rh.hk

Growing up in New York, Karsh Kale, one of the earliest, loudest voices of the Asian Underground, battles years of conditioning and the rude barbs of his friends to tuck away behind areas of Led Zeppelin CDs, what he really likes – Indian classical music. For Kale, his love for bandishes and bols, is like some deeply perverse secret, one that his friends must never know.

That was back in the day. Now, you’d imagine, years of colonial rule and a shared culture later, in a city like Singapore, a young Indian, doing exactly what Kale began with in New York, wouldn’t be all that big a deal. After all, the third largest ethnic group in Singapore, after the Chinese and the Malays, are Indians. Every construction site is liberally plastered with safety guidelines in Tamil. There are streets named after prominent Indian settlers. The crisp, ghee-cuddling dosas on streetside food stalls are just like the ones in Madras.

It shouldn’t be that big a deal, taking the sounds of India – the innumerable satsangs, the kirtans, the bols, the 12-beat tabla cycles and merge it with electronica. At least not for a guy called Rajesh Hardwani. But, like Kale, Hardwani is no stranger to the excesses of a dominant majority, which, however pluralistic, still looks at the culture of a minority with wariness, if not disdain. “I want to be totally honest with you, being an Indian in Singapore is not that easy. We have racial tolerance, but we don’t have racial harmony, you know what I’m saying? There is a difference. You don’t see it when you’re on the street, but you see it when you go through the army, you see it when you go through school. Its not just with Indians, it’s with the Malays as well,” says Hardwani, perched at the edge of his seat in the Hotel Novotel in Singapore. When he’s at the console, he takes on the more subversive sounding name r-H, and it’s not just a gimmick – the lower case ‘r,’ the hyphen, the upper case monolithic ‘H’ and even his shock of freshly dyed blond hair are all in a sense scaffolding propping up his remarkable music. That hyphen forms a sort of bridge between the stylized, contemporary lower case ‘r’ and the majestic, solid roots of the upper case ‘H.'

Rajesh Hardwani, or r-H as he calls himself, is obviously blessed with a vast reservoir of humor. He is also obviously blessed with an extremely good digital recorder. He puts those blessings to good use – sampling an infinite variety of sounds, ranging from ghostly airport terminal announcements to catty grandma-putdowns, and bungs in some standard issue drum&bass to create what is an easily accessible dance record, but yet one that isn’t quite content being only a dance record. Black Asia goes far beyond either Black or Asia, and creates a remarkably refreshing worldview. ~ RAVE Magazine, India by Soul City Publications