https://anishakhemlani.com anisha khemlani Thu, 03 Apr 2025 06:33:56 +0000 https://anishakhemlani.com en https://anishakhemlani.com/Home Mon, 25 Jul 2022 01:52:41 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/Home anisha khemlani *&nbsp;︎ anishask60@gmail.com **READING&nbsp; ROOM** founder &amp; curator: –– digital library workshop ig: &nbsp;@readingro.om Exhibition: APOPHENIA @ Ritual, Penang, June 2025 Bilocation Essay Chong Yan Chuah ASD*ASD (Algorithmic Societal Disorder) @ Hin Bus Depot, Penang, Dec 2024 &amp; REXKL, May 2025/ Sept 2025‘Desserted’ PoemTheo Albakri COBRINCA ICEPUNK @ Hin Bus Depot, Penang, Dec 2023&nbsp; Published: [BOOK] UNSCORED, AMORPHOUS (Essay Collection), The Key Press, London, 2025 [DIGITAL] i-D Magazine How to get into... 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Mr.Hennessy unfolds the latest fragrances Apple Brandy and L’Heure Verte by Kilian Essays: Blue Prisoner of the Moment Notes App # The Muse GOD IS DEAD Was I British in My Past Life The Collective Conundrum of a Lonely Endurance https://anishakhemlani.com/Notes-App Mon, 09 Sep 2024 13:31:48 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/Notes-App Notes App # <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa7241f94-fb39-4f8e-9574-21c33232a1d8_788x976.png" width="788" height="976" style="width: 705.188px; height: 873.431px;">‘The Jacket’ by Mark Bochu I often think about those who left here and don’t look back until years later when a whole new city is built. I wonder what it feels like to not be attached to somewhere that holds your formative memories. I wonder what it means to be wired in that way. I told myself to wait, to catch up with this man I only know online. It has been five years since he left and came back to the city where we first matched when I was just 18. To him, I present as a constant, a piece of furniture and a figurine. A characteristic of his adolescence. I told myself to wait, to write this piece with a specific lens. But to wait is to be attached and I’m trying to learn what it means to… Here’s my favourite quote about waiting: “Am I in love? Yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game.”—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments https://anishakhemlani.com/Blue Fri, 07 Feb 2025 03:43:39 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/Blue Blue <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc87da152-9d0b-4865-ac6a-9fd2a11f7310_1064x716.jpeg" width="1064" height="716" style="width: 908.109px; height: 611.096px;"> London is grey even when it should be Blue. It is Saturday, after lunch. The sun hovers, full up. 32 degrees today, the hottest of summer, nearing the middle of September. The houses, their tarmacs, lamposts and driveway cars glitter in the heat. Everyone is outside, hardly dressed, numbing themselves with pimms. Sun drunk, snooze, preparing for Sunday and then, Monday. The carpet-clad floors hold heat, keeping houses warm. It’s English; no one thought of heatwaves in Victorian times. You were in yellow. Yellow is made up of red and green pigments in equal parts, and green is made by mixing yellow and Blue. Apparently, the colour Blue doesn’t so much exist in nature, only in the seas and skies, or that’s why they think ancient Greeks didn’t name it first. Blue is my favourite colour. When I joined primary school, they let us choose our sports house, and I chose Blue. But after a fight with two older brothers and one older cousin, I was relegated yellow where I met you. Yellow was first made in India, where cows would only eat a diet of mangoes to collect bright piss, to distil and dry into yellow pigments of bliss. Mangoes are my favourite fruit. The Greeks did not name Blue first because it seems humans could not see it until modern times. The Egyptians found Blue whilst mining Afghanistan around 6000 years ago. They extracted Blue from the highly precious stone, lapis lazuli, which made Blue an expensive and rare sight for several years. When you look at old paintings, bright Blues and yellows come far and few unless you are a Renaissance painter, Raphael, paid to adorn the Virgin Mary in her Blue cloak. In 2006, Goldsmiths University figured maybe the Greeks didn't have Blue because they couldn’t see Blue just as maybe I couldn’t see you? They called on the Himba tribe in Namibia to test their theory; the Himba tribe did not have a word for you either. So they showed them screens with different dots of green and dots of you. People in the tribe couldn't see the dots that were Blue. The Egyptians buried Cleopatra with Blue stones to warm her eyes. Your eyes were Blue too, but like the skies and ocean, not natively so. They were pale like they’d been washed too many times by the refracted light and impressions of red, yellow or green?&nbsp; Blue amplified when you recalled a story about cycling by a double-decker bus. You said it made you feel like a whale next to ocean waves. If you didn’t embrace Blue, it would engulf you.At low tides, Blue smells like a chemical called dictyopterenes, a sex pheromone produced by seaweed eggs to attract their sperm.&nbsp; On nights I can’t sleep, I listen to relaxing sounds with titles like ‘Ocean &amp; Rain’. I lay awake that night listening to Blue tapping against my window, wishing I’d look out to you throwing rocks, carrying a boombox. As Blue settled, the droplets tinkled like a soprano, leaving only a faint print of Blue’s hand where it pressed against the window. It looked like tears when I tilted to see a rimming shadow of black. I briefly encountered black on the edges of your nailbed. In a conversation about Blue, you gave me a mission to pinch tobacco you promised to roll. I thought I smelt the pillowing softness, hissing between our parted lips. Then you returned my cardigan, and, afraid it might fade, I sniffed till my head hurt so I could trap it behind a chronic migraine. Migraines from when you and I ate M&amp;M's till our tongues turned Blue in year 3 when you taught me how to say the word ‘fuck’ till I cried cold, and Blue smelt like menthol. Menthol exhibits unique, multiple, and paradoxical sensory effects when applied externally to the skin or mucous membranes. Menthol application at low doses produces a cooling sensation, whereas at higher doses, it evokes burning, irritation, and pain. https://anishakhemlani.com/The-Muse Mon, 09 Sep 2024 13:31:42 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/The-Muse The Muse <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0cea4937-ddf5-483c-b35e-0b510c9e1923_1258x842.png" width="1258" height="842" style="width: 705.188px; height: 471.994px;"> There is a superstition, if your right eye twitches it is a sign from the universe that something significant is about to happen. Most websites tell me that the interpretation varies between cultural beliefs and traditions but I still don’t know which ones. Some associate right eye twitching with imminent luck, forthcoming success and even financial gain. While some say it could indicate potential conflicts and shit-talking– my mum says that about sneezing. They even think the duration and frequency of each twitch, a crucial factor to determine whether it is minor and temporary or major and on the horizon. It is my left eye that is twitching, at a rapid pace. I woke up today with dead arms, strangled by seven silver bangles on either side. Lacy panties, smudged kajol and overly dry lips, I had never felt more like Effy Stonem than I do at this moment. I had a coffee and half an onion paratha for breakfast observing last night’s funk, sitting at the dinner table 30 minutes past 8 am.It is so unfortunate that unless disabled by your line of sight, it becomes the source of one’s spiritual condition, “windows to the soul,” a primary between a world with and a world without. My unborn child will be the apple of my eye, the pumpkin was so big I couldn’t believe my eyes, that woman so beautiful she’s easy on the eyes and&nbsp; ‘Super Size Me’, the film about fraudulent fast food is eye-opening but I still eat McDonald’s after a late night because love, love is blind.