Swaying with the Verses

2026! Happy New Year! I needed a bit of creative break, so I’m delivering this a little tardily, it helped that there aren’t many gigs in the listings, so you won’t be missing out on anything!

2025 was very eventful, as evidenced with all the activities that have been documented in this newsletter for the past 9 issues! I had a nice break during the holiday period and had a chance to review all the radio shows, djing, this newsletter and other activities that happened in the past year; which has been really useful to plan 2026, I just have to put it all into action now!

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Listings / What I did / Radio Shows / My Gigs / Music Recommendations

Raga Music Listings— January 2026

January and February don’t have many gigs, it picks up in March, so keep checking my website for all the future listings.

18 Jan 2026 / 13:00
Vedic Sounds of Medieval India
Deepa Shakthi – vocal
Mehar-Jot Singh Sagoo – tabla
Ikhjhot Kaur – taanpura
Leeds Conservatoire, Leeds
Book Now: £Free.99

22 Jan 2026 / 18:30
Vande Mataram – A Musical Journey of Patriotism
Siddhie Kapshikar – vocal
Nehru Centre, London
Book Now: £Free.99

24 Jan 2026 / 19:30
Chineke! Orchestra: An American in Paris
Feat. Jasdeep Singh Degun: Concerto for sitar & orchestra (Arya)
Southbank Centre, London
Book Now: £17-£32

30 Jan 2026 / 13:00
New Year New Sounds, with Dal Singh
Dal Singh – tabla
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Book Now: £5-£10

*note… I don’t make any money or anything from these listings, I don’t even get guestlist (although I wouldn’t say no to guestlist… gigging is expensive!), I’m just doing it, because people need to know where to see live music.

What did I see/hear/do in December?

December just like every other month this year had so much going on.

I went to see the Sister Sledge show… which was fun, the crowd was up for it, there bangers, random Christmas songs, a few random covers, but overall it was lots of fun.

The December edition of the Loft Party with Colleen Murphy was my second helping out to set up the venue; coming together to help deliver something as nice as this party, really gives you a sense of community, both in the behind-the-scenes and within the party itself. The music was great as always and seeing so many friends and making new friends is one of the integral parts of this experience!

I played with my friend Vassilis for the Catalyst Cafe’s 10th birthday party, which was a really nice evening, and congratulations to Haris and the team for getting to this landmark!

The Awaaz Collective tookover The Greyhound Pub for a day to play some beautiful music, but also raise some money for the homelessness charity - Crisis. Our amazing sound engineer Casey set up the sound downstairs and it sounded beautiful. We started around 12, with me and Rav warming up both rooms, the rest of the crew appeared to takeover for their slots and it was the first time since the last Voices Takeover that we’ve all been in the same place; it was a wonderful day, the music played covered so many different genres, it was a musical geek paradise and a very nice unofficial Awaaz year-end party. More than anything else, it was a collective learning experience and this year, we’ll be much wiser and ambitious to do more events like this. I’m not entirely sure how much we raised at the end, but this is something else that we’ll definitely develop this year too.

I saw the Howardena Pindell ‘Off the Grid’ exhibition at the White Cube, it presents 60 years of work by the artist, ‘exploring the subversion of the grid as a formal device alongside the wider personal and sociopolitical concerns of her practice’.

There are a variety of works, varying in scale and medium, her abstract spray dot and hole punch works are colourful, the large piece Oceanic Underwater is a piece you can spend hours staring at, it’s a beautiful piece of work. The video works require some dedicated time, all of them exploring the theme of institutional racism.

Nāda Sonics—IRL, the first session took place at Lake Space in Deptford! I’ve been meaning to do something like this for some time and it was great to finally do it. The date fell a year and a few days after the passing of the superstar of raga music, Zakir Hussain, it felt appropriate to honor and celebrate the musical contribution of this fabulous musician. Nishant, the curator of Lake Space and I managed to organise this exploratory session very quickly, the space is beautiful, and I really wanted a very minimal feel to the presentation, the music is star of the show afterall. The turnout was great, comprising of friends and people I’d never met before. After mixing up a batch of chai and greeting every one, we proceeded to listen to some beautiful tracks, I had started the evening not wanting to talk and just play and listen to the tracks, but the vibes felt right to start talking about Zakir Hussain’s contributions and experiences of seeing him perform; and because he performed with so many musicians, it was easy to branch off and talk about the other musicians that were featured in the tracks, Aashish Khan the sarod player that passed a month before Zakirji being one of them! The audience were full of love once we finished, with everyone commenting that they really needed a session like that to really unwind mentally and re-centre themselves.

