DJ ZEZE — Nikita Levitskiy

3D hero — furry logo, speakers and a DJ controller over a looping club video

Overview

ZEZE plays open format — hip-hop, R&B, trap, baile funk, dancehall, afro, tribal house — and is a resident at Duplex Prague. The site has one job: sell her from the first screen and bring in bookings for clubs, weddings, corporate events, private parties and festivals. There are no prices on it — terms are agreed in person.

I built it end to end: concept and design, 3D scenes rendered in Blender, a custom audio engine, three languages, legal pages for the Czech market, security, SEO and launch. No framework — vanilla JavaScript and a static Node.js build that ships a ready HTML page per language.

The first screen has no pop-ups: the site uses no cookies and no analytics, so it needs no cookie banner. Within a week of launch Google had 7 pages indexed, the site ranked second for «soundbyzeze» right after her Instagram, and Lighthouse scores SEO 100, Best Practices 100, Accessibility 97.

Explore the real thing/demos/zeze/

The demo runs the real controller with the first five minutes of each of the four mixes — the full sets play on soundbyzeze.com.

Signature animation

How it works.

The controller is not a picture of a controller. Scrolling swings the camera from the front to a top-down view, and from there the decks, faders and effects actually play her mixes.

01
80 rendered frames
The camera move is an 80-frame sequence rendered in Blender and scrubbed by scroll. Speaker cones and lights are separate render passes on top.
02
A custom audio engine
Mixes are cut into 60-second AAC chunks and stitched sample-accurately, with no clicks. Every sound runs through the mixer — in any browser, iPhone included.
03
A real layout
Buttons follow the spec of a real controller (DDJ-REV5): faders, crossfader, EQ, filter, echo, reverb, flanger, hot cues, loops, rolls, censor, scratch, sync, SHIFT.
04
Speakers on the beat
Cones light up and pump in time, and a tap shakes the speaker. The fur on the logo and the smoke are custom Canvas/WebGL shaders.

DJ ZEZE — After the turn — the controller from above; on the right, the first screen on a phone — After the turn — the controller from above; on the right, the first screen on a phone

DJ ZEZE — mobile — After the turn — the controller from above; on the right, the first screen on a phone

Explore the real thing/demos/zeze/

Features06

01
Controller on a phone
Zoom by section (deck A · mixer · deck B), forgiving touch targets and multitouch — two faders with two fingers at once.
02
iPhone, even on silent
A plain <audio> on iOS plays outside Web Audio, so the faders did nothing; the custom engine fixed it. Web Audio is mute in silent mode — a workaround makes it play.
03
Light first load
Audio starts loading on the first mouse move or tap, not with the page — 3.8 MB less on every visit. The logo does not jump: CLS 0.004 against a 0.1 limit.
04
Three languages, properly
EN, RU and CS as separate static pages with text in the markup, a hreflang sitemap, llms.txt and JSON-LD. Checked from 320 to 1920 px: no broken compound words, no one-letter prepositions left hanging — a rule in Czech typography.
05
Nothing to attack
Strict CSP, HSTS and anti-framing headers. No backend, no forms, no secrets. Czech business details in the footer and a GDPR notice in three languages.
06
Search from day one
Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow (Bing, Seznam, Yandex) connected at launch.