Eastern Resonance 6th Harmonic, An Interview with Lalit

Eastern Resonance 6th Harmonic, An Interview with Lalit

by ESS Curatorial Fellow James Gui

Leading up to Eastern Resonance, the October 30 Quarantine Concert featuring experimental pop and club musicians from Asia and the diaspora, Curatorial Fellow James Gui sat down with each of the performers to get an idea of their background and thought process behind their music. The sixth and final feature is an interview with Lalit, a Brooklyn, NY based DJ and producer. Read on to hear their musings on spirituality, working with La Monte Young, and starting the Xiao Ma Party Controllers collective.

Let’s start out with a fun question. What are your favorite sounds?

I love the sound of coffee dripping. I like certain peoples’ voices. I love anybody who is really singing with their whole heart in it. One thing that really inspires me is sort of this silence that you hear in a state of meditation. I think some people interpret it as tinnitus, but it’s the ringing in your ears when there's nothing there but you're hearing something. High pitched tones and vibrations, like drones, machinery, they all have different textures and frequencies, but I'm so easily entertained because I just love a lot of sounds. 

I know what you’re saying. There's this one time I was hiking in Norway, I went to the summit of this hill and there was no wind, no animals. And it was just like, like pure silence. All I heard was that ringing.

Yeah. It's like a ghost of a sound. Honestly, the science of it is still very young. We don't actually understand a lot of how auditory phenomena work, even though we've been trying to for a long time. But so much of it is completely psychological, you know? You can actually hear it if you tune your ear to hear it.

In my experiences of qigong, I can hear energies when I'm working with them. I really love  listening for those, I guess they’re hallucinatory sounds, you know, but they really speak to me and dance and create all kinds of beautiful music in my mind. That's kind of where my inspiration comes from when I'm really making music for myself with drones. I'm kind of trying to capture these things that I'm hearing with beats, not necessarily percussive beats, but binaural beats. 

But I love the sounds of a big hollow drum too, I love impact noises. I kind of love it all, but I think maybe my thing is extremes. That's a complicated question. Hard one, actually! *laughs*

I just dove right in, but that was great! You mentioned all these things we’re trying to make sense of. I feel like science is one way that people try to approach things that we don't understand, but you study alchemy and all these different spiritual practices, which are a different way to understand all these things that we don't understand. So I'm wondering how that integrates into your music making or your understanding of music.

It's really everything. I think when I was younger I knew I liked music. I liked to sing, I just became obsessed with songs that I would hear, trying to get my hands on them and listening to them over and over again, trying to sing them and learn every instrument. It was something that really made me happy. 

I wasn't very social, I didn't really get along with my family, I was like the black sheep and always kind of like a weirdo at school and stuff. So that was, you know, my safe place, listening to music. I wasn't a spiritual person really, I was very confused about what my beliefs around my culture were. I was raised Buddhist, but I went to Catholic school and then I didn't really agree with either of those things. I was really staunchly atheist when I started learning more about philosophy and the topic of alchemy, which heavily influenced the history of science. 

But once I ran away from home, I had these explosions in awareness and consciousness that I think I had been suppressing when I was in an abusive environment and my relationship to music became so much less about escaping and more about transformation and spiritual liberation too, you know? It’s where I feel freedom and it's where I feel God.

And when I met La Monte Young, I think that really strengthened that practice and it made me feel less alone in it. Because what he taught was “sound is God”, Nada Brahma. It's this slogan that we lived by. And what we practice in Hindustani music--ragas and classical singing--is a form of sound yoga. It's a way to kind of engage with sounds on a daily basis as a sadhana, as a daily practice to become closer to God, to use these vibrations through your voice, through music and through these compositions that were created with the science of vibration and frequency and this cosmology in mind. It’s meant to bring you liberation and be an object of your devotion, an entire way of life. It's yoga, you know? Which is internal alchemy, a type of medical science, and an art all in one. So I was really lucky that I found that teacher to foster that attitude that I had. It continues to be a backbone for my whole life.

When was it that you met La Monte Young?

I started to work as a volunteer at the Dream House in 2010 and was doing that for a while. I think around 2011 he sort of just came up there while I was working and saw me there. Then after that called me and asked all these really uncanny questions like, “Are you a musician? Do you sing? Do you wanna learn Indian classical music?” And I was like, yeah, I am a singer and I am learning Indian classical music.

