Swaying with the Verses

Massive apologies… two newsletters in and I’ve already missed my scheduled date and become super late with this one number three, I shall make sure the next one is on time, because I don’t want anyone to miss out on the listings, always check my website for the latest dates and gigs!

March was spent in a lot of dark rooms in south London listening to some amazing djs as well as visiting ‘lates’ at the V&A and Whitechapel Gallery. I have to take photos to remember where and what I did, otherwise it all disappears in a haze, but this also means I have enough photos to add to this newsletter and stop it from being wall-to-wall text!

I went to the London Loft Party hosted by the amazing Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy, for those that haven’t been, Colleen plays the most amazing tunes on a sonically amazing sound system, with an appreciative crowd that are more like a family it really is an amazing uplifting experience.

I went to see Ben Lukas Boysen at Corsica Studios, supported by Kayla Painter it was a deep ambient listening experience with some flith thrown in, go see both if you ever get chance!

Whitechapel Gallery Lates had a specially curated evening of events by Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) to accompany the Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker exhibition currently showing there. The exhibition was an exploration of personal suffering and racial discrimination with pieces shown made throughout his career, a mixture of techniques and approaches makes for a varied experience and well worth seeing. The multimedia work to ‘upload his conciousness to a computer’ is staggering considering when it was made! B.O.S.S. curated film screenings, performance and dj sets throughout the evening. The performance by Kobi Essah was brilliant.

Zar had a launch party for his new ep ‘Light Stain at Dawn’ on CDR at The Standard Hotel, a wonderful event, with dj sets from Amrisha, Almass Badatt, Poison Zacora and me; and chat between Zar and Tony Nwachukwu about the creative process and freedom given to Zar with the financial backing CDR gave him to create and release this project! There was a full play-through of the ep and it sounded wonderful on the Library Lounge’s sound system! Definitely get a copy, and there’s also a book being released that Zar wrote about the inspirations and processes during its creation.

The V&A Late was curated by Diet Paratha and featured dancing, fashion, art, talks, screenings and a big party in the entrance hall. I’ve been wanting to see the dancer/choreographer Usha Jey for sometime now, her social media and youtube channel have been blowing up and going viral for some time now, she created ‘Hybrid Bharatham’ mixing the south Indian dance tradition of bharatanatyam with hip-hop. Abhinaya, the art of expression, encompassing the use of body language, facial expressions, and vocalizations to convey emotions and narratives is used to tell the story of hip-hop songs giving you an experience of a traditional dance, but with a contemporary subject matter. Out of everything that was on, this was the one thing that everyone wanted to see, with a line snaking from outside the The Rapheal Cartoons all the way to the entrance hall, with around 800 people in the line at one point. It was well worth the wait though. The performance is now up on Youtube, but is definitely worth seeing live!

There was a reggae/dub event at Boxpark, Croydon, that Shri (who I interviewed on my Voices Radio show last year in November) told me about, he was performing with the amazing trombonist Dennis Rollins, the selectors were playing some fire, the mc was brilliant and there was a wonderful crowd, there are some great events all over London if you can find them!

Raga Music Listings— April 2025

My website swayoftheverses.com has listings all the way to July, so always check that for gigs happening in the next few months, I’ll make sure these are posted up as early as I find out.

I had drafted this section when I started writing this newsletter last month, so just for having that record in place, I’m going to leave it as it was written!

This month see’s quite a few interesting projects; ‘Guru Nanak’s Message of Peace through Music’ is a whole day of events at the Barbican Centre presented by Darbar, celebrating the message of the 1st Sikh Guru, with music, lectures, film screenings and much more. ‘Rise - past, present and future’ sees Nitin Sawhney curate a day of performances at the Roundhouse with young musicians from around the country performing!

5 April 2025 / 18:00
Legacy – An evening of Tabla and Kathak
Rajkumar Misra – tabla
Saberi Misra – kathak
Hiranmay Mitra – harmonium
The Bhavan, London
Book Now: £20-£15

6 April 2025 / 14:30
Guru Nanak's Message of Peace Through Music
Eeshar Singh - santoor
Gurprit Chandan - jori
Barbican Centre, London
Book Now: £15

6 April 2025 / 17:00
Guru Nanak’s Message of Peace Through Music
Amrita Kaur
Anantvir Singh
Aruna Sairam
Giridhar Udupa
Gurdain Rayatt
Momin Khan
Patri Satish Kumar
Surdarshan Chana
Zeeshan Ali
Barbican Centre, London
Book Now: £100-£20

