Ikagar Saini is a man with no plan. He hates planning. So much, in fact, that he is committed to improvisation almost as a way of life. It’s what informs his music, his art, just about everything he does. His idea of expression is a spontaneous burst of emotion through his work, diverging from an abstract point of origin to a drastically different conclusion.

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If you ask Natasha Humera Ejaz — which I did — the idea of happiness is really stupid. “It’s a strange theory,” she says. “Everyone’s always fighting for it. What it is. Where it is. How to capture it. I don’t want to go through life thinking that happiness is something that’s beyond my reach.” It really isn’t, which is why it’s such a stupid theory. And Ejaz, a Pakistani musician, actor, dancer, and educator, is creating reminders for herself, through her art, through the music she writes as Stupid Happiness Theory — that happiness isn’t really as elusive. That it’s within grasp for anyone who tries to capture it.

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So how’d your exams go?” and “wait, how old are you?” aren’t usually the lead questions in interviews with upcoming musicians but then the case of Abdullah Siddiqui and Hatim Siddique is a novel one.

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“It’s pretty self-explanatory. Azadi, freedom. Freedom for everyone. Freedom for us, freedom for the artists” says Mo regarding the name of one of India’s freshest independent labels, ‘Azadi Records’.

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A little more of this, and Sidharth Ezhilan might explode. He’s pissed off. With the industry — the ‘business’ of music — with the gatekeepers dictating tastes and trends, with the ignorance of a large chunk of audiences. …

Since the program launched in 2015, Border Movement Residency has worked with over 10 artists creating residency experiences that are customised around the individual needs of artists. The aim of the program has always been to create meaningful and relevant creative exchanges between musicians in South Asia and Germany. …

“I think it all depends on what you want to express through your art,” says Berlin-based French DJ and producer David Monnin as he explains why the identity of a being has both creative and an anti-creative influence in the process of making art. “You can’t ever completely dissolve your identity. Most of us have grown up within a social and cultural universe that we can’t really escape. Even if you manage to dissolve it for a short moment, it will always come back and leave a mark on your work.”

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Image credit: Malaka MP

On 3 December 2017, over 100 people gathered at the Goethe-Institut in Colombo, Sri Lanka to bear witness to a distinctive, idiosyncratic performance: Sub_Sequence where 5 individuals performed a live, collaborative audio-visual set. …

boxout.fm may have launched under a year ago, but it feels like India’s first-ever independent
online community radio station has been around for much longer. Through various initiatives
(boxoutwednesdays, boxoutsessions, theplug.news) outside of the radio station, they’re
challenging the idea of what they truly are and can be; this could not be truer with their boundary-pushing initiative ‘Boxout in Transit’.

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Image: still from a video by Pablo Lauf

The sixth Berlin based Border Movement residency saw New Delhi based producer and DJ Sanil Sudan aka FILM get selected to spend 2 months in Berlin…

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