&nbsp; At age 11, I watched a grown woman sleep on a sunlounger by the pool below me. Our eyes don’t meet and no one blushes but my world shrinks into the four walls of my parents’ master bedroom. I wonder how old she is. If I’m a pervert. I wonder if I sliced an apple real slow and thin, she’d let me put it on her tongue. I wonder when she bleeds if she’d let me lick her up if she tastes like ketchup. I catch my pudgy face reflecting, I squirm, draw the curtains and hide under my blanket until dinner is ready. I saw my cat see himself at 6 months old, he pounced and snarled until eventually at 7 or 8 months he recognised this similarly spotted cat as himself. Till today, I try to show him us cuddling in the mirrors all around my house. His eyes widen and he often turns away. It leaves me a little bit ashamed. Henri Wallon was a psychologist who studied reflections and noted, that chimpanzees quickly lost interest at first sight. Still, human infants became enthralled, even devoted to exploring these connections– between body and image.The year is 2007, It’s an atypical morning for the Kardashian crew, our dear Khloe Kardashian rides in the backseat of a jeep on the way to jail for violating her parole after she got a DUI. Kris is on the edge of her seat, she suggests they dine at IHOP first and is quickly shut down. Next to her, Kim is taking photos of herself, on a digital camera turned backwards. Kris snaps, “Kim, would you stop taking pictures of yourself? Your sister is going to jail!”But Kim, she’s a rebel. She replies, “It’s for documentation.” A star is born.Sometimes if I can get the angle just right, people say I look like Kourtney… I ask Quora why I look differently in mirrors. User Amaan Aslam from New Delhi tells me, “You can never see what you look like. Only other people can see what you look like. Every mirror reflection, every photograph, every painting is merely an image of your face. You always see a laterally inverted image of yourself. You never see your true self.”For this reason, I pray to never meet my reply guys, the man who behaves in an overly familiar manner but I’m barely acquainted with. Their psyche piques my interest, especially those who live across the world, in LA or on isolated farms somewhere in Australia. I wonder where they derive pleasure from complimenting me and only sometimes receiving a double-click heart back. Is it the knowledge of providing me with the pleasure of being desired? A 29-year-old man is narcissistic and jaded beyond his years. Distilled in his room are markers of his privilege– portraits of a tall, thin and old white man splinter the walls– they are his grandfather, enneagram of his inherited wealth. He makes fun of me for not knowing the patterns on his curtains, “you know nothing about culture!” he’s beaming. His job is to help people update the insides of conserved buildings in London. To me, he is morally bankrupt, aesthetically puerile and emotionally dislocated. But in bed, he only wants to successfully serve like a perverse paean of his self-isolation, a coping strategy for his lonely heart, for when he is somehow both too much and yet not enough. He wants to cuckold.I am playing Mortal Kombat as an athletic warrior versed in martial arts, fighting against a peroxide-blonde female ninja. Have you seen that episode of Black Mirror? S05E01: Striking Vipers. Two old college friends Danny and Karl reconnect through a VR version of their favourite video game, and then they fuck, virtually.Desire is cuckold by language. A manifestation of the unconscious and the inexpressible. “I love you, but because inexplicably, I love in you something more than you,” wrote Lacan. The objet petit a– a projection of ego made to symbolise otherness. To this cuckold-narcissist-intellectual man of 2024, there is nothing more than being gratified by the fabrications of his mind. It is not that he annihilates himself but transfers himself onto me. When he sees me pleased by (an)Other at the degree of his staging the event, he becomes so invested in my orgasm by becoming the orgasm itself, his perceived lack reflects onto the Other who lacks the knowledge of his control, this is the psychosexual pleasure; jouissance. Ce n’est pas ça. “It is rather you who are cuckolded; you are yourself betrayed in that your desire has slept with the signifier.”Do you get it? Till 20, you get fucked. Frontwards, backwards, sidewards. At 21, you meet them, they look like romance and speak like comedy, they make music that is demure and they conjure up the image of a sort of dignified puppy. They are Ideal. For some reason, the sex doesn’t count… but still, they’re kind of like them and them’s kind of like you… Until a breakdown, you-dont-actually-know-me type fight, you cry and there it is the final final fantasy oooooweeee.&nbsp; You like this movie, The Unattained Love. You repeat a mantra into your mirror daily, “catching flights not feelings!” Right? Every 3 months you try to go… Somewhere and in the last week you try to find... Someone. You become obsessed, you dream about them, they were probably the one. I LOVE! I LOVE! I see you are me and I am you. I LOVE! And you learn, they cannot be reached except to raise it as nothing: (a)Voiding Love. They will remain an enigma and in that gap, there is freedom to suspend meaning. It is impossible to be desire when you ultimately do not know what kind of desirable aspect to project, you are only left with the dignity of yourself. They are a muse and you fill the gap with an egoistic drive. A drive to realeyes your own desire. *In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the analyst’s role is to be an object of transference, to be ‘love’ and so, real, truth. This is achieved by the degree of separation from the patient, purposefully imposed by the analyst. The analyst is an enigma. In the first moment of transference, the subject’s particular fantasy is traversed and the analyst as a supposed subject of knowledge gets de-idealised. In the second moment of separation, love’s effect of imaginary coherence gets stripped away to reveal the pure drive of the subject. A muse is an object of desire/love made to inspire by being kept wholly silent. A muse lends to an artist’s narcissism which always exists in a desiring love, one loves oneself in love, one encounters here only that, the other must be useful, to serve one’s ideals and in so far as this is a longing for, love becomes a yin-yang. Again, a muse is an object of desire/love made to inspire by being kept wholly silent. A muse is denied any real active participation in the artist’s creation, away from the symbolism of language… The muse inspires by metaphysical penetration, to gestate and bring forth, from the womb of the mind. As James Baldwin wrote, “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”The muse’s silence or even non-existence acts as an agent to reveal the real. Except I think there is a moment of hyper-idealisation as the muse’s inadvertent role as a denier of reciprocation gives them weight as a subject of ‘knowledge’ or ‘power’ in the egoist mind.&nbsp; *The most common triggers of eye twitching are: Alcohol intakeBright lightCaffeine excessEye strainFatigueIrritation of the eye surface or inner eyelidsNicotineStressWind or air pollution I remember I had not drunk an adequate amount of water in 4 days, I had only been consuming wine, caffeine and cigarettes. If we surrender ourselves uncritically to this profusion of images, we risk ‘overstraining’ our sense of sight and losing the connection between perception and cognition. *Lacan says the patient does not enter analysis to remove the symptom, they come because the symptom has stopped ‘working,’ stopped reliably producing jouissance like it once did. The patient does not want to change, they’ve already changed and they want to go back. https://anishakhemlani.com/Prisoner-of-the-Moment Mon, 09 Sep 2024 13:23:29 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/Prisoner-of-the-Moment Prisoner of the Moment <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7ea10d2c-30e2-4f2d-b058-27a78488ef67_5862x3914.jpeg" width="1456" height="972" style="width: 705.188px; height: 470.771px;">‘unemployment’ (2016) by John Kline My brother flew into Mumbai at 7:30 pm. My mother, father and I have been here for at least five hours more. Not to say this is significant to our holiday but only that there existed a space in time– a pressure point. In those five extra hours, my parents and I resumed our routine as Mother, Father and Daughter when we found our bearings within the 20-minute radius of our abode in Bandra, a North Western suburb of Mumbai. I passed the mansions of Bollywood’s elite overlooking the weekend beach dip of their devotees, some of whom, I hear often take it upon themselves to guard the gates of their lord’s manor; filming CCTV footage on their phone cameras just in case. We ate at a restaurant called ‘Mini Punjab’ where the term, ‘mini’ was not ornamental like in its rap equivalent, ‘Lil’ but an actual declaration of size. My father and I bickered. I remained on my Mother’s team even if she remained firmly in the role of his wife. We toured the markets nearby and I bought some oxidised jewellery before returning to the hotel for a surprisingly flavourless chai. Finally, at 6:45 pm we left to receive my brother at the airport. He spoke softly, smiled brightly and stomped lightly. As the days progressed, I watched him adopt the roughness in their tone, the frown directed my way and the tenacity of each step sorely wearing off the glue at its seams. The aura around him dissipated into something less than Blue; the void filled and then not there all over again. This convergence in being represented a process in time, an interval of something like a suspended thought… It is not that his naturalised state had gone forever. It was there, it had just not arrived yet. A separated entity kept in hesitation. He, the traveller, is our subject who fidgets through his first three days and I finally see in him what I have always felt but could not observe correctly in my emergence from elsewhere. That there are some of us who easily dissolve into the reflections of others, revealing ourselves in the second person as we assimilate to a speech, a stance, or a way to hold our hair on a sunny day. We become the “easily adaptable to different situations and people” of our resumé’s ‘About Me’ sections. Yet, there is a tension writhing inside, insisting against an otherwise perceived rigid sense of self. This is the instinctual epigenetic tightness that does not know how to escape from our chest, unable to pinpoint the moment of its geographical breakdown. Leaving us to suffer a momentary lapse in… as we cross time and simultaneously create it as a brain-nullified NPC, mammal to sort of compassionate human/machine hybrid. We’ll eventually emerge by rote while enduring a sense of loss. And it is