Bespoke sound system creators Friendly Pressure and Stone Island are teaming up for Milan Design Week

As he gears up for a Milan Design Week collaboration with Stone Island, Friendly Pressure founder Shivas Howard Brown talks formative sound system experiences and being part of a lineage of Black British music.

In a sun-flooded East London studio, Friendly Pressure founder Shivas Howard Brown pads across a thick cocoa-coloured rug to the record player flanked by two chest-high speakers. He presses a button, the electric-pink vinyl starts to spin, and Baby Rollén & Gallegos’ Along the River fills the room with bright, warm, high-fidelity sound. The punchy breaks come in and Howard Brown cuts the music. “When you hear your song through my shit, you’ll know what you’ve been missing,” he says. “I don’t know how it’ll affect you emotionally, but I bloody hope it does something.”

Friendly Pressure is Howard Brown’s blossoming business, specialising in crafting bespoke loudspeaker systems rooted in London’s diverse music culture. Right now, he’s in the intense final weeks of a build for Milan Design Week 2025, where Stone Island Sound – the legendary Italian luxury brand’s ongoing music initiative – will present Stone Island | Friendly Pressure: Studio One. The immersive sonic experience will reside in Capsule Plaza at Spazio Maiocchi, a hybrid exhibition space, where the venue’s dimensions and design will shape the texture of the sound. Brought to life by the heterogeneous music community surrounding Howard Brown and his loudspeaker studio, its centrepiece is the custom-built high-fidelity Studio One FP-Unity System. It will debut alongside a week of live music sessions, DJ sets and conversations curated by Shelter Studio, of which A Loose Ting – Errol of Touching Bass and Friendly Pressure’s listening space concept – is one part.

Painted in a rich brown textured finish, the stacks reference a 1950s Klangfilm horn and are centred around custom-designed unity horns and subwoofers developed by Bosco Taylor. Together, these merge different outputs into a single source, mimicking a ‘point source’ – the holy grail of audio. These unity horns are the result of years of testing, designed  to conflate different sound frequencies into one source, resulting in precise, emotive audio reproduction. The modular sound system harks back to the golden age of recorded music, treating it as both a sensory and physical experience.

“We’re presenting London’s identity at a time when design and creativity are being pushed out,” Howard Brown says from his spot on the floor, leaning against another speaker, as he explains how the event will encompass both brands’ cultural heritage. “Seeing each respective logo on the flyer should make sense. I’m projecting a Friendly Pressure visual and programming aspect onto it, but at every step, we’re asking, ‘Is it industrial enough? Does it speak the Stone Island language enough?’”

That blend of London culture and sound, delivered through technical excellence, is at the heart of Friendly Pressure and an extension of Howard Brown himself. Growing up in a mixed-race Indian-Jamaican household in north London, he was surrounded by music from day one. His Jamaican father, a singer-songwriter, regularly recorded at the house, so music kit was everywhere, a high-spec hi-fi system was the standard and legends like Jazzie B were uncles. Howard Brown was allowed to touch and explore hardware as soon as he could toddle, leading to a “lifelong obsession with cables” and figuring out how things work. “I’d push in the dustcaps, but my dad would just get them fixed.” 

Howard Brown’s first steps into sound system craft began in his late twenties, with a pair of his dad’s abandoned, blown-out Heybrook speakers. The first step was tracking down – and shelling out for – the specific mid-range PMC drivers, before fixing the circuitry and cleaning up the cabinets. At the start of 2020, the Heybrooks were ready. “I plugged them in and, oh my God. I sat in front of the speakers listening to records all weekend. I’d never had anything in my hands that sounded like that.”

The Heybrooks set something off, and when the pandemic hit, Howard Brown began rethinking. A POC bakery and specialised bike shop were both floated, but in the back of his mind, Friendly Pressure was crystallising. “I wished I could make my own speakers,” he says. “But it’s a coveted space, and I didn’t have any way in, so I started to read, and read, and read.”

To stay afloat, he started flipping vintage speakers on Instagram, driving around the country in his mum’s car to collect them. “I enjoyed hustling again. It was a new identity. I’m supplying the catalyst to the best dinner party, the best vibe,” he says. “And they’re high fidelity, so you don’t piss your neighbours off.”

