Name: Kush Arora aka Only Now
Occupation: Producer, sound artist
Nationality: Indian-American
Current release: Kush Arora's new album under the Only Now moniker, Timeslave III, is out now.
Hometown Recommendation: I’d recommend The Labyrinth in the Oakland Hills and Sibley Park. I love the Berkeley and Oakland hills, they’re special and worth a visit.  

If you enjoyed this Kush Arora interview and would like to stay up to date with his music and live dates, visit him on Instagram, and bandcamp.



There can be many different kinds of energy in art – soft, harsh, healing, aggressive, uplifting and many more. Which do you tend to feel drawn to most?

I am drawn to the most polarizing sides of it. Melancholic and nihilistic on one hand, on the other, extreme life force - often not happy - but fighting for the equilibrium of some type of universal balance or justice.

I’ll choose the latter, despite my obsessions with the dark arts. It’s the energies that are transcendent that I am most attached to.

When it comes to experiencing the sensation of “energy” as as a listener, which albums, performances, and artists come to mind?

A few albums in recent memory that come to mind, released over the last decade

Endless Wound by Black Curse

Seething, sulfurous layers of the perfect blend of all abominations - doom, death, black, atmospheric metal forms with pure mania.

It keeps the layers of psychosis high with shredding riffs, wild drum work, and total freedom.



Kadodi by Domadana Kadodi Performers

Beautiful drum work from Uganda on Nyege Nyege Tapes.

True energy through rhythm hypnosis. I mean some of this might be the wildest ‘locked grooves’ adjacent music I’ve ever heard. And the remixes take it over the top.



Rawskulled by Ak’chamel, The Fireblack Breechclouts Hides and Wagonsheets

Texas freaks come with some fourth world psych folk and manipulated instruments, dusting away centuries of Arabic and Eastern European strings and motifs.

Totally degraded, ceremonial madness that really hits a mystic nerve for me.



Notable performances:

Various performances over the course of the 90s by Zakir Hussain

The tabla master of our time harnessed physical energy with his hands in ways that one cannot imagine. Drums into tones, kaleidoscopic patterns, entrancing me completely.



Merzbow at Oakland Metro, 14th December 2018

Highly anticipated return of the master to the the Japanese home away from home for noise over the decades - the Bay fucking area!

Packed house - Masami Akita layering sheets upon sheets of glowing white noise. Shapeshifting, morphing left and right, a jigsaw orchestra of sounds moving in, out, to and fro; utterly relentless.



A real astral projection of sound which left me electrified for months to come, and reinvigorated me, as I first discovered Merzbow in 1997 or so, and was never the same since!

[Read our Merzbow interview]
[Read our Merzbow interview about improvisation]

KMRU at The Lab, San Francisco, 22nd March 2022

I remember being excited to see my acquaintance Joseph Kamaru open for Fennesz, another legend.



The hypnagogic field recording ASMR, paired with tonal shifts on the Lyra synth took me to one of the calmest states of mind I’ve ever experienced at a gig.