It was a really nice start to the Nāda Sonics—IRL sessions, and a huge thanks to Nishant for being so accomodating and a pleasure to work with! The next session will be in March, and hopefully we’ll be able to deliver these sessions every month; the format will change slightly, I’ve asked my friend Isaac to do a breathwork session before we start listening to the music, so that everyone can have some time to release their stress, process their emotions and calm their body, and allow them to really lose themselves in the music. I’ll have a link to the session here once tickets go on sale!

It was nice to get some space over the holiday period to get some rest, watch AFCON and work out a plan for 2026.

New Years Eve was spent with the Voices Crew at Mare Street Market and was lots of fun, I played in ‘The Den’ for an hour, and then got to enjoy a brilliant set from Collen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy to bring in 2026 with a bang!

Radio Shows — December

December had some really nice shows to end the year.

I did a retrospective of 2025 for Nāda Sonics, a lot of music was played, but also there were a number of conversations that were rich with information and nuance about raga music. I still can’t believe that I managed to have an in-depth conversation with Pandit Ajoy Chakrabarty about raga music! (also make sure you listen back to that episode!)

I did a guest mix for the wonderful Valentine Comar on the institution that is Worldwide FM on her breakfast show! She proposes a brief to djs to produce a mix about the topic ‘Breakfast in/at/with’ and then it’s the resposibility of the dj to work out a mix of tunes around their chosen subject - I chose "Breakfast in Hypnopompia": the surreal, dream-like state experienced when waking from sleep. I wanted to musically represent the transition from dreaming to breakfast, moving through a haze of sound into clarity and light. (It starts around 50mins into the show if you want to jump straight in!) I’ve been listening to WorldwideFM since it’s inception in 2016, so it was an absolute pleasure to be asked by Valentine to contribute a mix!

I took part in the Chatroom Crew Takeover on Marshmello’s Midnight Marauders show. If you don’t know, Marsha was the first dj to broadcast on NTS and is a legend on NTS. She has a show from 10:00-00:00 every 4 weeks on a Sunday night. The concept of the show was to handover selection duties to regular listeners in the chatroom, with 15mins for each mix. It was a complete honour to be asked to contribute to this, the selections from everyone that took part were of the highest order!

The final show of the year for me on Voices was one of my favourite! The brilliant Sarathy Korwar spent two hours with me and we talked about what is now his 10 years of releasing music. In those ten years he has made 7 of his own albums, 4 collaborating with others, as well as numerous remixes and other live projects and now is a grammy nominated artist for the project that came out at towards the end of 2025 with Anoushka Shankar and Alam Khan. It’s a packed show with a wonderfully in-depth discussion over 2 hours!

My final show of the year was covering for my friend Umé’s show ‘Caught in Between’ on LooseFM. LooseFM have a really nice studio in North Greenwich next to the O2 and the Design District, they’ve got some great shows on there, so check them out when you have time. I didn’t really have a plan for this show, other than starting off and ending with Beth Orton! It was really enjoyable for me. And then later that day I broke my tooth
:(

January Radio Dates

I’ll be back on Sister Midnight in February, but the shows on Voices and NTS are back this month! :)

20•01•2026/11am — Voices Radio: The World is Sound
31•01•2026/8am — NTS: Nāda Sonics

My Gigs

I don’t have anything booked in for January yet!

Music Recommendations

New year, new music! Jason Singh has a very nice new album out. Field recordings captured in the Reigando Cave in Japan, combined with contributions from various musicians results in an album with some beautiful ambient textures.

Ola Szmidt’s latest release came out in December, and is beautiful. A piece of work that celebrates restrictions, using a limited set of tools this is full of textures, loops, some gorgeous sounds and Ola’s beautiful vocals. 13 tracks that you should definitely spend some time with!

2026, plans are afoot, let’s go! 🙂 Thank you to all the people that subscribed and have read this newsletter in 2025.

Sway of the Verses