<h1 class="left">Q. Tell us about your childhood home. What musical influences did you have growing up?</h1>
<h1 class="left">My childhood home which was a one bedroom ground floor apartment that my parents rented is situated on the edge of Leh next to the buddhist crematorium in the “ghettoised” area of the mon tribe (musicians. called Skampari. Other than hearing a lot of Michael jackson as anyone would do in the 90’s it was also Buddhist ritual music during Saga Dawa (Buddha Purnima., and funeral music as processions would pass by my house, along with witnessing the Naats and the Qasidas sung along with self-flagellation during Ashura every in the main market of Leh, these were very strong sonic impressions on me growing up in Leh. Also to mention the score for Dil Se by Ar Rahman, the sombre ghosts of military occupation invoked in those sounds and the spectral cinematography of Santos Sivan were also concrete influences. Other than tangible art forms the varying geography itself allows space for sounds to morph and modulate naturally. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">Q. How did you become interested in music-making?</h1>
<h1 class="centre">I did not come anyway from a musical background, rather than have a sharp ear for sounds I didn't have anything close to playing any instrument, my parents wanted me to be either a civil servant or a high post government officer, it all alluded essentially to childhood friends of mine who would leave town to study in boarding schools 2004-2006 and come back with certain western music popular at that time mainly american mainstream pop punk and nu metal, around then my family would escape to new delhi for the winters and I would go to the flea book market in Darya Ganj and pick up back issues probably thrown away by embassies and bookstores for dirt cheap rates, with publications like Q, metal hammer, Kerrang, Mojo and Wire, and the compilation CD’s that came with them opened up worlds of music to me before Youtube and Internet streaming was a thing. Eventually I taught myself guitar and formed a death metal band called Vajravarah, eventually every member had to move their own way and I started experimenting with noise myself around 2016.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Q) Your album ‘Fatima’ is titled after your grand aunt. It contains microstories within itself. Can you tell us about the people and places that form part of the album?</h1>
<h1 class="full">I think it deals certainly with the original state of grace Ladakh had, and the innocence that simple people still possess. I could have easily conceptualised it on folk tales, myths, epics, kings and queens since we as a culture have no dearth for that.The process had already begun during the pandemic and I was arrested in many ways by the death of local people integral to the community especially of the generation who were born in the shadow of partition, their lives and their struggles were never chronicled in a bigger lexicon and their stories were only passed down orally or bottled up forever.</h1>
<h1 class="left>Initially as I saw Ladakh changed I yearned for how things were earlier, the idyllic Hedigerrian agrarian life .The flash floods in 2010, the bollywood/ fashion economy culturally extracting what they can from a touristic point of view, amongst all the noise I feel the voice of the Ladakhi identity was silenced. So rather than have any politics ascribed to it, he fact that I was able to compose finally despite financial limitations, despite constant discouragement, was a political act in itself.</h1>
<h1 class="right">With these compositions I am barely able to scratch the surface of the volumes these lives carry and the magnitude of the sacrifices this generation had to make so selflessly, furthermore than the micostories I feel the central theme would be the power of sacrificiality on one hand, and the unknown hard and soft power atrocities that indigenous people go through, the collective trauma that breeds and festers for generations.</h1>
<h1 class="full">The microstories vary, there is no essential moralistic message in them, except of a chronicling of various tragedies harkening back to migrations from Gilgit Baltistan on foot in 1947, fire that broke out at an orphanage in 1997, the ghosts of tourism in the pandemic, the price of pursuing art when you are not rich eternally, and walking past bloated bodies in 2010. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">Q) What is your songwriting process like?</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Since I don't have any musical training whatsoever, I have no method I stick to. I see it as a set of problems that I have to solve, once these problems are resolved then there is a composition. There is always only one agenda, which is to make space. Isolation and solitude is key. If the process is overthrought then it's mostly worthless, the more naturally and automatically it occurs the better for me at least. There has to be strain of vulnerability. There are no guided rules or waypoints for me, improvisation is always key.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">When it came to Fatima, I was blessed to have Felicia Chen aka Dis Fig , Elvin Brandhi, Fursat Fm aka Rohit Gupta of PCRC fame also share these states with me, they were oracular presences with their voices that helped me very well create interesting counterpoints which were unimaginable initially. </h1>
<h1 class="left">Q) How do you collect the found sounds you use in your music?</h1>
