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musical Journey

* Live Document *

I’d attended weekly devotional Indian folk music sessions (bhajans / kirtan) with my family since I was born. As kids we were encouraged to sing-along to and lead the music. I also picked up the naal/dholak/dholki (double-sided hand-drum) and ganjira (tambourine) at this setting. Having little competitions with other percussionists during drum fill sections, and being perfectly in sync during the higher tempo songs has always been energizing for me. Majority of these bhajans were not in languages I understood, yet I was still drawn; naturally my emotional connection to music became more centered in camaraderie with other musicians, and whatever was evoked in me by various kinds of musicality, rather than the lyrics.

Alongside bhajans I was being classically trained in music theory on the piano. Around my fourth year of training I took a break and was later re-inspired to play piano by a family friend through improvisation. As I became more comfortable with improvising on the piano, music also became a personal space for peace, freedom, expression, and inspiration.

Towards the end of high school, a friend who was dabbling in production had me record a few layers for a track he was mixing. That recording session sparked my interest in music production. At the time I was listening to EDM artists like Avicii, Hardwell, Swedish House Mafia, Alesso, etc. That big melodically driven electronic sound was appealing to me especially from a creative standpoint since it emphasized the composition and the production just as much if not more than the vocalist.

At this point I also began to consciously acknowledge that a major part of my attraction to music/art is its nature as a universal language. It made connecting with anyone feel simple.

During college, I produced several original EDM / Progressive House / Dance tracks that are all still on my soundcloud account. These were all under the alias ‘PureNoize’. At the time I also became a big fan of the pace, melodies, and chords Porter Robinson introduced in his Worlds album. The feels were strong and it heavily influenced my craving for wanting to step out of just progressive house music.

I was also in a competitive hip-hop crew at the time and was starting to be inspired by various electronic hip-hop artists (trap was a rising genre at the time). Wanting to change up my percussion to fuse with hip-hop was what pushed me to finally step out of progressive house.

I changed my alias to ‘presh’ at this point in time. I was making loads and loads of experimental music, but not releasing much. I posted ten songs from this time period on soundcloud. My inspirations grew in all sorts of directions. My genres of influence now include, RnB/Soul, Hip-Hop, Rock, Metal, Afro-Latin, Electronic, Classical, and more. I also seriously tackled my mixing and mastering skills during this time period. Very scientific and technical phase of my music journey.

A couple years later I decided to seriously pursue music as a craft and a business, with hopes to build my life around music. This led to finding inspiration from Anjunadeep and various other artists inspired by the newer melodic deep house sound. I figured it was a sound I could create my take on, while staying industry relevant and aiming for Anjunadeep as a dream music and business collaborator.

Compared to most music, I perceived Electronic Dance Music (EDM), especially the house music production and DJ scene, as one of the most standardized and industrialized forms of music given it’s consistent straight-forward composition methodologies, and consistent performance formats across companies (record labels) and venues (clubs, festivals, etc.). The music was always designed for smooth live mixing in a way all DJs understood. I saw widely adopted musical strategies and experiments attempting to achieve a larger collective exploration of a style of music. So, I had put part of my faith in this musical pursuit in people who perceived it similarly; it seemed reasonable to acknowledge it this way from a financial survivability and camaraderie standpoint. By focusing more on collective achievements, I could reason with anyone in the field to understand what we can do next right? As an individual, I could stay within the methodologies of the style, but maintain wiggle room for innovation right? It seemed like the most practical approach to a stable music career starting point. I told myself that I’d push the edge of what’s being tried by the collective, for the collective.

This part of my journey inspired the visual branding and messaging “a soulful blend of sound healing and dance music”. I used ‘soulful’ to describe a soul and folk influence as well as a general soulful feel, ‘sound healing’ to cater to mindfulness and wellness markets and inform sonic character of the music (softer, warmer tones, smoother bass, lush ambience and texture, uplifting harmonics, smoother rhythms, more gradual progression, etc.), and ‘dance music’ given my strong bias towards rhythms and progressions from various dance genres as well as my love for dance.

This phase was the most difficult part of my music journey thus far as it came much closer to a survival strategy while also being a place for freedom and play. I studied more into copyright and trademark laws, business ownership, streaming platforms, social media marketing, crowdfunding platforms, sync-licensing, and selling samples and stems. I created music educational content and taught workshops. And I took a music composition contract with Theia Studios to write soundtracks and design sounds for their game.