only at the point of our departure that he, the traveller, will arrive there again. Finding the self as the self transpired, beyond. https://anishakhemlani.com/GOD-IS-DEAD Mon, 09 Sep 2024 13:25:22 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/GOD-IS-DEAD GOD IS DEAD&nbsp; <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F34a4a8d5-97b2-4cb6-ac64-e952492ff683.heic" width="1456" height="1092" style="width: 705.188px; height: 528.891px;">I am lying atop the sunken-in side of my 13-year-old mattress. I can feel the springs jabbing into my back… his image soars for a split second before I realise the once period-stained sheets now resemble the salmon-pink of my Caucasian friend’s dusted elbows. I am sore from the previous day’s travel and a 1.5-year stint in Melbourne. The walls start to close in around me, whispering their corroded memories of what once happened inside my Barbie-gleamed prison cell. I drop deeper, cocooning between the comforter, leaving no space for gaps. I lift my legs and place them above the traces left behind from a similar day’s past. I type, “The Bear soap2day” into my browser tab and click on the first link. At the end of season 2 episode 7, Richie (Cousin) finds Chef Terry peeling a pile of mushrooms on her own. She invites Richie to join and he does. He asks her why she does it, at this stage in her career. She replies, “I think it is time well spent.”She tells Richie about her father, how she mostly learnt about him after his death from finding a stash of tour notebooks he’d left behind. In it, he described "the palm trees he’d seen or the escargot he had tried or the time the ocean looked purple”. She says, “The way he wrote everything, it was like a reminder; don’t forget this moment or don’t forget this interesting strange detail. Hundreds of entries he’d sign each off the same every time…”Chef Terry gets called to duty before finishing her sentence but in cinematic satisfaction, Richie turns around to face the placard hung up above the kitchen clock of America’s finest restaurant.“Every Second Counts”.The inflight serving of chicken satay and peanut sauce gurgle upward, spilling out in dribbles onto my already-manky keyboard. “Cringe” I mutter under my breath as I cling to the bolster beside me. Grabbing tissues from the headboard behind me, I begin to wipe up the mess till I remember my own… Crawling across the room I grab my phone to open up my voice memos.‘New Recording,’ 29th June 2022, 30th July 2022, ‘Dryburgh St,’ 1st August 2022, ‘Racehorse Road,’ 21st August 2022, ‘Beurepaires,’ 27th November 2022, ‘Royal Park,’ the list continues for 8 more entries.A year ago, lonely, distraught, and all other pitiful things, I started walking. A lot. Sometimes long enough to find me on the doorstep of Australia’s finest export, Bianca Censori’s Ivanhoe; a foreign suburb on the other side of a city I thought I kind of knew. I still cannot believe she’s from Ivanhoe. When the days slowed and the sun settled back down into the Earth, I wandered toward home, grounding myself in the memories of another life. Shutting my eyes, I would try to sniff out the sugarcane sap of the dewy grass underneath a grandmother’s steps when she taught two fighting sisters the importance of perspective, of difference, of disagreeing but still understanding. Breathing in deeper, the sap turned sour for the over-brewed woman at a gallery café. Acidity coated the underside of my tongue when she greeted her old friend and his brand new wife after her own recent divorce. I listened to her worry with dryness in my mouth; her daughter was dropping out of an engineering course to pursue the arts. As my tongue started to numb, I heard her reconcile with the overbearing father of her eldest daughter. He scolded her for cycling down their quiet suburban road, alone. I finally swallowed when she explained how she had grown tired of him imposing upon them his own OCD-induced thoughts of fear and fatality. I sat up straight and opened my eyes as she shook her head, raised her hands and said, “Enough about me! How was Vietnam?” Catching onto the nearby chitchat of actual passersby, I’d breathe out, slowing my footsteps to sync with their echoing laughter. Harbouring their happiness as my own, I’d sometimes save them for later. For when I felt tense in the softness of my bed. I’d release them with closed fists.&nbsp; I called these walks my “adventure days”.In a voice memo from 30th July 2022, I noted how everything felt so sparse and yet so insular. Like, short and coinciding stop-motion films. That conceptions of a viable life existed in places with more street lights; a vibrancy mostly constricted to the 6km radius of Melbourne’s CBD. In the spaces between, I narrated the faces of people inside their cars. Giving them new stories. In doing so, I became aware of the endless stories I wrote for myself, that I clung onto fictitious worlds as a child cries for their favourite stuffed toy. With them, I never felt scared. But imprinted in the back of my skull is the notorious pinging of my mother’s incessant calls. On a 2-hour journey to Footscray Park a few months into my great adventure, I felt a tickle in my ear… I stopped by the side of the road to find that my eldest brother’s hand caught on fire and he was in the hospital receiving a skin graft. I choked on my own saliva for the remainder of my trip. Once I sat down on a bench by the highway, I understood. I was living in a nostalgia of my own making. Appropriating what happened like Philipp Perlmann, a linguist in the novel Perlmann’s Silence by Pascal Mercier. For him, things lost their presence and he only seemed capable of fully experiencing life when remembering it, clutching onto the sentences his acquaintances expressed in the past. I’ve looped around these hallucinations for a while, dropping hints into my bedside drawer, stashing them away in my pillow case and littering them amongst the dust, to pick back up later. And only briefly in I AM MARTIN NEWELL or WAS I BRITISH IN MY PAST LIFE? <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff97682d2-781d-41b6-b156-59b433b88322_1797x568.png" width="728" height="230" style="width: 705.188px; height: 222.793px;"> I didn’t call my brother to check up on him. *It has been two weeks since my last edit. I am at a café in KL’s city centre and a previous nightlife hotspot, Changkat, Bukit Bintang. I am listening in on two law graduates discussing their painstaking clerkships. I jot down their tremors into my black leatherbound notebook with a semi-broken but well-cherished 0.05-point pilot pen that I buy in bulk from Art Friend in Malaysia. I pause for a second to scoff at their renditions of ‘emotional’ female colleagues. Minding my own business has never really been my thing. As a young girl, my mother and I often engaged in eavesdropping together. Sitting on a bar stool in a hair salon in Colombo, Sri Lanka, we pricked our ears backwards to the people around us and our eyes forward at the mirror. Giggling and stealing glances at one another as my mum translated Singhalese into Sindhi for just me. Admittedly, the conversations around us were not very interesting. I think, I mostly derived pleasure from listening in on what felt like ‘stolen’ conversations… Soon, I was eavesdropping everywhere regardless of whether I was stuck at a salon waiting for my mother to finish her blow-out or at dinner with friends I adored. I had become disposed to eavesdropping. It’s no wonder I finally found a calling in Anthropology at age 23, my dream job is to be an Archivist for a gallery and I&nbsp; spend my free time watching 3 hour long podcasts. In preserving some sense of an archival project, I came across Voice Memo Bootleg online. They are a gig archival account based out of Melbourne that records concerts on a field recorder to post online. From there, I found an entire subculture of Australian music archiving including Eternal Soundcheck (2009 - 2018) and Weirdo with a Dictaphone (2012 - 2014). Their recordings offered the listener (me) an opportunity to reside, if only for an instance, in an otherworld. It is evident, that most of these accounts were made in the 2000s– the first truly digital decade, and also the first decade that saw widespread use of the public internet. Alongside a spike in innovation and globalisation, the naughts were characterised by an intoxication for what came before. Approximately 130 years ago German philosopher Friedrick Neitzche famously proclaimed: “GOD IS DEAD” as the dissolution of a specific and ‘sacred’ moral structure after the Enlightenment period. He recognised the uptick of intellectual-philosophical debate had prompted a modern rationalism that had removed God from the contemporary Western understanding of the universe; replacing religion with the "cult" of science. And, while Nietzche’s proclamation of the death of God is often characterized as the beginning of nihilism, Nietzsche explicitly opposed nihilism on the grounds that it weakens one’s passion for life. He writes, “What does nihilism mean? – that the supreme values devalue themselves”. So Nietzche was a bit of a romantic, and as an atheist, it is obvious he didn’t believe only religion could impart meaning unto life but what he did believe was there was no objective order or structure in the world but what we give it. Mostly, he recognised the importance of systems of value in helping us to embrace the drama of existence.Dazed Media recently dropped its 2023 trend report on the future of youth culture. I