Ruhail Qaisar is a self-taught artist from Ladakh, India. His work focuses on sound-creation, left-field art, analog photography, and experimental filmmaking. As a musician, he explores memory, intergenerational trauma, and the operational swarm of the unconscious through sonic inscription and the incorporation of gestures and improvisation. The work serves to transmit memories carried through events and local mythos as developed through his recollections of growing up in the older section of Leh, India. We dived in depth to his mental space and personal story here.

Ruhail my very first interest is in wanting to know you and your overall phase of growing up. Please take us through your early memories of exploring music, films, and various arts and instruments. How was childhood and academic uprising? When did you realize you had artistic instincts?

I was born in 1994 in a lower-middle-class Muslim household, and Ladakh was going through the tail end of a transitional phase in time, we as a population had just made it through heavy communal violence in 1989, largely caused by the abuse of power then applied by the state government in Kashmir coupled with local altercations, which eventually resulted in the loss of lives, and further sprawled into economic boycotts that were imposed for a few years. In my early years, there was a definite trace of stigma and prejudice dormant, but since my mother who is a teacher was transferred to remote villages around lower Ladakh, we had to keep moving location accordingly. She also worked brief stints formally as an Urdu radio announcer at All India Radio and also as a tourist monastery guide, so she would unwarp a lot of music, local mythos, and stories for me. This kept me unfazed by urban life and institutional doctrine in my early years and exposed me more to the natural beauty and the diversity in the rural landscape and the culture at a very early age, I would get to see local rituals, exorcisms, and beautiful ancient monasteries.

My father on the other hand worked at the Ladakh Ecological Development Group as an art director, he then practiced oil painting, mainly portraits and natural landscapes, and he was responsible for exposing me to images of Van Gogh and Ilya Repin through his art books and also led me to sit beside him and paint while he completed his projects. Around 1997 when my father transitioned from his art and started his own tourist business, we got our first television which was a secondhand Sony Trinitron with 9-channels, I would stay glued to it for Michael Jackson music videos and cartoons.

Eventually, once I ended up going to school from 1998 onwards, life was spent day-to-day, and music and art would become a very unconscious aspect and weren’t given much attention to but assimilated recklessly. I got my first guitar when I was 13, I learned to play it entirely from my friends and as I grew old I learned to play it very fast by slowing down difficult Death Metal songs on YouTube and figuring them out by ear.

Do you remember who and what were the kind of influences you were set back by? The artists, movies, or music maybe? What made the click for you? How has Leh, as in place, impacted your perspectives and worldly understanding?

By the time I was in my formative years, all societal priorities were shifted to academic and religious studies. Music and art were seen as a liability. On one hand, I grew up in an era with no telephones into a time with my very own personal one; life in Leh from the pre telephone era to the present 4G internet era had many occurrences and experiences. When I did in a wider sense realize the stark uniqueness of the landscape and culture I am from, they became strong aspects of my personal and social identity and I started also bringing this part of my identity into my music. It is still possible to find semblance and witness obscure anomalies within the culture, language, and local characters of Ladakh.

We had a very skilled blacksmith who begrudged a bet that he would outlive a local surgeon because the surgeon criticized his hygiene, he vowed to take an indefinite hiatus from bathing, and you would see him around town every other day in charred clothes, collecting scrap and feeding dogs, people named him Yamdud which translates as “lord of the purgatory” he slowly turned into a local legend. He ended up outliving the doctor but passed away himself 5-6 years ago. During the Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram the whole town gathers around the main market square, in the center, you witness a parade ranging from age groups of 15 to 40, all-male, devout mourners begin the ritual with a slow beating of the chest, gradually into flagellation, and furthering into euphoric entrancement till they collapse and faint, others also donate blood or mourn meditatively on the sidelines. One can also see local gods' descent into the bodies of two monks, who meditate for 8 months to host their bodies for the spirits of two Gods, and throughout various deeply symbolic rituals and gestures, they deliver important prophecies for the coming year. There is also a part in my guest episode on Meuko! Meuko!’s NTS show from last year with parts emphasizing all these aspects. Witnessing all these concrete examples firsthand certainly helps the gears click in place when it comes to working with audiovisual theatre.

Meuko! Meuko! & RUHAIL QAISAR's **NTS show**

Your work is a little bit of every genre but with no direct conformity, your music has theatrical and dramatic touch… no doubt of your connection with filmmaking... How would you describe the interconnections and co-creative aspects of all mediums and such? Please explain your peculiar nerve of experimentations and their amalgamations.

With the number of impressions formed on my psyche throughout life, it will be hard to backtrack and drop every name; also it has more to do with my own personal perception and attraction to sounds, images, and gestures. I witnessed the filming of Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se around my hometown when I was 4, the images in the film were framed by cinematographer Santos Sivan and the score and music were written by A.R Rahman, the strong dramatic images coupled with the sound form a strong impression, these images are synonymous to that period in time from which Ladakh has changed a lot.

