Part 1

Name: Debashis Sinha
Nationality: Indian-Canadian
Occupation: Drummer, producer, sound artist
Current Release: Debashis Sinha has two new releases out on Establishment: Adeva_v000_04 and Brahmaputra, both mastered by Peter Kirn.
Recommendations on the topic of sound:
AI Decolonial Manyfesto.
Technology as Cultural Practice.
A seminal paper that articulated a lot of ideas for me, “Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence” (Mohamed, Png, Isaac).

[Read our Peter Kirn interview]
[Read our Nerk & Kirn interview]

If you enjoyed this interview with Debashis Sinha, visit his website for further information and current news. We also recommend our previous Debashis Sinha interview.



Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound? What were early experiences which sparked it and what keeps sound interesting for you?

Since I was very young, I always wanted to explore and seek out things that were hidden from me. In my teens, it was the music of the 2 Tone and punk scenes, but also industrial and experimental music, or at least whatever I could find in those pre-internet days (shout out to Brave New Waves which schooled a generation here in Canada).

This seeking also took place in my basement, with my rag tag collection of drums and recording gear. I was constantly trying to do things “wrong” and then see what it sounded like, to see if there was a story hidden in the tools (although I didn’t articulate it so). Even now, after so many years, I’m constantly asking myself “what if …?” and trying things out to see the results.

I was never interested really in doing things the “right” way, but rather trying to find a way that was my own, or at least come to a place I enjoyed, through a path that was my own.

What's your take on how your upbringing and cultural surrounding have influenced your sonic preferences?

I straddled 2 worlds in a very real way, growing up in the small city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, pre-internet. There was the world of my neighbourhood friends, but also the world of South Asian immigrants (primarily Indian) that was growing in the city. When my father moved there, there were literally 3 or 4 men from the Indian subcontinent in the whole city, that was all. I grew up knowing every brown person in Winnipeg.

I think my seeking of “secret” or hidden sounds came directly from inhabiting 2 very different cultural (sound) worlds as I grew up. The sounds of these worlds were completely separate - there was 0 crosstalk between them, they were totally hermetic, which sounds impossible now. Apart from that, my father was an academic, so we spent significant amounts of time during my childhood living in India and Nigeria while he did development work.

So in essence I encoded over time a lived experience that embodied a knowledge of “more” as it pertained to sound (and culture in general) – maybe my being knew that the sounds I heard at any one time were only a small part of what existed in the world. Perhaps that is what drove and drives my desire to look for or uncover sounds and stories that are not immediately apparent in the archive or text.

Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage when it comes to your way of working with sound?

As an autodidact, I have always hesitated to consider myself as part of a tradition or lineage, because in Bengali and Indian culture “tradition” is a very powerful word. It has very particular meanings when applying to artistic practices as old as the ones you find in India and the area, and my own practice has never adhered to the historically and traditionally very strict boundaries that would result in defining oneself as a member of a lineage or tradition there.

I’ve had a difficult time navigating how to connect the way I worked with sounds and the materials I have been drawn to with my own cultural heritage. That relationship has resolved, or I suppose continues in the process of resolving – I know now that what I do with sound is inexorably part of my own experience of my heritage, and that experience and expression operates intersectionally with my interests and skills.

There are traditions of attention and artmaking from India that are encoded in my gestures, but do not limit or define them, and I think there are many artmakers from different cultures in the diaspora that are exploring in the same way. I build and claim my culture as I work, and a large community of artists are building and claiming with me.   

What types of sound do you personally prefer to work with? Are there sounds you reject – if so, for what reasons?

Lately I’m working a lot with machine learning and neural networks to generate content for my sound work – a new release on Establishment (Adeva_v000_04) is made almost completely from these outputs, and I continue to create sound and video works using these processes.

This exploration started after I was accepted to attend the 2019 MUTEK Japan AI Music Lab. Initially, I was not so interested in the outputs of the tools we looked at. As someone who has worked with sound for many years I questioned why I would want to use or work with sounds that had the character that many neural networks output, or the assumption (at the time, continuing today) that using machine learning and AI in the sound domain meant trying to “reproduce” or classify music.

Upon reflection, though, I started to consider the process and the collaboration of working with neural nets, the workflow and concepts that can be involved in making this material, and realized there was something to explore there. It became apparent to me that the larger workflow was imprinting ideas and a state of the art on to the audio material that needed to be considered and folded into the final work, a kind of DNA of process that had something to say about what I was producing, which I really loved.