tried to purchase it before my jaw unhinged itself from my skull when I saw a £2000 price tag. So I pulled research elsewhere by going on their website and searching, "nostalgia". It is safe to say I had to click "load more" a lot of times. In the 1976 novel, Speedboat, Renata Adler recalled one of Edith Piaf’s numerous final concerts at the Paris Olympia: “She was singing “Je ne suis pas folle.” She ended the song, as always, with maniac laughter. On this particular evening, someone way back in the theatre echoed that laughter. At first, it was thought to be a prankster, or at least a heckler. Then it was thought to be part of the performance. But when that insane laugh continued, bitter, chilling, on Edith Piaf’s precise note, like one tuning fork of madness responding to another, three ushers and six members of the audience escorted the laughing lady, with infinite courtesy, to the street.”The world echoes… listening is never passive. In an interview, Herbie Hancock retells a story of a concert he played with the Miles Davis Quintet in Stockholm, Sweden, in the mid-1960s. He says they’re on tour and the show is heating up, the band is in sync, the music is flowing, and the audience is connecting. It’s magic. Until, Miles starts playing, building up to his solo and Hancock misplays a chord. He says it is just “so wrong” and “it’s hanging out there like a piece of rotten fruit.” But Miles pauses for a fraction of a second and plays a note that somehow miraculously makes his chord “right.”If structure would absolve any ideas of radical freedom, it is here we see the value of its constraints in propelling creation. We are always responding to something. Nostalgia is the spirit of our times. I know we’re all probably at our wits-end with the idea of nostalgia (especially since the pandemic). But if you haven’t already caught on, I think nostalgia may as well be Gen Z’s religion, so to speak. We’re a generation so obsessed with history, in both repelling it and honing in on ‘tradition’ (it is somehow extremely sexy when a DJ spins vinyl and not a USB). Also, anthropologists actually have a place in the job market again and it’s probably because of climate change and maybe because of where we’re at culturally. The internet has reserved us victims of our increased capacity to archive; store, save, organise and instantly access large amounts of cultural data at the ease of a finger-tap. I think it is fair to say, that we are living in an overtly aestheticised climate where the old cannot be old if the new is not so much new at all… Time doesn’t go away anymore, instead, it is put on a shelf where it persists in syndication. A perpetual ambience to modern life. A coping mechanism in the face of ‘rapid change’.And so we’re back where we started: All around us lie features that, like ourselves and our thoughts, have more or less recognizable antecedents. Relics, histories, and memories suffuse human experience… Whether it is celebrated or rejected, attended to or ignored, the past is omnipresent.”&nbsp; –– Lowenthal, 1985: XV. ~ like one tuning fork of madness responding to another ~In Svetlana Boym’s ‘The Future of Nostalgia,’ she separates nostalgia into two subsections. The first, ‘restorative nostalgia’ mourns the “impossibility of mythical return” to a magical world “with clear borders and values”. Its adherents define their identity based on the boundaries of a bygone era, they long for and seek to reconstruct a past supposedly marked by greater “authenticity”. The second, ‘reflective nostalgia’ is aware of the potential gaps between identity and resemblance. There exists a distance that allows for connection in a way that is conscious of the past’s imperfections and more importantly, irreversibility. There is acceptance of no “absolute truth” and the past as Boym writes is a way to meditate “on history and the passage of time”. At first, I assumed music archival blogs like Voice Memo Bootleg, Eternal Soundcheck and Weirdo with a Dictaphone were reflective because they are unique and systematic, unconstrained by any commercial markets, paying audiences or manufacturing. They reflected freedom of international copyright law and I assumed they offered a useful hearing aid in the past. They are awash with a sense of ageing, scruffy, shabby and decoupled from digital production software like sound editing. If purified, I thought these accounts as storehouses of tradition would naturally diminish because ‘purity’ is elusive and quickly leads to a sense of subjectivity and stereotyping. Apparently, I concluded they formed impure, well-blemished shoes to step into. In some sense, I could be right. But, now I see what I liked about eavesdropping or archiving or Voice Memo Bootleg was escaping into the highly individualised. That I was able to attempt perceiving a perceived individual perspective like a human centipede, ingesting and shitting out for another to ingest and shit out. When I think of sensory perception, I think of visual perception ‘closure,’ the perceptual tendency to complete an incomplete pattern by filling in the gaps or the way our brains see faces in patterns. In this way, there’s probably a lot to say about aural perception but the lack of confident research makes it hard to make any real claims. There’s some stuff I can say about the sounds of the Industrial Revolution and how their loudness mostly remained inconspicuous until ‘power’ and social importance came into question but I’d be boring you with another 2000 words. There’s also the idea of binaural hearing and sound localisation which has largely to do with space. Quite a lot of work has been done to mask one sound and bring out another or the idea of auditory fatigue when being exposed to the same sound over and over that you become numb to it. I’ve personally been known to sleep soundly to alarms. Clearly, individuals and societies of various eras listen differently. Sound partly has to do with an individual’s state of mind, i.e. mood and interest and partly the individual’s relation to the arena as a local or outsider. Some different languages also have special onomatopoeic expressions for familiar animals, birds or insects. Aside from their phonetic limitations in language, their obvious differences in words must indicate something about the manner in which some sounds are heard so distinctly yet differently by separate cultures. Do animals and insects speak dialects? I recently read that bat mothers speak motherese (baby talk) to baby bats and that tomatoes can make sounds to convey pain. There is one particular recording from Weirdo with a Dictaphone that stood out to me. It is one of Sam’s later ones from 27th June 2015 of Melburnian post-punk band, Total Control’s highly anticipated and final live performance.The recording is definitely on the shitty side and feels as though you are listening in from outside the venue. It features heavy bass levels, crackling coil vocals and of course, shrieking squeals from the crowd. It cuts out a lot and the set list isn’t complete. But, apparently the venue– Hugs&amp;Kisses was giving more Shove&amp;Manhandle. Sam describes the crowd as antisocial and gives a special mention to the “strung out hip fuckwit who deliberately tries to ruin the recording at a couple of points on some kind of anti-bootlegging crusade” and is told to fuck off by not Sam, but a patron next to him. The man also brags about starting a fistfight and multiple brawls ensue. It’s a punk show; stick it to the man and all that I guess… What drew me to this particular recording was, the guitarist/keyboardist Mikey Young mentioned it in an interview with The Vine afterwards. I couldn’t read it because the digital magazine has obviously dissolved but according to Sam’s little description, it occurred during ‘Systematic Fuck’. See an excerpt of the lyrics below: Stripped downA lonely operationStripped downStripped downAnd curled in shame You're the one to blameYou're the one to blameYou're the one to blameSystematic fuckSystematicWithout Sam’s written rendering, we wouldn’t have actually known this happened. That is to say, audio is fantastical because of its missing visual element. Even the most perfectly captured sound is unable to restore the moment of its first inscribing. The world is no longer there and on closer listening, it probably never was. The age of recording was an age of nostalgia, as the digital age only can be. Like the Hancock example, music displays a sort of haunting presence– ghosts arrive from the past to appear in the present. The historical past cannot be identified with belonging to the present as it fractures a sense of temporality. The ghost becomes paradoxical but if I were to denote a musician’s relationship to their music suggests a sense of nostalgia as an ingrained principle of their musicality whether through listening to past recordings in playing past compositions or creating new ones, you’d probably agree… right? Any attempt to isolate the origin of a sound will find its inaugural moment already dependent upon a system of sounds that have been installed prior to the ‘original’ moment. I think it was Derrida who said something along the lines of a past that anticipates a future that never occurred. Leyland Kirby, under his moniker The Caretaker, created an entire (ambient) musical ID around the relationship between music and memory’s often inconsistent retrieval.Didn’t ambient music make its grand return in the pandemic? FUCK I did it again, I found a way to write about ambient music.