He was like, well, do you wanna learn with me? And I'm like, yeah, but I don't have money. I knew that they cost $300 a lesson, which I didn't have, which is why I was going to another  teacher, this guy in Jersey, an Indian man who I called “Uncleji” and paid a much more affordable rate to learn gazals and khayals, but I still couldn't really afford it. So La Monte asked if I wanted to learn ragas from him in exchange for labor around his home, which doubles as the Mela Foundation. And I was like, I go to school, but I guess I have time, I can totally do that. I thought that was a really interesting opportunity because people don't really get to do this guru-shishya parampara, guru-disciple relationship, it's very rare to have that opportunity these days.

It's something that was really important in all of these ancient traditions, and in Hindu culture. But you know, we live in a very Westernized and capitalist world. So people don't really have the luxury any more to just do things like that. Not just the luxury, but the intensity and the devotion. So yeah, I was like, this is kind of crazy living in New York city and working for free. But I was like, I'm in college anyways, this is a learning period of my life, you know? I was like, yeah, let's do it. He's like, so yeah, now you have to do everything that I tell you. I worked crazy hours, he's a very eccentric man.

We just kind of clicked, like as soon as he saw me, I think we just felt like there was something that needed to be done between us. And I really, really respect his artistry and dedication that he and his wife Marian put towards his guru [Pandit Pran Nath], who I still think is one of the best singers who ever lived. To learn from someone who learned from him, you know, I was like, yeah, let's go *laugh*.

But it was very intense, that's basically how it started, and the rest is history. We visited each other in dreams too. I was working in the Dream House and interacting astrally with him and the spirit of Pandit Pran Nath and even Pandit Pran Nath’s guru, even though I was like, La Monte is this important white guy and I'm just nobody. But I just felt very connected to his lineage and I think he could feel that and something resonated where we were just able to become friends. Even though he was my teacher, he felt he had things to learn from me too. It was a karmic exchange, and we always said service to guru is service to God. It brings me a lot of knowledge and blessings, obviously as well as giving him a lot of free labor. *laughs*

Was there anyone else who you had this influential, mentor-mentee relationship with?

I think that's probably the most influential person, because he was like a surrogate father to me. But once I kind of started to distance myself after about four years, I started being social and going out and meeting people in places where people were playing experimental music. 

I met a lot of peers, other musicians who I definitely had exchanges with where we inform each others’ musicianship and ability to listen.

I learned so many things from so many people, as soon as I branched out from practically being married to La Monte, but I never spent nearly as much time with any of those people as I did with him. I feel almost like a peer to peer balance now with me and La Monte, like he was never my spiritual master. He was my music teacher. And I think in a way he almost looked to me for spiritual guidance. So it was like this exchange where I think like we taught each other things and I think that's kinda how it always is. I went through this whole journey of like, you know, kill your idols *laughs*. I serve as a guide for people now, but I always learn from them too. I prefer to think of learning and influence as a horizontal process. 

So what do you think of “experimental music” as a term and classifier for the work that you do?

Working with La Monte, I noticed obviously that the world of experimental music was very Eurocentric and being in the position that I was, it felt oppressive, even though I love the concept of experimental music, I love experimental music, I love experimenting with music and sounds. To have your voice heard in that world is very difficult if you're not doing all these things that look like the already vouched for and already profitable and palatable forms of presenting it. I've always been somebody who likes to make very intense music, and very uncomfortable music. And it depends who you're making uncomfortable, you know?

And I feel like as a person of my experience, the people who I tend to want to make uncomfortable are people who hold a lot of power and tend to abuse it in society. So I'm always kind of in this contentious posturing *laughs*, with the world of experimental music, because I just think it's not that experimental if you're not conceptually pushing boundaries as well as sonically. To me, those are the same thing. So yeah, it's such an oxymoron. It's hard to have a community around it or a market and economy around it. It’s always going to contradict itself in some way. But it is something that I love, I don't need to become well-known or famous in it, it's just something that I do for myself and for my own mental freedom and spiritual wellbeing. 

I have a lot of wishes for things in general to be more just, you know, but those things are in the realm of politics and when it comes to just the realm of music, I've just come to a place where I'm tired of having to do both. For now I kind of just keep these things separate. Like I have my ideas about what should happen as far as resources and power and attention and the culture and community, but I've become somebody who doesn't really share my personal practice and my sounds and the way that I actually interface with “experimental music” quite so much anymore, because it didn't really get me anywhere. I wasn't finding the people who were actually relating to it. 