So while I initially wasn’t keen on the character of those outputs, I came to realize that there are a set of more integrated and complex issues at play, and engaging with those ideas has expanded my aural palette in general.

This process is also part of the materials I use that are not directly connected to machine learning and NNs – field recording devices, the content of field and studio recording sessions, interacting with and exploring traditional percussion instruments and non-traditional soundmakers all carry with them some process of imprint and intent both on my part and the part of the tools. Working with or at least considering  these embedded root-level imprints is something that I’ve always been interested in. The workflows of machine learning just seem to energize that conversation for me, probably because it is so new.

Further, I have always been interested in culture as a process of production or knowledge sharing. So this use of technology as cultural practice is something that is very important to me.

Where do you find the sounds you're working with? How do you collect and organise them?  

I organize my sound worlds in my head to some degree – I think of them as archives, I suppose. Besides them being a collection or repository of audio, they’re also a collection of texts, with stories and intent behind them. And taken together, they also have an overarching meaning / intent / concept / utterance (as archives do). I speak of this as if the material has form and content – it doesn’t, really, not at first. They are more like seeds, I think.

In its initial stages, starting on a project means starting on creating an archive, even if it’s nebulous and ethereal, even if it has no audio in it as yet. There’s a story or a line or a gesture that has surfaced through some process that I want to follow, and that story/line expresses itself through sound(s) and the act of working with them – some sounds I find, some I make, some occur when being searched for, made or found.

Of course I collect sounds and sound effects and field recordings and musical ideas and what not. And that collection comes in handy in many contexts, in theatrical sound design for example. But when I’m looking for something, looking for a way through an idea for a larger project, I start by building that archive in my mind, formulating and discovering ideas that eventually get translated into sound.

Some artists use sounds as a means for emotional self-expression, others take a more conceptual approach or want to present intriguing sound matter. How would you characterise your own goals and motivations in this regard?

For me, the story comes first, but of course the story is borne of my own desires or curiosity. I feel like (or hope that) my solo work is part of a larger and longer and intense tradition of storytelling, going back through time to the first beings that shared imaginings to each other. I really do feel that – that the stories I try to tell are connected to that tradition.

I happen to use microphones and computers, but I approach constructing those sounds in that light of being a storyteller. Be they rhythmic / danceable or more abstract and textural, there’s always a story in the heart of it, or at least that’s my intention.

I feel like I do or want to use sound in all the ways you outline in your question, but it’s a dynamic relationship that changes moment to moment in response to the imperatives of the story I’m trying to tell.

Which tools have been most important and useful for you when it comes to working with and editing sounds?

There are more knowledgeable folks than me that can speak to the historical development of sound tools over the years, but certainly digital audio editing has been huge for me in finding my voice – not even processing, but just being able to easily cut up sound and find new relationships or meanings in the archive.

I’ve never learned to cut tape, and frankly it kind of terrifies me to destroy material so thoroughly. It would make sense if I was doing work which was directly associated with that action, like the chance operations Cage applied to tape edits, but that’s not what my work is about.

I certainly don’t think I could be thinking about the things I do, or have been able to develop myself as a storyteller, without the ability to digitally edit sound.

Many artists have related that certain sounds trigger compositional ideas in them or are even a compositional element in their own right. Provided this is the case for you – what, exactly, is about certain sounds that triggers such ideas in you?

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere here, story is what leads me through the gestures and material I need for a project. At any one moment, I’ve many different seeds and strands floating around my brain, not all of them fully understood or articulated or even consciously known.

When I encounter a sound it more often than not connects the dots for me, brings one strand to the fore or tells me that that sound belongs to this cloud, or that idea, or this other story I’ve been thinking about over there. When it’s time to work on that story, for whatever reason when that story has gained enough power to float to consciousness, I’ve already gathered an archive – maybe not explicitly or with any sort of organization on a hard drive, but an archive nonetheless, floating somewhere in the ether or in the back of my mind.

Sometimes a sound that comes out of a process of engineering or experimentation has its own power but no place. These sounds I set aside. When the time comes to explore a story, the archive comes to life, and the strands I’d placed in hibernation wake up. Of course I will never get every detail that led me to that story, but if a sound doesn’t wake it up, regardless of its power, I wait for the right time. The stories tell me when they want to be told.