*Evidently, I have been struggling to come to a conclusion, I guess to find a sort of moral in this story. I’ve been working on this essay on and off for 3 weeks and I was glad every time I had an excuse to divert from it for more than a few days. I thought maybe it was because I was depressed again and didn’t know how to deal with it. You know how they say, your body eventually gets accustomed to things? Or your brain sees faces in dots? I’d been doing well for so long, able to halt manic episodes or at least subdue them but the resources I’d garnered were not working any longer. The gym wasn’t hitting the same nor were these walks– it was much too humid in KL and my SULA was showing. Also, I’ve struggled to be funny in this essay and it has been hurting my ego… Before it gets too draining to read, let’s get to the point. I made it outside today. Hoping for some light, to bring back home with me where it is darkest. In the taxi on the way here, I couldn’t locate the off switch on my tears. I kept trying to count to 10 or picture a happy moment but I couldn’t conjure them. I tried to think of a day in 2017 when I first visited Melbourne and we drove out to the beach where it was windy. Or the last time I took a walk along the Yarra trail. Of that woman who sat with her eyes closed as her lids soaked in the heat on a winter’s day. I remember taking a photo of her. But then my tears came down harder, to remember “happy” because in those moments I knew I wasn’t. They were just beautiful attempts at feeling something. I made it to my destination and climbed out of the taxi, looking up to dry out my eyeballs.I have not paid much attention to the number 3 in a while, it used to be an obsession when I was manic and on a so-called spiritual journey. Yes, I even added ‘333’ to my Instagram handle at the height of the pandemic and its lockdowns until it became a joke amongst friends and me. Call me neoliberal, I dare you. Secretly though, I associated it with my Nani because it happened at the time she moved back in with my Nana. And I was happy for her, it is what she wanted for the last five years of her life. Maybe more. But she hadn’t left me anything behind besides a black leather sling bag I convinced my uncle to let me have. I needed to feel close to her in some way, to pretend we were communicating so I clung to the number 3– my favourite number for my favourite person. Today I stood up, showered (standing) and wore my favourite black lace gloves to spend the day vertically. I bumped into a barista on the way in here, he ended up seating me and then, serving me at the counter once I was ready to order. He told me there was no more oat milk as I held back tears. They only had almond and soy alternatives, for fuck’s sake. I ordered as quickly as I could, paid and grabbed my stainless steel table number. I rushed back to my seat and sat down. I placed the number on the table and finally, looked back up. It took me a few moments to realise… it was the number 3. Fuck you, Nani. I a child of the social media generation, felt it was necessary to tweet about this spiritual encounter. I was escaping into yet another fantasy. A different waiter served me my food and coffee while I continued typing away on my phone. “Hello, you” I turned around.&nbsp; It was the barista from earlier. “You wanted a plug point?” I had forgotten that when he seated me, I bent down to search underneath the bar seats for a plug point. He saw me give up and sit back down, breathing out. Irritated with myself for even making my way outside and trying to feel better. He had found me a table for 4 at the front of the restaurant, with a pink couch and a plug point.After moving seats, the first thing I did was write down this encounter in my notebook. There was probably a reason why I struggled to finish this essay for so long. I had gotten so enthralled by another idea, ideas with which I learnt to freeze time, in overintellectualising it that I had lost its essence. Ironic. I wanted to find the “interesting” aspect, to interpret what I saw and heard and maybe to no fault of my own– select the most workable narrative: logic. What I really did this for was to experience, realise and remember those human moments that stop me from wanting to jump out the window. It was the simple niceties and shared intimacies between others that I clung to. It was these moments I was trying to remember in the Uber on the way here. https://anishakhemlani.com/Was-I-British-in-My-Past-Life Mon, 09 Sep 2024 13:29:16 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/Was-I-British-in-My-Past-Life Was I British in My Past Life? <img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20ccd1ec-6c61-4d7b-ba70-65dd9c33a92b_930x558.jpeg"> She was meeting a man she had recently and abruptly swiped right on. She was in a state of complete indifference. Not only that, but her tarot reader told her, it would be a relationship with a special woman that would heal her emotionally for the rest of her life.When she arrived at the corner, he was there, a painfully pale but gentle face. They had exchanged just six messages the night before. His anxiety was visible to her. It was at once disconcerting and weirdly attractive. He immediately reminded her of men she had known years before. A little bit of Josh, her expatriate English heartbreak. A little bit of Marcus, her in-country volatile neighbour who sometimes held her hand during panic attacks. A little bit of Conor, the painfully emotional Irish man who felt obligated to his girlfriend of 10 years but still cheated on her. A little bit of Drew, her posh, dry-humoured and slightly unhygienic friends with benefits (and first man to make her cum).If you were to ‘jump up and down and move it all around. Shake your head to the sound, and put your hands on the ground. Take one step left and one step right, one to the front and one to the side. Clap your hands once and clap your hands twice.’ You’d see they were all from the British Isles!In her freshly drunken haze, she thought it imperative to message the group chat, “I love the UK folk!”Later, while whizzing out an unworthy old-fashioned, she pondered, could she have been British in her past life?She recalled donning Union Jack printed nails for an entire month in year.7. Her favourite film was ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging’– she had rewatched it over twenty times and could recite the script word for word. She felt seen by ‘Bend it Like Beckham’ and envious of Jesminder. Her friends were stunned that a pessimist like her would be leader of the Malaysian Directioners after bagging on every heartthrob that came before (sorry Justin). They found it peculiar when she claimed she had found enlightenment after listening to the silky smooth cadence of YouTube’s Brit Crew daily. Her body clock had rewinded by 8 hours all through high school. And, it was pretentious if not terribly uncool when she tried to emulate Effy Stonem for a fair few years. These days, people wonder why she sounds a little… “British”. How could she explain that she once returned to school after a summer of binging ‘Mad Fat Diary’ with a scouser accent?At 18, following six vision boards and a thousand squealing cries, she arrived at her new sort-of home in the North End of London. She had driven for one hour from the airport and flown fourteen hours from her home in Kuala Lumpur to arrive with a stunned, hunted relief. She had come to London for a 3-year-long university course at a revered arts institute. With a lack of focus, multiple mishaps, and scarce future planning (thanks for nothing Eckhart Tolle), she was forced to move back home. Finally, she made her way to the most culturally similar alternative that would offer her a visa– Melbourne, Australia.Here, she especially missed the flat vowels and clipped endings of a typical northern accent amidst the nasal drawls and sighing “naurs”. The dry humour she had grown to love from age ten was quickly replaced with hijinks and ‘Shoeys’. And, most people had opted for meth in their adolescent rebellion instead of coke.So when he spoke to her, she tried to keep herself from closing her eyes and drifting into a deep slumber. It would be much too embarrassing to admit her YouTube history was glutted with “Scottish accent ASMRs”.“Aye,” he said and she giggled.The day after their date, she took a quiz titled “We Know For Certain What Nationality You Were In A Past Life!” on playbuzz.com. The first three tries told her she was Russian.The website was clearly a farce. She contemplated spitting in a tube for 23andMe but preferred swallowing and wasn’t too sure about all the DNA stealing controversies. Instead, she watched Touki Bouki, a film she first heard about in February when she attended a screening of short films, ‘Mandem’ and ‘Road’ at ACMI.