**Meetings 1997-1998**, Ladakh Arts and Media Organization, video still

I performed at the CTM Festival 2021 remotely during the pandemic where I took part in the first online edition of their Musicmakers Hacklab, for six days I and nine other fellow artists conceptualized and collaborated on a few performance pieces to be showcased on the seventh day. Around March 2021 I displayed my audiovisual piece Meetings 1997-1998 at the Ladakh Arts and Media Organization for three days to a limited crowd during the second wave of Covid 19. This piece was made from six abandoned restored VHS tapes archiving daily life and occasions around a few locations in Ladakh from 1997 to 1998, imposed with a strong compositional piece of music made with local field recordings. The purpose was to evoke phantoms and hauntological emissions amongst the audience to perpetuate and color a memory lapse caused by the gradual and rampant advent of post-millennium late-capitalism, the internet age, and urbanization within the lives of local Ladakhi by opening a silent chapter. Local characters, houses, monuments, dialects, and rituals still remain distinguished in the heavily urbanized, tourist-tailored landscape as gaping totems and spirits of our past. And my pursuit is to draw them out into the open through variations and manipulations of quotidian images and sounds. Furthering into a process of what I can make each audiovisual passage do, the process and method vary all the time depending on the context and the instruments and the gear accessible to me. What remains at the core is a sense of unparalleled disease-like urgency to work with the dynamics of abrasive, intrusive, immersive, meditative, and confrontational pieces of the interplay between sound and image plunged into themes of longing, and separation, grief, and destruction.

Please forgive me, I didn’t listen to all of your music. But the much I heard put me in an absurd and almost surreal noise trance. How would you like to explain the transitions, compositions, and effects that you induce in your sonic pieces?

The projects that are up on Bandcamp and SoundCloud are old releases, which were made during my early 20s, at that time I was also in an exemplary but short-lived Death Metal band project called Vajravarah, so the ideas were inspired around a period when I was listening to a lot of Abruptum, and Exuma. The effects and ideas are the results of a long series of pure stripped-down noise-based audio improvisations on amphetamines and distortion, samples, and the human voice at play with each other. I haven’t released any new music in a long time, as I had to take a step back and refine my procedure and equipment in order to realize a more distinct context and method for the sonic universe of my new compositions. I have been finishing off a new full-length debut which should be out on Aisha Devi’s label Danse Noire sometime this year.

Ruail Qaisar’s online performance, **Musicmakers Hacklab**, CTM Festival 2021

Your tracks on Hounds of Pamir have synthesis with jazz, noise, and various ambiances. The growth of your experimentations with various instruments and digital gadgets has a blend of various emotions. Is this your subconscious or conscious act? How do you reach such completions? What thoughts and emotions run through you while composing?

I started Hounds of Pamir when I moved back to Ladakh after the first wave of Covid-19 hit India, during that period I relocated to a village and developed new methods to work, the first four episodes of Hounds of Pamir mark this period. Before that, I worked at boxout.fm, the only independent community radio platform in India, based out of New Delhi, where I learned the importance of community radio as a medium. Gradually this residency at HKCR developed into an avenue where I can connect with artists all over the world from Ladakh and collaborate through mixes, radio shows, and even live performances. By next year I plan to bring this project closer to home and open the channels to more vernacular sounds. I usually tend to not gauge the state of my mind during a creative process, over-focusing always errs and disturbs a clear flow, and clear flows are rare.

Ruhail it's evident you don't follow a rule book and have a distinct sensibility and energy.. What are your thoughts on Being self-taught.. How much of it is a bane and a boon?

Music and art as a profession was always discouraged in the family and society, it doesn’t coincide with the bourgeois ideals and the limited occupational choices present in Ladakh. It is also seen as a waste of all the hard-earned financial investment put into education. Only in my early twenties would I lean into seriousness towards a maniacal urge to explore art, music, theatre, and philosophy. The former lack and the late acquisition galvanized my interests. This country revolves around bare necessity, and necessity demands to make use of any resources available around oneself to survive, the architecture of all systems is conjured in such mannerisms that one has to end up developing their own methods of finessing loopholes through years of trial and error. If I had a musical family, certain technical knowledge, or the privilege to afford a private studio and gear at an early age, it would have sped things up for me, regardless I am rather glad that found my own methods and instruments to work with, this certainly helped me to step away from any form of conventionality when it came to producing music and reinforced me to depend on my own aural instincts. Teaching oneself also acquired immense patience. Of course, there were vast reserves of tools available through the internet but when it comes to running through life with real-time responsibilities; it is hard to carve a niche while still managing to take your own personal projects further on your own terms. For my early noise shows, I would have no gear except a floor tom, and my laptop to play samples from, when the tom wasn’t available I would buy canisters from the local junk shop and mix them up. In many instances, I have only performed on signal chaining borrowed pedals and gear from some very generous fellow artists around India like Jamblu, Stain, Gill, Cowboy & Sailor Man, and Shantanu Pandit.

Last but not least .. What future do you imagine for the experimental and abstract music scene?

The idea of a consistent and healthy experimental music scene seems like an idea that is very distant; it is also only an option for people who come from backgrounds and locations of accessibility and exposure. Simultaneously, there are distinct and diverse forms of vernacular art and practices all over the country, which largely get overshadowed by the popularity of mainstream media houses that cater to the North Indian population and their ideologies, only to tokenize performative representation when it is en vogue. The interesting part is that in many respects a lot of tropes executed in this pantheon of vernacular art within every underrepresented state in India fall easily into the category of experimental and abstract art, and indeed genuine avenues need to be explored to make them bypass redundant obstacles and nurture holistic worldwide appreciation.