Delhi based music collective REProduce began a series called Listening Room at KHOJ. The aim was to fill a gap in the ever-iterating and increasingly varied community of live music in India by showcasing talent that might not get heard in venues oriented towards more mainstream music. A Listening Room event would focus purely on the music – in a space where an audience can absorb sound on their own terms.
The fifth edition of Listening Room featured sounds by artists Conspirators of Pleasure, Heems, and Hashback Hashish.
REProduce, introducing the performers (dated 2016):
Conspirators Of Pleasure (London, UK)
Poulomi Desai and Simon Underwood are Conspirators of Pleasure – an improvising duo that seek to bend all the rules, question the sacred, create extraordinary soundscape performances and self-regulating sonic systems using modified and prepared instruments. Part of their unusual musical armory includes a prepared sitar, sonically twisted stylophones, prepared bass, modified toys, resurrected radios and visually scarred slide projections. Their compositions explore experimental terrains, twisting technology to transform organic sounds into eerie calls that flow from intense waves of abrasive, noisy, chaos-invoking industrial nostalgia, to structured pulsating rhythms, to melancholic, microtonal drones.
Heems (NYC, USA)
Punjabi-American rapper, founder of Greedhead Music, and native New Yorker, Himanshu “Heems” Suri launched his solo career while a member of alternative hip-hop group Das Racist. After Das Racist split in late 2012, Heems headed to Bombay and began work on his official debut solo effort. The album, Eat Pray Thug, was released in 2015 and coincided with an exhibition of the rapper’s artwork at the Aicon Gallery in New York City. Suri has performed at the Whitney Biennale, MOMA PS1, the MCA in Chicago, and San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. In 2013 he curated a floor of music and performance at the Whitney Museum as well. In March he will perform at the new Met Breuer Gallery in New York. He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Heritage Hotel: Art Spaces in Goa.
Hashback Hashish (New Delhi)
The music of Ashish Sachan confronts you with a simplicity that is both earnest, but also misleading – if you drill down there are details that only a pair of headphones (and perhaps a taste of his adopted name) can reward you with. Firmly rooted in the minimalist tradition, his narrative offers something for electronic music fans across the spectrum – committed geeks who respect musical history on one end, and on the other, those who could not care less about the past and just want to lose it on a dance floor. For this session, he’ll close it out live as opposed to the DJ sets Delhi knows him better for, with his own brand of precise, minimal techno; special guests will be announced at a later date.