<h1 class="left">There are various methods but mostly through contact mics and field recordings the process is not always rewarding but very meditative. Building percussion with found material has always been a keen interest since I discovered Einsturzende Neubauten and their ethics to making music despite having no money to buy instruments. Once they are collected they are broken down, bent, manipulated and mangled. So that music and anti music can exist simultaneously.</h1>
<h1 class="right">Q) What is your hope for the future of your hometown?</h1>
<h1 class="right">We as a population right now are waiting for the results of the election. We were promised the Sixth Schedule ( a provision that grants land, mineral, and cultural protection to tribal areas) by the party in power since the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. </h1>
<h1 class="right">The new candidate who wins the seat of the member of parliament would require to take this issue further up his chain of command and let their higher ups know that Ladakhis are in dissent disappointed by the betrayal of promises made in their manifestos, if they still fail, we will be on a indefinite hunger strike again throughout 30 degree celsius temperature in the Summers or -30 in the Winters. </h1>
Hopefully we will win this battle, and Ladakh is already growing. We have a huge tour de force of local artists breaking ground in their own ways, from cinema to painting to local hip hop, there is great potential in the coming years.
<h1 class="centre">Q) What themes come about in your music and other multimedia projects?</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Cultural fragmentation, urban decay, identity, hauntology, the collision of tradition and modernity, power. Cenacle 97-98 was an excavatory audio visual project made by digitising 5 VHS tapes with footage and sounds from 1997-1998 it was initially performed at Ladakh Arts and Media Organization in Leh, it was screened at, Zurich Kunsthalle, La Becque at La Tour De Peilz in 2022 and at The Gessnerallee at Zurich again in 2023 for Parasite o Sinensis.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">Q) You know 3 languages- how does this tie into your musical and artistic explorations?</h1>
<h1 class="centre">I think I am still in the process of perfecting myself when it comes to linguistics. My spoken Ladakhi and English is alright and I can speak enough Hindi to get by. I can read Tibetan properly and Urdu to a certain degree. It does definitely help a lot when I am incubating an idea because the genesis always comes down to text and text itself is integral to my work. English as a medium is exhausted and I feel limited by it because how many times can you draw the same metaphors and their dynamics, but with Ladakhi and Tibetan, if I end up translating what I write in English, the result charts another metaphysical and poetic territory which is very fruitful. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">Especially in the live performance setting since my actual songs seldom have any vocals, I have all this space when I am performing to exercise and exorcise with my voice, and since my last tour I am mostly singing and screaming in Ladakhi which I am happy about and wish to grow further. I am still strengthening my grasp in the Ladakhi dialect and learning German currently so I could read Walter Benjamin better. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Q) You have said that with ‘Fatima’, you wanted to create something that wouldn’t go unnoticed. Is commercial success a concern, in the Indian context? And if so, is that feasible taking into account the current music scene?
<h1 class="full">Coming as a total outsider to Delhi in 2012 there were no cultural spaces whatsoever which were welcoming so the punk diy ethic was always at the root of all my practises. New Delhi was convenient rent and accessibility wise compared to Mumbai and Bangalore, but was and is so bankrupt culturally and stagnant that there are only hypebeast sneaker store replicants who exist from the creme de la creme of farmhouses and porsches making terrible music in studios which their parents built. Essentially the only culture unfortunately is limited to two clubs where all the rich kids go, and music as abrasive as mine cannot exist there unless it bends to the banality of corporate executives and hypebeasts who want to get waste. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">Despite this via ReProduce Artists we did play our own shows and invaded spaces since 2016. I have seen musicians and artists come with great potential from bordering states but losing their minds and killing themselves because of industry politics and the vices this city offers. </h1>
<h1 class="left">The city makes you very resentful, and Fatima marked my resignation from Delhi back to Ladakh and I didnt want to deal with any exploitation and be resentful than what I had already, and the exploitation I am talking about is present in all industries, whether it may be fashion to art, and I wanted my work exist in larger lexicon so I had to bypass the Indian scene and its mechanics altogether. Thankfully the interest of Aisha Devi and Danse Noire was genuine, and they helped me further my work in many aspects.</h1>
<h1 class="centre">If you do go to any art exhibition or any of these fairs in Delhi seldom will you see a tribal artist's work, most frames have an upper caste surname always under them and the art is mediocre at best. I also felt people were to scared to call these dynamics out in fear of being gatekept. There are of course people who have been very supportive here too, but in a larger context I would either need to be a ghost producer for some rich kids or quit my pursuits altogether.