I think I should try to come back out of my shell more because I've done some healing, but it's something that I really care about. I think it's something that everybody should engage in, honestly. I think making music is almost meaningless if you're not trying to do something completely new with it, you know, like really expressing the fact that you're a person that's never existed before and what's gonna come out of you and your mind is going to be potentially like nothing you've ever heard before. I'm not that interested in sounds or genres that have already been made. I mean, every sound has kind of already been made, but the way to sequence them and contextualize them and set them in place is just such a beautiful opportunity for self expression and discovery, collective expansion. 

You're always finding out who you are, and I think that's a great thing to remember in artmaking. Like everybody, should enter that space of not knowing what's gonna come out, but just improvising, just singing, just doing whatever, I think it's such a therapeutic and cathartic process. But it's turned into this very bourgeois intellectual culture *laugh* I've read the essays, I've been a part of the discourse and the sound art history. I don't think anybody really owns experimental music as a tradition, I think everybody can and does do it and it's weird to try to create one linear timeline. 

But I think a lot of people make entire academic careers out of it, and it could be very cerebral, there's a lot of very interesting things to say about it. But that shouldn't make it into something high brow and inaccessible. It's so simple when it comes down to it, and it shouldn't be gatekept. It can't be. I don't know, there are resources, there are people who get paid who have a comfortable time just writing about experimental music and sound art and all that stuff, but I think it's full of shit, honestly. I resent the part of experimental music as a culture that is over-intellectualized. You just do it if you wanna do it, and there's a lot of ways to do it. All the theorizing that like white people try to do around this kind of stuff seems to come out of a need to defend their elevated status, validity, and capital. 

I feel like if anything, La Monte Young is the person who destroyed that paradigm. And he did it with music, the wisdom he gained from Black jazz musicians and Indian classical musicians he came across, the proximity he had to people like Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cale, and Henry Flynt. He wrote essays too and he explained himself, but I feel like part of what he wanted to do was he had this Shiva energy of bringing this end to this Western classical high-brow approach to electronic music while also unfortunately giving birth to like a whole new generation of it.

But I don't think that's what his intention was, you know? Like he wanted people to just come and experience it in real life, all of his work. And I think that's something that I carry with me too. It’s hard to translate, especially this esoteric and tantric stuff like that has to do with energy transmission. It’s really hard to translate that into words or even recordings. It makes much more sense in sound and light and direct experiences. And if you're trying to communicate sonic freedom or sonic experimentalism, boundlessness, it's not something that's gonna make sense in an essay. You can try, but the essay will only be supplemental to what it is you're trying to communicate. It's just funny that there's so much writing about this stuff, but it's like you could also be there instead. You could also just listen. You could just make some sounds, you know, like it's not that complicated. Like it's something that’s out there for everyone, you're not edgy or elite for being interested in it.

Exactly! So you’re also involved with the Xiao Ma Party Controllers collective. Could you tell me more about Xiao Ma and its trajectory?

Xiao Ma started with me and a handful of people that I became really close to while going to NYU. I think in that environment we realized we were all very much occupying overlapping identities of marginalization and needed to band together. We were all either first generation or immigrant students, came on scholarships, not having a lot of money, and on the LGBTQ and neurodiversity spectra in some way. 

It was a Chinese friend of mine Rej, she and my friend Yonathan just wanted some way to put out these creative side projects with some anonymity. Not having to put our names on it, not having to be committed to creating a whole career on it. We wanted it to have that anonymity and have more freedom to experiment, and privacy and the freedom to say certain things in a space of artistic creation. It was kind of a form of protection. So it was Xiao Ma, a vehicle, like a small horse, something very humble that would help us carry something forward, progressive.

So that was the idea. A lot of my friends were studying film and I was the one really into music. Our ambitions in film and other types of production like fashion were large, spicy, and were going to take a lot of fundraising. And we honestly didn't know how we were going to get around to making a lot of those projects. So the way that Xiao Ma became the party collective was just us throwing house parties, playing with the lights, doing experimental happenings, inviting people, anybody. Kind of like an open mic but wackier, not necessarily music, we just opened the door for all kinds of weird things to happen.

I think I had this idea that it was about healing, that transformation that can come from people letting go of their inhibitions and feeling like they have an audience, have some kind of protection and they can just do whatever they want. So we had parties and then eventually the parties, you know, needed music. And I performed my own music a lot of the time, I never really wanted to be a DJ. But I was always really into raving. So I feel like I was the resident friend of the group who knew anything about music. So then I became the DJ, they kind of just made me do it.

