist to bring his vision to the stage.
Perhaps the most defining skill Player Dave has honed in his second wave—intentionality also guides his work as an artist and label boss. “I have to know what I’m trying to do before putting shit out publicly,” he says. “Because as much as it’s like oh, it’s art, it’s fun, it’s music—and it is—the way the algorithms are and the way music consumerism is right now will fuck you around, and you’ll end up somewhere you were not trying to go.”
From release strategy to cover art, Player Dave’s latest EP, Heartbeat, exemplifies that focus. Featuring collaborations with Elohim, canary yellow, and Allegra Miles across a selection of twinkling broken beats, its four tracks were released individually over five months, then compiled into a complete EP in October.
The rollout maximized playlisting opportunities while allowing the visual identity to unfold organically. The glowing cigarette ember on the cover art for lead single “v@por” grew into the sparks featured in the rest of the EP artwork, inspired by the movie poster for The Brutalist, and achieved by bringing an angle grinder to the photoshoot.
It’s a slice of the DIY ingenuity he’s brought to Daisy Chain Recordings since its launch in 2024. “I really got good at the rollout for my own stuff, the video work, the cover art stuff, and I had some homies that were sending me stuff and asking me questions about the rollout,” Player Dave says of his decision to launch the brand’s growing label arm. “I was like, ‘What if I was just helping them do this?’ It was really natural.”
“Hush,” a spacey garage track by Player Dave and sumthin sumthin, arrived as Daisy Chain’s inaugural release in August 2024. Since then, the signature sound has expanded across 12 releases from Mirror Maze, JOIA, Crosstalk, Next To Blue, Kelbin, canary yellow, Player Dave, and others whose productions scratch the label boss’s Daisy Chain itch.
“For me, it’s these two-steppy, four-on-the-floor but very garage-focused drums, with still really thick bass, and melodies that are stuck in your head forever. That’s kind of my favorite shit,” Player Dave says of the current sonic stamp. “And those songs don’t just come every day. There is really a specific kind of switch in my brain that gets flipped when something will work on Daisy Chain.”
In November, the label’s sound crystallized on Dream Disc, a 13-track compilation album pairing previous signees with label debuts from cult favorites and emergent names like QRTR, RamonPang, Stresshead, Kelbin, and Crosstalk. Built over six months, from track selection to planning a limited CD release, it was Player Dave’s greatest tastemaking exercise yet.
“When you’re running a label, it’s like, ‘I can pick anything I want.’ There are amazing artists who are unheard of all over the world, making insane shit that, if I reached out to them, would probably be down to release on the label,” Player Dave says. “The world’s your oyster. Any sound you want to sign, you can—so you have to be super intentional about it.”
It took time to develop Daisy Chain’s sound: “It was kind of ‘build the plane while you fly it,” Player Dave recalls. Now, with the brand at cruising altitude at the start of 2026, he says, “There’s definitely some magic there with everything I put out the last year. All of it works. And I can hear the future too now.”
Fans heard that future at Proper, where FNGRS CRSSD, the San Diego promoter behind Proper and CRSSD Festival, invited Player Dave to book the Terrace with artists from Daisy Chain’s current guard: LA producer Next To Blue, Miami club staple Coffintexts, a B2B of blips and basslines from Villager and canary yellow, and PD’s own resonant rhythms. Canadian veteran Jaques Greene, whose deep garage beats FNGRS CRSSD had already tee’d up for an appearance, was a perfect closer.
“We started talking really gradually, had wanted to do something together, and it never really made sense. They last-minute hit me up to do this, and I immediately jumped on it,” Player Dave says of the NYE takeover.
Competition can be fierce among local promoters working in similar spaces, but a growing professional relationship with the biggest fish in the pond gives both Daisy Chain and Player Dave room to grow. “I think one cool part about being friends and collaborating with people as influential as the talent buyers at CRSSD is that we’ve had in-depth conversations about what I want to do with Player Dave, and they see the vision,” he says.
Sure enough, after handing off to Greene on NYE, Player Dave found himself passing the baton to possibly his most revered stylistic predecessor, Four Tet, on New Year’s Day. “If I could pick one person that I want to open for the most, it’s probably him,” Player Dave says.
“That’s not an opportunity I get a lot of the time, to fully explain to a talent buyer at a festival what I’m trying to do,” he continues. “To be in a position where I’m friendly with people who are booking somebody like Four Tet—they get to hear me out, hear me play, and make the decision for themselves, like, ‘Yo, we think that kid fits there, just like he says he does’—I’m grateful, and it means a lot.”
The feeling was similar last May at Lightning in a Bottle, where Player Dave, returning to the California festival that shaped his relationship with electronic music as a teenager, headlined a Daisy Chain showcase with additional sets from Villager and canary yellow. His tight-knit LIB community showed out for what he says was “the most impactful moment” of his 2025.
Each set was captured with multi-cam video and high-def audio and uploaded to YouTube, amplifying Daisy Chain’s reach far beyond the festival. “It was just an investment we were willing to take as a label,” Player Dave says. “Thursday night of LIB, there’s not too much going on, so we knew most of the attendees were going to be there.”
“It made me feel like what I’m doing is working, same as with the CRSSD cosign,” Player Dave says. “All these things are shaping me, trusting the process.” He continues: “Although it’s taken a long time, when some of the best curators in the country are trusting me with a block of time, it shows me that what I’m doing is hopefully going to be worth it one day and pay off. And it already is paying off.”
All photos courtesy: Player Dave. All photos credit: Jeremy Verone (@jveronephoto).