Name: Jason Singh
Occupation: Sound artist, nature beatboxer, producer, dj, curator, facilitator, performer
Nationality: Indian
Current release: Jason Singh is one of the artists at the South Asian Sounds Festival as presented by Asian Arts Agency. For his concert on March 10th 2024, Jason will collaborate with drummer, composer, and improviser Sarathy Korwar. More about that performance here.



[Read our Sarathy Korwar interview about Improvisation]
[Read our Sarathy Korwar interview about KALAK, and Indofuturism]
[Read our Sarathy Korwar interview about Drumming]

If you enjoyed this Jason Singh interview and would like to know more about his music and work, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.



Tell me a bit about you went about planning and programming your performances at the South Asian Sounds, please.

Well I wanted to bring together a group of musicians that would help reflect my experiences of growing up in the UK and also playing with musicians that I highly respect and admire.

I’ve been working closely with the team at Asian Arts Agency to create a collaborative evening with my good friend, Sarathy Korwar too.

What do you look forward to most in terms of playing at the festival?

Sharing the stage with incredible musicians who are able to articulate and communicate musical concepts, their personality and ideas that are possibly sometimes abstract but are nonetheless engaging and inspiring.

I am also really excited about all the other performances that are happening at the festival. Every time I look online and see all the various acts that are playing, it’s pretty mind blowing.

I am looking forward to being immersed in music from the South Asian subcontinent.

[Read our Turbotito and Ragz interview about the Magic of South Asian Music]

One of the festival's self-declared goal is to highlight the talent of the South Asian diaspora. Can you please tell us a bit about your own sense of identity as part of this diaspora and how it motivated you to take an artistic path? In which way do you feel does this identity concretely influence your creativity?

This is a very complicated question to answer succinctly in an interview. I think the older I get, the less I identify with a South Asian identity.

I happen to be a person who grew up in a Sikh South Asian family but I’ve been raised and very closely connected to St Lucian families and Jamaican families and those cultures have really been part of my life as much as growing up in an Indian household. There’s been a really close connection all of my life between Caribbean communities and South Asian communities.

My musical and cultural roots are based in African music and so that plays very much a part of my identity as much as the music that I was raised with in the culture of my family. It’s an ongoing exploration really, the whole question around my identity and this question of the diaspora. I guess I feel like I am a mix of many different cultures and many different inspirations. So it’s complicated, massively complicated.

The artistic path has been the path of music, that is something I have been wholly dedicated to my entire life and is something that helps me that enables me to express and communicate the things I experience as a living, human being trying to make sense of what this life is about and what it is and why it is. Yeah, it’s complicated.

[Read our Kahani interview about giving the South Asian diaspora a voice]

Does the prospect of playing at South Asian Sounds feel different to you compared to other festivals?

Yes and No. It will be incredible to be around languages I have heard my whole life but across different cities, countries and continents.

I guess it may also articulate that there is no such thing as “Indian”. South Asian culture is massively broad and complicated and diverse. It’s going to be brilliant!

The diversity and depth of South Asia's culture is fascinating and mind-boggling. How would you describe the current South Asian music scene and some of the most interesting artists to you personally?

I can’t really speak about the South Asian music scene as I don’t really know what that is. I know fore sure it’s more than what is experienced through  mainstream media.

There are many artists that I love and respect and am inspired by and I am still hugely inspired by a wide range of musical genres. Some of the artists of south asian heritage I am really into right now include Jaubi, Arushi Jain, Arooj Aftab, Nasha Records, Qasim Naqvi, Nikki Sheth to name but a few

[Read our Arooj Aftab interview]