Because my music is not really palatable for large audiences, they were like, can you just play other stuff like for a party or whatever. Cause we need to get more popular if we're going to do any of these projects for real and raise money and get people to support our stuff. I went further into what I knew about techno from my Berlin days and that really kind of took off. 

It started out as Xiao Ma Party Controllers, but the “PC” was always sort of modular. It could mean either Party Controllers because we threw parties or it could be Production Corporation because they wanted to produce films and merchandise. I think also Publishing Company was one of the ideas because a lot of us were poets and we wanted to write and publish zines and stuff like that.

So it's still kind of a pipe dream because ever since we graduated we’ve all been in a lot of debt, we’ve all been working stupid jobs, and having a lot of trouble doing the things we want to do. So, you know, it was kind of a joke. But as I just kept hustling, it turned out that people like to see me DJ, so I kind of just ran with it and it mostly became this party at Bossa [Nova Civic Club]. Our parties have a certain vibe because we've prioritized certain things, we value certain things. We're all very close friends still, but we all live in different cities and work at our own pace on these passion projects and it's a vision that holds us together and brings others in as well.

Speaking of anonymity, you’ve had a few different monikers throughout your career. Does the name you put to your projects reflect your development as an artist?

I think I'm just somebody who reinvents myself a lot and it's just a natural progression. I played as my tumblr and facebook handle, VVEISS or vveiss nix since about 2015. I was very influenced by my time in Germany. I spent over 10 years learning German and studied German history and culture and it gave me a lot to chew on. 

I hadn't really come out as trans at that point. So I wanted something gender neutral, I guess, or masculine. I never had a solo name before that, I was just making art under my government name and then in the bands that I was playing in. 

So it was kind of a play on whiteness, since “weiß” means the color white, but also it’s the first-person conjugation of the verb “to know”. “Weiß nichts” translates to “i know nothing” and “vveiss nix” was just a stylized spelling of that. I was using wordplay and performance as a way to figure out how I felt about myself and how I have to navigate through the world. I figured I should try to have a name that sounds like I'd be a white man, if I wanted to get these DJ gigs. And I mean, it worked *laughs*. I've played with a lot of big names in the white techno world. And it wasn't just a DJ project, it was also for the music that I was making.

But there was this divide between the two and I feel like I kind of really wanted to DJ less in these very white spaces and go back to producing and writing more. So I thought using the name that I’d been going by that was given to me by La Monte, actually, could help to unify my original music and my DJing more. Because I never made techno, it was always like I made this other stuff and then I DJ’ed techno and often I could blend them together, but I was still trying to find my voice. So I think Lalit is just another step in that progression of me unifying all of these different parts of me as they mutate and mature. Lalit’s also actually a man's name. But you would only know that if you were Indian.

So for your next step in your music, what’s that sound like?

Honestly I'm still in the process of uncovering it. There will definitely be my vocals. The sounds that I've been working with have a lot to do with fighting, raving, and the folk music of my ancestors.

Where is your ancestry?

In Myanmar and in India, in south India, Tamil Nadu. I’m also part Chinese, and I'm heavily into Kung Fu so I’m bringing that energy too.

A big part of the reason why I curated this show is to work through some questions that I had about this current moment in the Asian diaspora. There’s all this interesting music happening at the margins all over Asia and I’m trying to piece together some sort of narrative about what it all means. For you, what does it mean to be on this lineup?

I don't think identity politics is the biggest concern for me because I've always tried to organize Xiao Ma more around values, but we do share a lot of experiences of being from different parts of the world. But I'm really excited. I haven't often been invited to do things on the basis of Asianness or Asian Americanness so I think it's really interesting. Trans people don't necessarily see me as one of them, East Asian people don't necessarily see me as one of them, South Asian people don't. For me it’s like, I'm all of these things, so it's healing for me to feel included in a group like this. I dunno, it's really cool. I'm just really excited to see all the other artists and what they do too.

I'm really excited to just be a part of conversation, find more like-minded people. I think also right now, more than I realized, it's so important for Asian diaspora people to learn how to relate to each other and learn more about each other. Cause we are not, you know, a monolith, there's just so much diversity and it's a lot of work to be able to find that solidarity across so many different cultural experiences, but there are things that we all obviously share. To try to put a name to it, it's a big task, but worthwhile.

Any final thoughts?

I mean there's so much more I could say honestly, but trying to keep it somewhat concise *laughs*. I think there'll be things in the music that hopefully also address what the questions  might not have gotten out of me.

Thanks so much for this conversation, I’m and excited for your set!

Thank you!