Mochakk Calling NYC: a city on the line

One of house music’s most wanted names was coming to New York. The city had to hear the phone ring.

Mochakk plays the way a good call feels: urgent, personal, impossible to ignore. His party series, Mochakk Calling, is built on that idea, and in June 2024 it came to New York for a weekend with a sold-out show at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at its centre.

Before the show there was the street. An ice cream truck in Mochakk’s colours would drive Manhattan for a day, from Union Square to Washington Square Park and Dimes Square, ending on Hester Street with a set. Our job was the look of it all: the graphic world of Calling NYC, the drawings, the lettering, and a livery that turns a truck into a moving billboard.

A call you cannot put down, written on the walls of New York.

The telephone is Mochakk’s own symbol, so we gave it a New York accent. The flip phone, the brick phone and the old handset became halftone drawings, the kind you see on a photocopied flyer taped to a lamppost. His portraits got the same treatment: high contrast, all attitude. Around them, the city’s own handwriting: tags, throw-ups and shouted lines in brush capitals. “Call me back if you wanna get fresh.” “Bringin’ heat to the street.”

Over it all, one colour. A loud, warm red that reads from the far end of a block and photographs well in any light.

Every piece drawn by hand, every dot placed.

The drawings are the heart of the identity. Each one is a separate piece, so it can live alone on a sticker, sit large on the side of a truck or stack into a poster. Together they read as one voice: a man who is always on the phone.

The city’s handwriting, in Mochakk’s words.

A full sheet of tags and phrases, written by hand and kept rough on purpose. They fill the gaps between the drawings, wrap the truck and give every piece the sound of a crowded street. The lock-up joins a clean, heavy wordmark to a scrawled “calling ny!!!”, so the brand is both a name you trust and a message you answer.

A party you could hear coming down the street.

The truck was the campaign. We drew its livery side by side: on the street side, Mochakk twice in halftone, a giant flip phone between the two portraits and a band of colour graffiti along the wheels; on the serving side, the hands holding the handset over the hatch; on the back, “MOCHAKK CALLING NEW YORK” in white over the phone, so the cars behind it in traffic got the message too. The partners of the day, SoundCloud, W Hotels and Renegade NYC among them, sit inside the composition instead of fighting it.

From Union Square to Hester Street, New York picked up.

On the day, the truck did exactly what it was drawn to do. People stopped, queued at the hatch, filmed the side and posed with the man himself. Mochakk took the hatch himself, and the artwork turned up on a skate deck held high in the crowd. The drawings looked as good in a phone’s photograph as they did on the screen.

The truck and its crowd on the day, through the lens of Teksupport.

New York talked about it, and the call came again.

• Exron Music, 17 June 2024

  Mochakk takes over NYC with a pop-up performance in an ice cream truck. The weekend in full: the truck’s route through Manhattan, the set on Hester Street and a sold-out show at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that ran for more than twelve hours.

• NYS Music, 13 April 2025

  Mochakk Calling: NYC lands at Brooklyn Army Terminal. The series returns the next summer as an open-air show on the Brooklyn waterfront, with DJ Boring b2b DJ Seinfeld and Lovefoxy in support.

A world that is entirely Mochakk’s, drawn to travel.

Artist: Mochakk. Branding, drawings, lettering and truck livery: Odduel. Creative direction: Luciano Panachão.

Photographs of the truck day: Mochakk Calling NYC. Mochakk at the hatch and the 2025 poster: Mochakk’s Instagram, via NYS Music.