During this phase I created some of my most cohesive collections of work that can all be seen in the Releases section (after ‘Nothing Is Real’). ‘Dancing Mystic EP’ ended up being the most pivotal.

In ‘Steady EP’, I used a small tongue drum I found on instagram as a consistent sonic element throughout. On completion and release of this EP, which I am oh so proud of and so grateful to have my collaborators on, I allowed my curiosity to go loose and learnt more about this family of instruments. This led to discovering the RAV Vast, a much larger tongue drum or tonguepan played with the hands. This led to finding a video of Nadishana playing the RAV Vast with utmost skill and compositional finesse. After seeing this I just knew I needed to incorporate this into my music. I primarily have the muscle memory of a pianist and hand percussionist; given it’s both melodic and percussive nature, this seemed like a perfect fit for my body. When I got my hands on my first RAV Vast, it felt absolutely great.

Many entrepreneurial considerations were at play as well. Tonguepans were also present in sound healing, wellness, and meditation markets. RAV Vast has a strong social media presence, and the instruments were within budget. It was during COVID quarantining, so without the opportunity to play my dance music release work in club mixes for people, I figured I needed to pivot to something more visually compelling for online content. With the saturation of production tools and digitally produced musical content in the market, I figured investing more in my capacity as an instrumentalist would help me differentiate. Anjunadeep was also pivoting to a softer more melodic downtempo ambient influenced deep house sound that lined up with the rise of mindfulness and wellness markets.

And thus ‘Dancing Mystic EP’ was born as a fusion of all these thoughts and feelings — eight months of dedication to this project. This release also led to my next major pivot, handpans!

I’d been observing the wonders of the handpan community ever since discovering the RAV Vast, but didn’t invest in a handpan for my sound as it was beyond my budget at the time. I’d already started to have favorite builders and players around the time of the ‘Dancing Mystic EP’ release, including Ayasa, Yishama, Yatao, Nadishana, and Kirill Osherov. Not long after releasing ‘Dancing Mystic EP’, Ayasa reached out after listening to it in their workshop and offered me a handpan. OH.. MY.. this made me so happy. I’m indescribably grateful for Ayasa providing me with my first handpan.

This handpan served as a vehicle to be able to share with, explore with, and join with the handpan community. I’ve met so many builders and players since and have begun to attend handpan gatherings. Yishama describes more about the history of the handpan instrument here. Because of how new the instrument is and how accessible it is (it’s sonic character is so universally appealing and soothing, and it’s set to scales to ensure good harmonics even when playing with little control), this musical community is uniquely musically free and approachable. The honesty of improving my body’s ability to play an instrument that’s so undiscovered ended up being what I needed after being flooded by creative automation, commercial expectation, and socialite competition in the EDM world. The instrument and community brought me back to a much purer place in terms of how I relate with music.

Around this time, I was becoming more deterred by the path of music business. I was having difficulty representing music the way I wanted to — as a craft, therapy, communal activity, community service or mode of communication — while aiming to sustain it financially. I felt excluded, both by myself and others, from passion projects due to my motive to survive off of music and balance commercial expectation. Maybe it was a matter of me not being able to effectively find camaraderie yet? I just didn’t know and wasn’t able to contemplate on it without taking a step back from music business.

Since then I’ve been setting up my life to support my exploration of handpans and other creative mediums without mixing any business strategy. I’m reserving financial compensation for hard skills that are more objectively useful. The flexibility that comes with being my own patron as an artist has been a crucial choice for my approach at the moment. No more market analysis; no more strategically “staying relevant”; no more stunting my curiosity to prevent deviating too far from a commercial expectation; no more considering the sustainability of a brand; no more worrying about the financial feasibility of every opportunity that presents itself; just raw exploration, connection, innovation, inspiration, and expression :)

Closed my work portfolio (still viewable here for logging purposes)

My first release: ‘Nothing Is Real’

Life has been much more peaceful and inspiring this way so far.

Latest Blog Post: ‘Why one may choose not to associate capital value with music’

Meaning of the logo

Collaborated with artist and brand designer, Jonathan Moskaluk, to create this logo that marked the start of my full-time music career.

The butterfly in the imagery represents transformation.

The owl represents contemplation, patience, and being observant; experiencing, then intuitively knowing when to act with focus; finding meaning in things that seem inconspicuous.

The ‘bindi’ / teardrop on the forehead typically symbolizes inner wisdom, concentration, mutual respect, and higher consciousness (or strong critical thinking and reasoning) that helps people distinguish between reality and fantasy.

The overall styling is influenced by South Asian art to represent my heritage.