10 April 2025 / 19:00
Dastan – E – Karn
Mahmood Farooqui – vocal
The Bhavan, London
Book Now: £17

11 April 2025 / 19:30
Riverside Ragas: Amrita Kaur
Amrita Kaur – vocal
The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, Gateshead
Book Now: £22.50-£11.30

12 April 2025 / 13:00
Midday Mantra: Vaisakhi Celebration
Kaviraj Singh – santoor & vocal
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Book Now: £5

22 April 2025 / 19:00
RISE-Past Present & Future Talent
Anjali, Anisha, Anika, Subhan, Amrita, Sahib, Ahmed, Dilraj, Hashim, Ikjot, Sukhraj, and Preet
Roundhouse, London
Book Now: £65 – £25

27 April 2025 / 17:30
Carnatic music concert
Lavanya Sundararaman – Vocal
Baluraguraman – violin
M. Balachander – mridangam
Dr. Abiram Sahadevan – kanjira
The Bhavan, London
Book Now

*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.

Radio Shows

Last month on Voices I had a bumper three shows, on my own ‘The World is Sound’ show, I spoke to the amazing Niraj Chag; we initially met at the Chila Burman exhibition launch party at the Imperial War Museum, Manchester, for which he composed the soundtrack. An amazingly prolific composer, with numerous albums to his name, but even more score/soundtrack work for tv, theatre and dance, and very inspirational to see a south asian composer working with such diverse projects

I then covered for my friend Rosanna Dean and her show ‘Sounds from the Studio’ which gave me the opportunity to play a completely different flavour of music, she draws from so many different musical styles for her show it’s a very nice freeing experience; what was meant to be a 2 hour show, turned into a 3 hour show when the dj after was unable to make their show too. I decided to play some ambient music, jazz and grabbed a load of cds from my collection, including a lot of free cds from WOMEX, and randomly picked tracks from those! I really need to do a tracklist for this show!

And then the hour after, my other friend Leopold was unable to make his show ‘Natural Element’, so it turned into a 4 hour contiuous session! Leopold plays electronic music on his show, so it was a very nice excuse to play some downtempo electronic music for an hour!

This months Nāda Sonics on NTS focussed on musicians playing stringed instruments and it was nice to explore a few instruments that had been derived from the rubab; the sarod, the sursringar as well as the rubab itself. I throughly enjoyed this session!

And finally I did my ‘The World is Sound’ takover on G-Shock radio, I invited two wonderful musical people in Ume and Kacper Pieta. I played 2 hours of jazz, hip-hop and ambient selections that I had been listening to over the previous two months.

Ume is a singer and musician, she played some beautiful music with selections from her Moroccan and Japanese heritage, but also other influences from her travels and studies, as well as singing a few of her own tracks live! It was her debut as a radio dj, but you wouldn’t think so from this show, some really nice stories interspersed with some amazing music!

Kacper is a dj based in Manchester, he normally plays jazz, japanese city-pop and world music, but took this opportunity to play some brilliant selections from the soundtracks of video games growning up, as well as some dnb tracks, with some excellent commentary.

I’m really enjoying G-Shock sessions and being able to musically delve into the music other artists listen to in their own time and have that conversation about why it means so much to them!

Voices Radio

NTS

G-Shock Radio: The World is Sound

Next on:

Voices— The World is Sound: Tuesday 15 April 2025 / 11:00
NTS— Nāda Sonics: Saturday 26 April 2025 / 08:00

Music Recommendations

New Photek… nothing else needs to be said!

Okay… this track is great, there are plenty of videos on youtube dissecting the lyrical rap flow, as well as the instrumental layers; this video though, is a complete insanity, it’s shot so well, and there is this visual celebration of martial arts, dancing, drumming and culture from India that gets you so hyped!

My Gigs

I missed out on annoucing a few gigs, due to my tardiness with getting this newsletter out, but I recorded a mix at Radio 1001 and also spent a few hours with Kit Lockey one of the founders of Voices Radio; playing music at Spacetalk, which was super enjoyable.

2 May - Ambient Session / 19:00 / Sauna Social Club, Peckham, London

4 hours to explore everything in the ambient, downtempo, lofi, raga, blues zone! Last month’s session was so much fun, Ume and Kacper joined me after G-Shock and played an hour each, before jumping in the sauna! It was so much fun… in a very chilled downtempo kind of way! :) I am really enjoying these sessions!

I hope this isn’t too long, I’m still finding my writing style and also maybe I should stop going to so many things, because then I have to write about it all, but it would be rude not to with so much on offer! Thank you for reading, follow me on Instagram for any random gigs that I might be doing that pop-up and see you next month, on time, spoilers, there were more amazing gigs!