Image credit: Ali Bharmal

Is Shoumik Biswas growing old? He’s definitely growing up, if his new Disco Puppet album, ‘Aranyer Dinratri’, is anything to go by. Disco Puppet’s past works have been defined by unpredictability, perhaps even a kind of designed recklessness. In his own words, his songs have always been “disconnected” from each other, serving largely as a “collection of things put together”. Here, Biswas ditches his yo-yo tendencies in service of a unified sonic narrative, a kind of sameness tying all the songs off ‘Aranyer Dinratri’ together.  …

Image credit: Nafis, no_name_face

“Here, in this land of equality, black and white are not buried in separate graveyards; nor do black and white pray in separate rooms and churches. There are no conflicting religions, no cacophony of conflicting scriptures. The priest and the padre, the mullah and the monk, drink water from the same glass here,” wrote Kazi Nazrul Islam — a Bengali poet, writer, musician and anti-colonial revolutionary in his poem ‘Samya’ (equality), “I sing the song of equality, of a country where fresh joy blossoms in every heart, and new life springs in every face. Friend, there is no king or subject here. No differences of rich and poor.”

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Left – Pulpy Shilpy (image credit -Ron Bezbaruah) / right – no_name_face (image credit – Nafis Ahmed)

The Border Movement Residency project has worked with over 15 producers and musicians since its launch in 2015 – creating unique experiences tailored around the individual needs of the participating artists. The aim of the program has always been to create meaningful and relevant creative exchanges between musicians in South Asia and Germany.

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Image Credit – Ériver Hijano

 “Artists have the ability to design perception. They can find ways to convey tough subject matter in a tolerable manner. As artists, we can create spaces and platforms where people feel safe and enabled to engage in critical conversations without having the pressure of being assigned a certain societal, political or ideological expectation. And, we can be infinitely creative in how we enable this dialogue. It does not always have to be a literal dialogue using language. For, language itself can sometimes become a mode of exclusion” says Ramsha Shakeel — an interdisciplinary artist and experimental musician from Pakistan. In her explorations, one often discovers the romance of dimensions where individual archetypes in both sound and art coalesce to create aural interactions that define human emotion.

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Image Credit – Siddharth Kumar

Aditi Veena and Lakshya Dhungana were travelling around Nepal a couple of years ago, setting up impromptu audio-video busking performances for strangers. One of those happened to be outside a small shop selling momos. Veena, aka singer-songwriter Ditty, was playing songs from her new album, ‘Poetry Ceylon’, using not much more than a mic, a guitar, and an amp. Dhungana, a filmmaker, would put up a bedsheet and use her projector to show movies about Sri Lanka that she had made. This was Streets For Us, a project the two started back in 2016 when they were both living in Sri Lanka. Dhungana originally wanted to make a film about catcalling, but further conversations between the two led to this instead.  …

Image Credit – Alistan Cruz

Episode six, season four of Bojack Horseman – the anthropomorphic existential dread-fueled haunt-binge – is titled ‘Stupid Piece of Sh*t’. This is also what Bojack calls himself, as he gets out of bed, and again when he stress-eats cookies, and again, as he is driving around town to avoid his mum. This particular episode was brought up during a session of the mental wellness podcast Marbles Lost & Found hosted by music producer Zain Calcuttawala and Avanti Malhotra. The podcast started a couple of years ago, as a means of normalising the conversation around mental health, without homogenising the subject of emotional chaos. …

Image Credit – Peter Cat Recording Co.

I began my career as a music journalist with a gig review of Peter Cat Recording Co. something that is best left buried in the tumultuous sands of time. It is my dying wish that no one ever finds it. To say that it was flattering to the band would be an understatement. When I first caught PCRC in BlueFROG Mumbai I was taken by a contagious compulsion to let go. Anyone who has followed frontman Suryakant Sawhney’s work over the years, will tell you of the distinct flavour his visual aesthetic leaves on your tongue. You can’t really taste his music without imagining it.

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Image Credit – Ron Bezbaruah

Pune-based musician, Gowri Jayakumar, is a woman who wears many hats, switching effortlessly from one avatar to the next one. From being in a pop/jazz/folk band, Run Pussy Run, to starting a platform meets record label focused on minority voices in India, she’s constantly innovating and reinventing herself.

“I feel like this is the first time I’m going to stick to something”, she says, when we talk about her foray into the world of electronic music under the moniker Pulpy Shilpy, whose 4 track EP, ‘Slough’, is a dark and brooding dance record that has received praise from both critics and listeners.

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At the core of Dena Zarrin’s personality, and the music she writes as Madanii, is a sense of identity. Zarrin’s life as the daughter of Iranian immigrants in Germany informs a lot of her musical output, existing in that space between western and eastern cultural and aesthetic values, straddling the two worlds. Music had always been a part of her, but she’d gotten involved with the industry, the business side of things. “I somehow lost my way in all that. I just felt physically and mentally ill—I realised I have to do music. Even if there’s a high risk and I die poor in a ditch, I have to do it. I started the project [Madanii] around three years ago, when Trump was president of the US, a lot was going on,” she says over a Skype call. “I just felt there weren’t many second generation migrant children in music here; there weren’t many people speaking up. I felt the need to be a voice somehow and bring my cultural heritage to the forefront.”

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Image taken from Antariksha Sanchar: Transmissions in Space designed by Quicksand Design Studio

“Art is a way to understand myself and the world around us. I feel I am only at the beginning of a beautiful journey. I have always considered myself as a student of art: a process that is continuous and hopefully lifelong,” says Avinash Kumar (Thiruda), a game designer, researcher, artist and one of the co-founders of Quicksand (an interdisciplinary consultancy). …