Image credit: Siavash Naghshbandi

For his latest project, Saba Alizadeh will focus on silence. The pauses between speeches by past dictators. The little gaps they give in between emphatic phrases spoken to rouse their audiences. Silence, in fact, plays a big role in his music. …

In Germany, techno thrives amidst contradictions. It exists within the walls of a former church where audiences indulge in decidedly unholy activities. It’s where pot smoking sixty-year-old men – wearing Grateful Dead t-shirts – dance alongside young adults consuming speed that’s provided by boys sporting the latest looks in grime/fanny pack fashion. …

Border Movement are excited to announce a showcase on Wednesday 15th and Thursday 16th August at Pop-Kultur Berlin in the form of live performances, DJ sets and an interactive discussion. Taking place at Club 23, and representing members of the Border Movement family from South Asia and Germany, there will be live showcases from Dan Bodan, Rudoh, Stupid Happiness Theory and Anika; interspersed with DJ sets from She’s Drunk, Lauf, and Andi Teichmann.
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Image credit: Evolve Stills and Motion – Jamblu, REProduce Chhattarpur, October 2017 

“Venues”

Speaking casually to a number of people in the Indian music industry, that’s the unified response I get when I ask why electronic music cannot seem to leave the main tier 1 cities (Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore). Interviewing several others, I repeat the question: how can electronic music spread beyond the congested spaces of major metropolises. The answer again is unanimous: “venues”.

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Image Credit: Humayun M

Islamabad likes to run slow. But having grown up in this city, musician Asfandyar Khan, who is also the artist behind electronic moniker TMPST, didn’t quite register the pace. This changed when he moved to Karachi in 2015. He found the city aligned with his own pace a lot more; perhaps this change is what made its way into TMPST’s upcoming release, ‘Unravel’.

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nu age of lau is a formless collective: one that has no defined sonic contours. It draws its influences from sacred art, natural and religious world. …

Image credit: Prasiit Sthapit

Kathmandu-based electronica artist Phatcowlee, a.k.a Rajan Shrestha, is not a fan of nightclubs. His friends once took him to a party at a club in Kathmandu and he found himself lost in a sea of noise. “It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with the nightclub scene here, but I just had an overwhelming sense of not belonging here,” says Shrestha. So, where does he feel like he belongs? “A bedroom? A room of people who actually care about electronic music? I don’t quite know yet,” he quips. …

Image: pcrc album art for ‘Portrait Of A Time’

Concealed in the sound waves of a record are traces of its past, an impression of a forgotten emotion or moments that couldn’t last. In his book ‘Gramophone, Film, Typewriter’, Friedrich A Kittler wrote if the phonographic disk had self-consciousness, it could point out while replaying a song that it remembers this particular song. And, what appears to us as the effect of a rather simple mechanism would, quite probably, strike the disk as a miraculous ability: memory.

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Many years ago, Nigel Perera used to be a mobile DJ in Negombo, Sri Lanka. He’d play events such as weddings or birthday parties. “I used to listen to the golden pop hits from the 80s back in the day; the stuff on the radio,” he says. He played at a pub in Negombo where he’d DJ commercial music, old classic rock, the works. He would push himself to find that balance between what kind of music worked for the audiences there and what gave him satisfaction. …

You were wrong.

But don’t worry about it too much. With his recently released single, ‘You & Me’, Sahej Bakshi, the man behind Dualist Inquiry, has more tricks up his sleeve than even his best friends imagined.

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