*Touki Bouki is a 1973 avant-garde Senegalese film directed by Djibril Mambéty. It is touted as being Martin Scorsese’s ‘favourite international film’ (whatever the fuck that means). Now a staple of Art House cinema, Touki Bouki even featured in Beyoncé and Jay Z’s On The Run II tour video. However, Mambéty’s niece, filmmaker Mati Diop, was left unimpressed, telling newspaper Libération, “It looks like it’s an art director who brought them the image, and no one has been concerned about what artistic and political story is behind it.”Set on the outskirts of Senegal’s capital city, Dakar, Touki Bouki follows two young lovers, Mory, a cowherd country boy who drives a motorcycle mounted with a zebu skull and Dogon cross, and Anta, a university student with a barely veiled contempt for her elders’ traditions. The two bond over a distaste for their village surroundings and fantasise about escaping to Paris, for a delirious taste of ‘paradise’. They embark on a series of petty crimes á la Bonnie and Clyde until Mory hits the jackpot. On paper, Mambéty’s storyline seems direct, even simple but the production is incredibly layered. He offers an experimental and discontinuous approach that blends foggy dreamscapes with jaggedy sounds to depict the complex and potent recurring postcolonial dream (nightmare) of migrating elsewhere, usually to colonist land. He chops up Josephine Baker’s ‘Paris Paris,’ with indigenous music (played on a Peul flute, particularly by the nomadic Fula people) to convey Mory and Anta’s disillusioned utopian desire for ‘freedom’.Josephine Baker famously renounced her American citizenship for a French one. Musicologist Alexander Fisher wrote, Mambéty’s purposeful use of Baker’s 'Paris, Paris' serves to remove the Black American Baker from her Eurocentric habitat in which she was exoticised for both, her gender and race (that space being ‘utopian’ Paris, where she mostly appeared as a nude erotic dancer). Touki Bouki repositions her within an African context while deploying Western sound capturing/editing techniques. This, Fisher claims, breaks down the prevailing divisions between African and Western music to form a cultural bridge, establishing a line that connects Fula’s forced migration on slave boats to the U.S. and Baker’s migration from the U.S. to Europe. Here, Baker’s voice is reclaimed for an African audience, thereby completing a triangular journey that demarcates 'the ‘Black Atlantic’.The Black Atlantic coined by Paul Gilroy, describes the Atlantic world as being deeply shaped by slavery and the slave trade. Between 1492 and 1820 about two-thirds of the people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were African. Gilroy argues the violently brutal migration process played a key role in the development of Black consciousness across America and Europe. Here, the Black consciousness is ambivalent, it does not just reject white culture but actively engages with it; re-crossing the Atlantic creatively and lending itself to the formation of modernism. In his view, the Black Atlantic describes a transatlantic culture that is African, American, Caribbean and British all at once.In a dream, Mory stands on top of a car decked with stars and stripes of the American flag and sings a griot (tribal West African storytelling) song, while the scene cuts to shots of cheering children in the streets of Colobane, making it seem as if they are following the car down an empty and dusty country road. Mory is naked, a nod to the film’s name, which translates to “Journey of The Hyena”. In one of his last interviews with N. Frank Ukadike, Mambéty says, “The hyena is an African animal… The hyena comes out only at night; he is afraid of daylight, like the hero of Touki Bouki… The hyena has no sense of shame, but it represents nudity, which is the shame of human beings.” When the time comes for them to finally depart for Paris, Mory psyches himself out, leaving Anta to sail away alone. As the film comes to a close, Mory realises he has been spiritually upbraided by his Grandma. She calls on him to remain in Colobane to face the aftermath of colonialism and to create new stories for a modern and independent Senegal. Like Mory, Mambéty stayed in Colobane, the deprived neighbourhood and setting of all his films. Influenced by Ya Dikone, an icon of resistance and rebellion in Senegal, Mambéty refused to migrate to France to find work or study cinema. Instead, he attended a local theatre college before getting kicked out and producing Touki Bouki with a mere US$30,000 budget and a lack of camera equipment. Touki Bouki depicts migration dreams in postcolonial communities as one that exists more as a feeling than an actual locality. These places we long for do not exist outside of our minds, and just like a lot of things in life, are mere manifestations of perceptive illusions. ‘Elsewhere’ is just another story told to soothe our cripplingly confused souls. * The next morning, she wakes up in hot flushes. She digs through her side table drawer like a blind man searching for his cane till she realises, she is still wearing her ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’ sleeping mask.Removing it, she stands up and walks over to the mirror. A protruding gut with curly grey hairs circling pink nipples. Short stout legs and a sushi-roll-sized penis. Thick floppy arms and bitten fingernails. She moves slowly, first brushing the horse-shoe patterned hairs poking out on either side of her forehead. Working downward, she strokes her nose and pulls on a straggler at the very edge of her left nostril. She admires it before placing it in her pyjama pocket. Swinging her fingers up swiftly into her mouth, she starts to lick them up and down before placing them on her Spotted Dick. Finished. She walks downstairs and puts the kettle on. ‘Nothing like a good ol’ builder’s tea mate,’ she says grinning. https://anishakhemlani.com/Vital-Label-Butter-Sessions-1 Sun, 10 Sep 2023 14:02:50 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/Vital-Label-Butter-Sessions-1 Vital Label: Butter Sessions&nbsp;(DJ Mag Print issue #645 Sept 2023) MELBOURNE (original name Naarm) is the most populous city in Australia. It is humble in size, yet rich with culture; its identity splattered across in graffiti-sprayed laneways lined by heritage architecture. Far away and still so close in its amalgamation of America, Europe and Asia, it is home to the famous flat white, a DIY ethos and of course, the grifting DJ. Butter Sessions’ founders Sleep D, aka Corey Kikos and Maryos Syawish, actually hail from a coastal suburb called Frankston, 41 kilometres outside of Melbourne’s central business district, but they have become an essential and much-loved part of the city’s music scene. “It was only an hour out of the city, but as teenagers, it felt so far away,” says Syawish. Sleep D took it upon themselves to build a community of their own, eventually establishing themselves as important pillars of the local tech-house sphere. At 15 years old, the boys and a bunch of their friends religiously attended under-18s nightclubs, traversed online forums and kept an ear out for Melbourne’s hottest (over-18s) festival sets. “We spent our weekends at the club and CD shops after school, getting all the mixtape essentials,” Syawish recounts. At the time, Kikos says it was meeting likeminded people that appealed to him: “There was this body of people that just wanted to dance the night away.” In the ’burbs, it wasn’t so often you came across people interested in the same niche as you. “Starting a label became a way for us to meet other people and slowly form a community that has grown over the last 13 years. Now, it’s about sustaining, advancing and enjoying the process,” Kikos explains. Development At 17, they started Butter Sessions as a blog, which later developed into a Facebook group for sharing tunes from local musicians. It grew to include a Butter Mix series featuring plenty of Australia’s finest, alongside international friends like Kenji Takimi, Brian Not Brian and more. Today it incorporates a digital merch, record and print store, with releases from over 40 producers, and much-anticipated events. The venue-brimming shows Butter Sessions is known to host today started inside Sleep D’s childhood homes, but it was the duo’s first public live show at Melbourne’s The Night Owl (now Sub Club) that gave them a real taste of what was to come. From there, the first Butter Sessions solo event was held at the now-shuttered Mercat Basement with a few peers and around 20 to 30 friends in attendance. Sleep D later launched Mania, a highly popular weekly Saturday club night at Lounge, showcasing locals like Jennifer Loveless, Moopie, Harvey Sutherland, Tornado Wallace and Francis Inferno Orchestra, as well as international acts like Huerco S., Steffi and Virginia. Kikos says it was these events that shaped their trajectory, uncovering a side of the business that helped them figure out what it meant to be DJs, promoters and true community builders in the scene. Syawish doesn’t feel much has changed with their latest party at 24 Moons, another Melbourne favourite. He explains, “We’re probably playing slightly different music and I hope better at DJing than we were back then, but I mean, they’re both dark clubs with big sound systems. The main difference is, it’s our friends plus more others. But the essence has mostly stayed the same.” In late 2013, Butter Sessions dropped its first release, Sleep D’s three-track vinyl EP, ‘The Jackal’. The heaving ensemble featured rough and tough, screechy and scratchy starlet, ‘The Frankston Jackal’ — a pivotal track in the label’s story. “I remember hearing [‘The Frankston Jackal’] get played by artists who weren’t Australian and thinking, ‘Wow, we’ve managed to reach the other side of the world!’ It was affirming, reassuring and motivating,” Syawish says. Despite the international recognition, it persuaded the boys to stay in Melbourne. The Melbourne-to-Europe pipeline has become a sort of norm; many Australian DJs are known to cut their teeth in the fledgling artist town before moving on to Berlin, London or another Northern-Hem sort. But Sleep D feel Australia has so much to offer. After all, it’s why they started Butter Sessions in the first place, to try to make it work Down Under. “It’s always fresh with great people to work with, so we’ve never really had the urge to up and move our operation overseas,” says Syawish. For them, Melbourne offers the perfect pace to work on music without being surrounded by an industry moving at rapid speed. Syawish says the city gives them the room to explore sounds without being too influenced by their external surroundings. “Not to say that I don’t like being influenced by different countries; I enjoy travelling, absorbing what’s happening musically, but then coming home and making up our own minds about what that means,” he explains. “It feels properly balanced probably because it’s so far away from the world and that’s a big part of the charm,” adds Kikos. “We can’t just jet off to Berlin for four hours, you know?” Showcase In 2021, the duo celebrated Butter Sessions’ 10-year run in Australia’s underground with a graphic book, party series and hefty three-disc album. It’s an ideal place to start for those unfamiliar with the label, showcasing the simmering avant-garde techno, bubbling acid and frothy house that have been staples of its output, and representing the evolution of a harder, faster and certainly rougher hedonistic nightscape. The compilation serves up Ewan Jansen’s intense dancefloor shamanism, the cerebral techno-trance of Guy Contact, Turner Street Sound’s UK garage-style swing, and a whole range of electrifying woozy boogies from Furious Frank, Mosam Howieson, Polito and more. Vanessa Worm whispers in the dark, her vocals coiled over a driving beat, and Butter Sessions regular Cale Sexton brings a squelching alien abyss. And while the label’s focus is usually on local talent, Sleep D also dipped into their international network for the collection, recruiting the likes of Haruka (Japan), D. Tiff any (Canada/Germany) and Ivy Barkakati (USA/Spain). More recently came a new local addition to the roster, RBI (Ruby Willis), who debuted in March with her album ‘Disseminate’. “She’s a new name for the label, with a contemporary trance, UK inspired-sound that’s produced with organic elements like the clarinet,” Syawish explains. In August a new EP arrived from longtime Sydney friends Unsolicited Joints, and on the way is a long-awaited album from Polito — “they’ve managed to make a modular synth sound like a real instrument” — another EP from the melodic house aficionado Jennifer Loveless, and a 12-inch by the free-spirited Fadercap (aka Sedgwick). In June, the label released Sleep D’s 10-track LP ‘Electronic Arts’, which mimics the loose approach of their live sets with accelerated house and dreamscape ambient techno. Syawish tells DJ Mag about rediscovering his Iraqi heritage on album track ‘From Village To Empire’: “I wasn’t embarrassed but definitely shied away from my background... I really like those [Middle Eastern] sound worlds and their percussive elements, so I included a lot more samples and fi eld recordings from my travels and live sets there.” Evidently, Sleep D are always finding themselves through their music and it only feels fitting that the range of Butter Sessions artists is ever evolving alongside both them and the local scene. As their LP description astutely asks, wherever will their “existential pathfinding” take us next? As published in DJ Mag’s September 2023 Print Issue. https://anishakhemlani.com/Portals-of-Longing Wed, 12 Jun 2024 06:27:10 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/Portals-of-Longing In Conversation with&nbsp;Portals of Longing The DILEMMA, art critic Lucy Lippard writes, is how to integrate art and politics– “the two crucial elements of our culture that have been called oil and water.” Like Lippard, I Woke Up late, with no real birthright to awareness education. The social consciousness I gained from my parents was one of a religious sort, to treat everyone with kindness. My revelatory experiences came after University, living in the first world’s third world equivalent when I immersed myself in London’s active art scene from 2016 to 2019. There I learnt the art of protesting and the term, reformative action, which surfaced again when I returned to Kuala Lumpur’s multiculturalism in 2020. I felt burdened by the social order’s naturally accepted prejudice. Like Lippard felt in 1984, “isolated art for art’s sake had no place in a world so full of misery and injustice,” I feel today… It is March 2024. Portals of Longing assumes a liminal self, logging precarious transformations in spirit and purpose, to animate the contemporary struggle of refugees in Malaysia whose lives are often considered peripheral to the city, the nation-state, and wage relations. Drawing on lived experiences in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestine, Syria, and Myanmar, the Artists map dreams between worlds, grasping onto murmurs of history to uplift their culturally personal legacies. Fluctuating between moods and forms of movement unregulated by a state that accompanies their life in a ‘post’ world crisis,’ Portals of Longing channels the only sense that is certain–– yearning. A woman waits for a son, a husband, and a brother to return in Nour Aldeen Salem’s painting, ‘Diaspora.’ Her black and white image caresses a belly mapped out in droplets of red for the far-away sites bottling up her only blood type. She symbolises, as Salem puts it, “the greatest suffering of all” in a world inundated with forced choices. In the artist’s home in Syria, male counterparts often face compulsory military service, urging them to move elsewhere. Salem found out he had to enlist to fight in a war just 15 days before… His mother waits for 10 years, hoping her son will visit. I ask Salem if she has seen ‘Diaspora’– “Actually, I didn’t show her the artwork because if she sees it she will cry much more,” he replies. The international and legal definition of ‘refugee’ generally refers to people fleeing conflict or persecution for going against reasons of race, religion, nationality or political opinion in their country of origin. This act avails the refugee of his nationality and so, protection from the country. Still, in Malaysia, there is no formal framework for refugees, and they are not legally defined nor protected by law. This is to say, Malaysia exists as a legal no man’s land where refugees are vulnerable to exploitation and are often treated akin to undocumented migrants, vulnerable to targeted and official crackdowns. For some of the 187,020 refugees and asylum-seekers registered with the UN Refugee Agency in Malaysia since February 2024, viability is neither here nor there. Being uprooted from their national communities implies a loss of one’s identity, culture and traditions, dissolving their sense of personhood. This leaves some refugees without agency and limits them to a bare life, in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is truly lived. It could be said that the refugee’s limited existence is confined within the boundaries of a systemically defined ‘refugee’ existence. But Malaysia was the only country that would take Salem on such short notice, even if that meant Salem had to give up his primary vocation in physics once he arrived. Instead, he learnt graphic design and now practices as a freelancer– much like the father-daughter artist duo, Abdurof and Reham Baydoun, artists of ‘Timeless Odyssey,’ who say freelancing is a sort of saving grace when 9-5’s are not an option. Reham, an architect, and her father Abdurof, an artist, also paint a woman– one who is relentless in her pursuit to safeguard national legacies while vying for tranquillity across borders. Carved in a traditional Syrian decorative design technique called Ajami, ‘Timeless Odyssey’ focuses on the migrant woman’s journey through the long history of human civilisation. Horses, flowers, mosques, and churches trace the intricate identities of coexistence. Birds of peace soar above symbolic landmarks like the Twin Towers to represent the artist’s journey to Malaysia. Reham makes a joke that the painting may seem “crowded.”Yet, it is in this beautifully illustrated chaos that we see the manifold experiences of a refugee’s life, even if bounded to a limit. In one way or another, the works in Portal of Longing are a visual documentation of a particular story. Whether a hero in Baydouns’ portrait of the woman or Ahoora Jenab Zadeh’s more fraught sculpture, ‘Crossing the Rubicon,’ An astronaut floats in the middle of four hands where an alien sits, facing this astronaut. Behind this astronaut is a perfected man who celebrates a victory– a 13-year transit through assimilation. Except that they are all in white. Zadeh’s ‘Crossing Borders’ reflects the many perspectives of one man’s journey through migration, but most of all, depicts the sense of alienation from not just his surroundings but his being as well,l with the purposeful use of white acting as a blank canvas of sorts, a void. Zadeh explains, “Becoming a refugee was a means to an end. We know we cannot return to our country of origin, but when we enter here, we cannot help but be distracted by the fact that we are finally safe from the place we are running away from. We think we are safe because if we are running away from conflict, if we are running away from persecution… But the longer we stay here, we realise that there are issues in and of being a refugee in Malaysia. That slowly chips away at the concept of hope as we know it.” *After I end the interview, I get into a Grab to head into the city. On my way there, I pass a football stadium with the words, ‘FREE GAZA’ spray-painted across the field. Young children are carrying the Palestinian flag, and my Grab driver is tuned into a radio station looping Islamic prayers for the women, the men, and the children being attacked. The disparity between historical narratives and personal experiences has never been clearer. Portals of Longing escalates and intensifies the semantic gap between the representation of violence and the experience. As Zadeh tells me, it is not that people are not willing to understand refugees, but currently, a limited, widespread understanding of refugees permeates Malaysia’s social cognition. He says, “Sometimes when I mention I am a refugee, people’s initial response will be, ‘Oh, but you speak English so well,’ or ‘you’re educated,’ ‘you’re doing something with your life.’ There is an ignorance of being a refugee and the refugee experience as a whole.” There is an intersectionality to these issues, to why we support and to whom we lend our support. The artist’s first-hand reporting helps dismantle biases, calling into question the materiality of being and the very real collateral of war, its people. As Zadeh tells me, “I want them to feel even, a semblance of my pain” because people rarely learn by listening; they learn by experience, even if through observation. Zadeh agrees, he doesn’t expect people to empathise but to cultivate sympathy through understanding one’s internalised level of pain that can sometimes only be expressed through the interiority of art. Art is an expert witness. As published in Mulazine, March 2024. https://anishakhemlani.com/Chicken-Bones-at-the-End-of-the-World Thu, 03 Apr 2025 06:33:56 +0000 anisha khemlani https://anishakhemlani.com/Chicken-Bones-at-the-End-of-the-World Chicken Bones At the End of The World: Adam Phong’s One of Our Fossils at A+ Gallery Cluck cluck. Gack gack. Cluckety gack gack cluck. I find myself in the kitchen again, as always, my thoughts turn to you. How could they not? The way you rest so calmly, your soft flesh yearning for me to caress it below the warmth of tap water streaming down your shoulders, tracing every curve, drawing out your essence. I can almost hear your breath gack as I gently carry you over, to lower you into the simmering pot, your skin trembling just slightly as it begins to break down.I feel your resistance, wanting to hold on just a little longer. Cluck cluck. But I know how to coax you, make you surrender, to ease under my touch. Once you give way, I’ll pick you up again, laying you down on the wooden board. I’ll take the knife, slicing through, slowly peeling back your layers, your skin will part as I continue to draw the blade over you– feeling your heat, the give of your flesh.I’ll move deeper, using my fingers to slide along those soft lines of muscle and bone. Your bones– oh, your bones, love– are so cold, so fragile in my hands. I trace them, feeling their shape, their smoothness, their hollow strength.Cluckety gack gack cluck.* I had hainanese chicken rice for dinner last night. It’s no surprise: chicken is the most consumed bird on earth, with around 23 billion of them clucking and gacking across the globe at any given time. And as the materiality of the earth shifts under the weight of exhaustive human activity to-be-fossilised chicken bones enter the planet’s strata by way of industrial-scale poultry farming– chicken meat, it’s cheap as hell. Cheaper than buying clay.Cheap enough to have it as our permanent record, as in the geological record, the remnants of our time that archaeologists or aliens of the future will sift through to determine who we were and how we shaped our world. The chicken is suddenly this individual thing once more, a soul illuminated by teeth chomping down into it.At A+ Gallery, Malaysian artist Adam Phong opens the door to a time warp. Bones hang suspended from the ceiling, coiled in wires. The lighting is tinged with yellow and I have to rub my eyes to make sure I’m not hallucinating the trumpet shaped sculpture drooping over me. Claustrophobic is my first thought. Fear my second. But mostly, there’s no time to think. Like my terminally online peers, I’d “prefer not to,” brain rotted from 24/7 capitalism, careening towards a meltdown. I am in fact, “mentally exhausted from dealing with the present, leaving (us) with no energy to imagine the future,” as the exhibition statement notes.So I’m lucky that Phong’s exhibition– One of Our Fossils– curated by Bob Edrian, is instinctual. Seven sculptures made of chicken bones are carefully presented to create a space for reflection, inviting us to imagine how future civilisations might interpret fragments of our existence. These bones are no longer just biological fragments but objects of history, charged with narratives, myths, and stories that reflect the intersections of culture and environment. The exhibition nudges us to feel out this absurd transcendence of time against our modern condition, reminding us of the fragile balance between permanence and impermanence. And, Phong is adamant about this: feeling things out… When I try to photograph the larger sculpture alongside a smaller relic, the artist gently corrects me. He tells me to position myself in front of the piece as he’s intentionally left a gap between them, creating a space for telepathic connection—a ghostly transmission of meaning. Nothing is an oversight but an invitation for the viewer to envision what might lie between the two objects, to fill in the blanks. That’s when I fully understand, it’s all about imagination. We briefly discuss different could-be’s. “When archaeologists dig up old bones,” he says, “they’re just guessing at their meaning.”I am reminded of an article I read a few weeks prior, about a research team who restored 14 of the 86 famous casts from Pompeii to extract DNA samples. In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius experienced one of its most significant eruptions, burying the Roman city of Pompeii under a thick layer of small stones and ash known as laplli. As their bodies decayed, cavities formed that perfectly preserved their positions in their final moments. Since the 1800s, plaster has been filled in the voids and assumptions placed on the Roman Empire and its people. But with the advent of this new genetic analysis, findings completely contradicted previous beliefs. The study revealed that individuals previously assumed to be family– such as mother and her child, or two sisters– were not genetically related at all. This discovery challenges our assumptions about gender, kinship and social stereotypes. Also, it turns out the Pompeiians were far more cosmopolitan than previously thought, their DNA reflecting a mix of ancestry from across the eastern Mediterranean.* I make a joke: “chicken or the egg?” and Phong replies something about nature versus culture since the bones have been processed, cleaned and reassembled… He says something else about how “every bone has been touched by a mouth.” I try to continue this train of thought, to ask more questions, while I am still a little overwhelmed by the structures around me. “Do you know why chicken bones will outlast us?” He says that so much of fast-food involves chicken bones, when we eat it, the bones are wrapped back into the plastic they’re served in, before being thrown away and ending up in landfills– essentially they’re accidentally preserved.He also tells me he was actually in Indonesia eating a lot of chicken himself, he was already collecting these bones before he read the scientific paper which inspired the exhibition. It was like he was preparing himself for an opportunity he did not know existed. And, I think the show reflects that. The experience feels organic. Phong was even careful to keep the project a secret from his parents and close friends because he wanted their experience to feel as such, organic and unmediated.I still remember before walking into the exhibition, Phong turned around to ask me if I’d seen any of the works. I said no. When I entered my first reaction was to blurt out “Oh, wow!”Phong’s work makes us reconsider how we leave traces of our existence in ways we may not even anticipate, like chicken bones ending up in our landfills and ultimately becoming a part of our future geological record. It’s ironic, what we consider waste can actually outlast us, leaving behind a record of our time for future generations to decipher. The artist plays with this idea of longevity, forcing us to revise the narratives we attach to objects and how those narratives are inherently shaped by our cultural and environmental contexts. So many of our assumptions remain in the present even if we (capitalistic societies) tend to obsess about the future and its progress. Our understanding can always be upended by new discoveries and tools. Phong’s work, much like the DNA analysis of Pompeii’s remains all these years later, challenges conventional wisdom and invites us to think about how we interpret the past with our present and future simultaneously. One of Our Fossils is both personal and universal, connecting the fleeting nature of our current moment with the potential futures that lie ahead, in a haunting yet oddly comforting way. His immersive environment demands engagement. As he says, “science wants to discover, art wants to digest.”One Of Our Fossils is on view till the 14th of December 2024 at A+ Gallery, Kuala Lumpur. Admission is free.