Image credit: Farah Gherda

45 days to go

Sanaya Ardeshir is freaking out. There’s been some mix up with her visa to the UK, just a day before she’s supposed to leave. She’s slated to open for the mighty Bonobo in Manchester on 4 July but, given this last-minute flub, she’ll have to come back to India, apply for a new visa, and then go back for the gig. After that, she heads over to Berlin for a couple of months. That last bit is for the Border Movement Residency (BMR), for which Sandunes (the name Ardeshir performs under) has been selected, along with FILM — the producer Sanil Sudan, from New Delhi — and Alien Panda Jury (or Daniel Arthur Panjwaneey, from Karachi).

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6 years ago, when 24-year-old Rija Yousuf moved back from Saudi Arabia to her hometown Karachi, all she wanted to do was discover the city with fresh ears. Having never grown up in Pakistan, this was more than a homecoming. It was an opportunity to explore a city fraught with violence, with a sense of curiosity and wonder. …

It sounds idyllic; straight out of a book, even. Or maybe a reality TV show. Last year, in May, around a dozen musicians from different parts of the world found themselves holed up in a house in Karachi — a regular house, in a not particularly fancy area. …

Tales of origin are always the stuff of legend. They are the all-important beginning, the moments of creation, when someone or something seminal appeared. Fact often gets muddled with fiction, feats appear greater with time but the crux of the story, always remain the same – this is when something important happened, this is when we started counting.

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In its third year, Magnetic Fields Festival takes the leap from local player to international powerhouse.

When I first came to Alsisar Mahal, the site of Magnetic Fields Festival, there was no tent village. There were no brightly coloured festival freaks in all manners of fantastical attire. There was just a lovely palace in a small town about half of the way down the road from Delhi to Bikaner. …

As disembodied sounds start coming through the speakers, the start of my interview with founders of Pakistani electronica collective Forever South, was about matching the voices to the reputations.

Did the reedy voice belong to the loquacious Haamid Rahim, aka Dynoman, conductor of this orchestra, waving his baton to directions south?

Was the decidedly dudish voice that of sound engineer and musician Bilal Nasir Khan, aka Rudoh? …

“Karachi is bursting at the seams. It’s a loud, obnoxious and difficult place that doesn’t seem to ever stop growing. However, it is dangerously easy to romanticise; the way big cities often are by their inhabitants. I think it’s important to acknowledge that your own experiences aren’t necessarily reflective of the experiences of others around you. For me, Karachi is home. When a place is so inextricably linked to milestones, relationships and emotions, that it becomes a part of who you are, it is difficult to imagine that it could never not be ‘home’,” said Danish Faruqi .

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“It’s easy to take things for granted and much more inconvenient to look beyond the ‘norm’ to see how flawed society and its structures and systems really are. Being well adjusted to a flawed society is not healthy, it is desensitisation. And from desensitisation stems hopelessness and blind acceptance of violence, intolerance, and the status quo,” said Danish Faruqi , a Karachi-based artiste, who has mastered the art of crafting musicality with exceptional finesse under the pseudonym AL AK. 

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The Pakistani ‘underground’ music scene is not what it once was. From lazy, close-to-terrible covers of Radiohead, Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, those serious about their inclination towards music have veered in their own directions, finding their own niche, and some have even built their own sounds. …

“My role as a musician is to sculpt harmonies out of sounds and vibrations which further the beauty of the cosmos. Music offers a subjective way of experiencing reality. From quarks, galaxies to the entire observable universe, everything is in motion. We have to develop an appreciation of the symphonic reality that we’re a part of. You know how sometimes we’re unable to ‘think straight’. I have come to realise that clarity of the mind forms only when you harmonise with your surroundings,” says Karachi-based Ramsha Shakeel, an experimental musician whose dabbles with macabre timbres and rhythmical depth has led to some incredible experiments within the drone and ambient world. Although the artiste’s musical journey is a synergistic collision of art, science and philosophy; it’s her metaphysical romance with the cosmos that perhaps best describes her tryst with music.

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