Especially with streaming and bandcamp being bought out there is already a very thin sliver of making money from your music. I am still a total outsider in Europe as well but the support and the friendships I have found amongst musicians and artists who are themselves outsiders there has been very genuine.
<h1 class="right">I have no regard for commercial success because I have already chosen a niche profession. Yet, I want to do this all my life and for that I need to sustain myself, and nurture my body of work and allow it to grow into various forms, so I take easier jobs like working on soundtracks or work as a mountain guide for hiking groups. </h1>
<h1 class="centre">Q) What projects are you excited to work on in the future?</h1>
<h1 class="centre">There was a point in time where I didn't have enough in my organic pipeline but now it's overwrought with varying tumours I have manifested for surgical extraction. I have an album in collaboration with Swedish musician Gottfrid Ahman (ex- In Solitude, PAGA, Saturnalia Temple) , and Swiss percussionist Michale Anklin. We recorded this EP over a week in La Becque based on the ideas of Ladakhi procession music with detuned guitars and tribal percussion and performed it at Les Urbaines at the Arsenic theatre in Lausanne. A residency I was selected for by the Styrian Government and ORF AT (Austrian Radio) in Graz, to learn composition and perform it at the MUSIKPROTOKOLL festival this September on the ambisonic sound system in a tunnel venue called Dom im Berg. An improv live album recorded with Elvin Brandhi as a duo at a legendary venue Cave12 in Geneva during my 3 month European Tour last year. And a collaboration with Yumna Al Arashi and Wisrah Villefort for the SALTS gallery in Basel through Haus Gawaling in Mathon Switzerland. There also would be selected live performances across Europe, my hands are full but I am ready to get them dirty. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Q. Tell us about your childhood home. What musical influences did you have growing up?</h1>
<h1 class="full">My childhood home which was a one bedroom ground floor apartment that my parents rented is situated on the edge of Leh next to the buddhist crematorium in the “ghettoised” area of the mon tribe (musicians. called Skampari. Other than hearing a lot of Michael jackson as anyone would do in the 90’s it was also Buddhist ritual music during Saga Dawa (Buddha Purnima., and funeral music as processions would pass by my house, along with witnessing the Naats and the Qasidas sung along with self-flagellation during Ashura every in the main market of Leh, these were very strong sonic impressions on me growing up in Leh. Also to mention the score for Dil Se by Ar Rahman, the sombre ghosts of military occupation invoked in those sounds and the spectral cinematography of Santos Sivan were also concrete influences. Other than tangible art forms the varying geography itself allows space for sounds to morph and modulate naturally. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Q. How did you become interested in music-making?</h1>
<h1 class="full">I did not come anyway from a musical background, rather than have a sharp ear for sounds I didn't have anything close to playing any instrument, my parents wanted me to be either a civil servant or a high post government officer, it all alluded essentially to childhood friends of mine who would leave town to study in boarding schools 2004-2006 and come back with certain western music popular at that time mainly american mainstream pop punk and nu metal, around then my family would escape to new delhi for the winters and I would go to the flea book market in Darya Ganj and pick up back issues probably thrown away by embassies and bookstores for dirt cheap rates, with publications like Q, metal hammer, Kerrang, Mojo and Wire, and the compilation CD’s that came with them opened up worlds of music to me before Youtube and Internet streaming was a thing. Eventually I taught myself guitar and formed a death metal band called Vajravarah, eventually every member had to move their own way and I started experimenting with noise myself around 2016.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Q) Your album ‘Fatima’ is titled after your grand aunt. It contains microstories within itself. Can you tell us about the people and places that form part of the album?</h1>
<h1 class="full">I think it deals certainly with the original state of grace Ladakh had, and the innocence that simple people still possess. I could have easily conceptualised it on folk tales, myths, epics, kings and queens since we as a culture have no dearth for that.The process had already begun during the pandemic and I was arrested in many ways by the death of local people integral to the community especially of the generation who were born in the shadow of partition, their lives and their struggles were never chronicled in a bigger lexicon and their stories were only passed down orally or bottled up forever.</h1>
<h1 class="full>Initially as I saw Ladakh changed I yearned for how things were earlier, the idyllic Hedigerrian agrarian life .The flash floods in 2010, the bollywood/ fashion economy culturally extracting what they can from a touristic point of view, amongst all the noise I feel the voice of the Ladakhi identity was silenced. So rather than have any politics ascribed to it, he fact that I was able to compose finally despite financial limitations, despite constant discouragement, was a political act in itself.</h1>