But the Friendly Pressure niggle persisted. A private audio-visual installation gave Howard Brown the cash to build his prototypes, then things started rolling. The call came for his first pinch-me moment – a commission for the British Library’s Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music exhibition last year. Howard Brown marks this as the moment Friendly Pressure stopped being just a business and became a part of him. “My dad was like, ‘Yes! Come on, son. It’s gonna be huge.’ His reaction was so meaningful; the money didn’t matter any more.”

Remembering the first time he saw his system alongside artefacts from the greats of Black British music – Skin from Skunk Anansie’s jacket, a photo of Jazzie B at the MOBOs, King Tubby’s bass bin – Howard Brown almost tears up. “I’m in the room with my idols and my uncles.” He pauses. “Fuck. I don’t wanna cry.”

With Friendly Pressure’s growth, the team has expanded. From Technical Director Talvinder Bains (currently working upstairs, surrounded by shelves crammed with kit, mystery cardboard boxes, and surfaces covered with cables of every kind and colour) to the specialist carpenter in Somerset and a golden-eared acoustic engineer, each member brings expert, post-disciplinary knowledge. Howard Brown’s pride is palpable. “Everyone’s family. Get them in a room and sparks fly because no one’s institutionalised. No one’s like, ‘This is how it’s supposed to be.’”

While there’s no set sound, Friendly Pressure systems are programmed for versatility, and each system has a unique audio identity. Friendly Pressure is rooted in the hybrid sound of street soul, with every song telling a story. “Is it house? Is it hip-hop? I think that’s a real mixed-race identity that I project into my systems.” But no speaker is perfect for any genre, with Howard Brown referencing legendary systems Jah Shaka and Channel One, each offering different sounds in dub. “The more you listen to your stuff through a system, you tweak it to hit the hardest.”

Instead of seeking perfection, Howard Brown wants Friendly Pressure to be a catalyst for experiencing seminal music moments. He shares a memory of being 12 years old and watching Wookie master Battle in Jazzie B’s Camden studio. “That record lit up the whole of the UK and it’s still played today. That’s what I want to contribute to.”

Friendly Pressure: Studio One at Capsule Plaza is part of that vision. From DJ sets by Victory Lap Radio, a music collective championing UK rap, and artists like John Glacier, Ashbeck, Kwes E and BXKS, bringing the community into non-traditional spaces and transforming them into joyful dancefloors is a form of protest for Howard Brown. “People of colour are always too loud, like, ‘Can you turn that down?’ If I can present these stories in those spaces, maybe people will understand and be less against the culture.”

As talk turns back to the forthcoming Stone Island Sound presentation, Howard Brown describes the painstaking process of fine-tuning each system for a space’s acoustics. Friendly Pressure: Studio One at Capsule Plaza will present these unique challenges. In a few weeks, when Friendly Pressure’s founder steps into the space for the first time, he’ll tweak the sound with the help of reference records and his audio engineer’s finely tuned ear, catching anything that sounds off, down to the most minute vibrations. “Everyone working in speakers has their reference records; you know exactly how it should sound through any system.” Howard Brown’s failsafes are Saint Germain and Kool & the Gang’s Summer Madness. “I know them inside out.” 

With more projects lined up, including a potential club system, Friendly Pressure is flying. Hi-fi shows, however, are a firm no. Howard Brown doesn’t connect with the “purist identity”; those spaces don’t represent him, his culture or his community. “Representation is a massive thing.  I’ve never seen an audiophile who’s a person of colour,” he says, with a hint of an eye roll. “Google it. Like, do I look like an audiophile?” 

People have tried to slap ‘audiophile’ and ‘sound system’ labels onto Friendly Pressure, but it’s steadfastly its own thing. And Howard Brown likes that. “I want it to empower young people. If you don’t see yourself in a space, create that space yourself.”  Try to pin him down on the best way to listen to music, and he shies away. “I’m not here to dictate. That’s pretentious as fuck. Let’s have freedom of expression in front of speakers; that’s the feedback loop.”