<h1 class="full">With these compositions I am barely able to scratch the surface of the volumes these lives carry and the magnitude of the sacrifices this generation had to make so selflessly, furthermore than the micostories I feel the central theme would be the power of sacrificiality on one hand, and the unknown hard and soft power atrocities that indigenous people go through, the collective trauma that breeds and festers for generations.</h1>
<h1 class="full">The microstories vary, there is no essential moralistic message in them, except of a chronicling of various tragedies harkening back to migrations from Gilgit Baltistan on foot in 1947, fire that broke out at an orphanage in 1997, the ghosts of tourism in the pandemic, the price of pursuing art when you are not rich eternally, and walking past bloated bodies in 2010. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Q) What is your songwriting process like?</h1>
<h1 class="full">Since I don't have any musical training whatsoever, I have no method I stick to. I see it as a set of problems that I have to solve, once these problems are resolved then there is a composition. There is always only one agenda, which is to make space. Isolation and solitude is key. If the process is overthrought then it's mostly worthless, the more naturally and automatically it occurs the better for me at least. There has to be strain of vulnerability. There are no guided rules or waypoints for me, improvisation is always key.</h1>
<h1 class="full">When it came to Fatima, I was blessed to have Felicia Chen aka Dis Fig , Elvin Brandhi, Fursat Fm aka Rohit Gupta of PCRC fame also share these states with me, they were oracular presences with their voices that helped me very well create interesting counterpoints which were unimaginable initially. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Q) How do you collect the found sounds you use in your music?</h1>
<h1 class="full">There are various methods but mostly through contact mics and field recordings the process is not always rewarding but very meditative. Building percussion with found material has always been a keen interest since I discovered Einsturzende Neubauten and their ethics to making music despite having no money to buy instruments. Once they are collected they are broken down, bent, manipulated and mangled. So that music and anti music can exist simultaneously.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Q) What is your hope for the future of your hometown?</h1>
<h1 class="full">We as a population right now are waiting for the results of the election. We were promised the Sixth Schedule ( a provision that grants land, mineral, and cultural protection to tribal areas) by the party in power since the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. </h1>
<h1 class="full">The new candidate who wins the seat of the member of parliament would require to take this issue further up his chain of command and let their higher ups know that Ladakhis are in dissent disappointed by the betrayal of promises made in their manifestos, if they still fail, we will be on a indefinite hunger strike again throughout 30 degree celsius temperature in the Summers or -30 in the Winters. </h1>
<h6 class="full">Hopefully we will win this battle, and Ladakh is already growing. We have a huge tour de force of local artists breaking ground in their own ways, from cinema to painting to local hip hop, there is great potential in the coming years.</h6>
<h1 class="full">Q) What themes come about in your music and other multimedia projects?</h1>
<h1 class="full">Cultural fragmentation, urban decay, identity, hauntology, the collision of tradition and modernity, power. Cenacle 97-98 was an excavatory audio visual project made by digitising 5 VHS tapes with footage and sounds from 1997-1998 it was initially performed at Ladakh Arts and Media Organization in Leh, it was screened at, Zurich Kunsthalle, La Becque at La Tour De Peilz in 2022 and at The Gessnerallee at Zurich again in 2023 for Parasite o Sinensis.</h1>
<h1 class="full">Q) You know 3 languages- how does this tie into your musical and artistic explorations?</h1>
<h1 class="full">I think I am still in the process of perfecting myself when it comes to linguistics. My spoken Ladakhi and English is alright and I can speak enough Hindi to get by. I can read Tibetan properly and Urdu to a certain degree. It does definitely help a lot when I am incubating an idea because the genesis always comes down to text and text itself is integral to my work. English as a medium is exhausted and I feel limited by it because how many times can you draw the same metaphors and their dynamics, but with Ladakhi and Tibetan, if I end up translating what I write in English, the result charts another metaphysical and poetic territory which is very fruitful. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Especially in the live performance setting since my actual songs seldom have any vocals, I have all this space when I am performing to exercise and exorcise with my voice, and since my last tour I am mostly singing and screaming in Ladakhi which I am happy about and wish to grow further. I am still strengthening my grasp in the Ladakhi dialect and learning German currently so I could read Walter Benjamin better. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Q) You have said that with ‘Fatima’, you wanted to create something that wouldn’t go unnoticed. Is commercial success a concern, in the Indian context? And if so, is that feasible taking into account the current music scene?
<h1 class="full">Coming as a total outsider to Delhi in 2012 there were no cultural spaces whatsoever which were welcoming so the punk diy ethic was always at the root of all my practises. New Delhi was convenient rent and accessibility wise compared to Mumbai and Bangalore, but was and is so bankrupt culturally and stagnant that there are only hypebeast sneaker store replicants who exist from the creme de la creme of farmhouses and porsches making terrible music in studios which their parents built. Essentially the only culture unfortunately is limited to two clubs where all the rich kids go, and music as abrasive as mine cannot exist there unless it bends to the banality of corporate executives and hypebeasts who want to get waste. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Despite this via ReProduce Artists we did play our own shows and invaded spaces since 2016. I have seen musicians and artists come with great potential from bordering states but losing their minds and killing themselves because of industry politics and the vices this city offers. </h1>
<h1 class="full">The city makes you very resentful, and Fatima marked my resignation from Delhi back to Ladakh and I didnt want to deal with any exploitation and be resentful than what I had already, and the exploitation I am talking about is present in all industries, whether it may be fashion to art, and I wanted my work exist in larger lexicon so I had to bypass the Indian scene and its mechanics altogether. Thankfully the interest of Aisha Devi and Danse Noire was genuine, and they helped me further my work in many aspects.</h1>
<h1 class="full">If you do go to any art exhibition or any of these fairs in Delhi seldom will you see a tribal artist's work, most frames have an upper caste surname always under them and the art is mediocre at best. I also felt people were to scared to call these dynamics out in fear of being gatekept. There are of course people who have been very supportive here too, but in a larger context I would either need to be a ghost producer for some rich kids or quit my pursuits altogether.
<h6 class="full"> Especially with streaming and bandcamp being bought out there is already a very thin sliver of making money from your music. I am still a total outsider in Europe as well but the support and the friendships I have found amongst musicians and artists who are themselves outsiders there has been very genuine. </h6>
<h1 class="full">I have no regard for commercial success because I have already chosen a niche profession. Yet, I want to do this all my life and for that I need to sustain myself, and nurture my body of work and allow it to grow into various forms, so I take easier jobs like working on soundtracks or work as a mountain guide for hiking groups. </h1>
<h1 class="full">Q) What projects are you excited to work on in the future?</h1>
<h1 class="full">There was a point in time where I didn't have enough in my organic pipeline but now it's overwrought with varying tumours I have manifested for surgical extraction. I have an album in collaboration with Swedish musician Gottfrid Ahman (ex- In Solitude, PAGA, Saturnalia Temple) , and Swiss percussionist Michale Anklin. We recorded this EP over a week in La Becque based on the ideas of Ladakhi procession music with detuned guitars and tribal percussion and performed it at Les Urbaines at the Arsenic theatre in Lausanne. A residency I was selected for by the Styrian Government and ORF AT (Austrian Radio) in Graz, to learn composition and perform it at the MUSIKPROTOKOLL festival this September on the ambisonic sound system in a tunnel venue called Dom im Berg. An improv live album recorded with Elvin Brandhi as a duo at a legendary venue Cave12 in Geneva during my 3 month European Tour last year. And a collaboration with Yumna Al Arashi and Wisrah Villefort for the SALTS gallery in Basel through Haus Gawaling in Mathon Switzerland. There also would be selected live performances across Europe, my hands are full but I am ready to get them dirty. </h1>
