Agency: Sitting on the balcony of a cafe in Thamel, Ruhail Qaisar deconstructed the abstruseness of handmade instruments. “You get Piezo mics, best for metal surfaces,” he said as he knocked on the cafe’s metal balustrade with his ring, briefly clanging through the metal. “They pick up the sound from the inside.”
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This
deconstruction soon veered into a conversation about the history of noise
music. Qaisar talked about how the Berlin-based band Einstürzende Neubauten
began making instruments by hand in the 1980s using stolen construction
materials. He explained that this was due to their lack of means to buy
instruments. Born in a lower-middle-class house in Ladakh, Qaisar, 28, has
related to this struggle, relying on instruments made from found objects as a
self-taught noise musician.
His
music is a manifestation of personal and political catastrophe. The decay of
Ladakh caused by late capitalism, coupled with the trials of intergenerational
trauma constitute his defiant sonic performance. On March 11, Qaisar presented
his work in Lalitpur with noise musicians from
Qaiser was born
to Muslim parents, the first educated generation in Leh, the largest city of
Qaisar did not
see a whole lot of technology during his early childhood. He did not grow up
seeing many educational institutions. He explains that there was a trend where
parents sent their kids abroad to study. Consistent with this, he was sent to a
boarding school in
The loss of an integral community member coupled
with the decay in his hometown informed his second album, which he named
Qaisar
takes found footage from Ladakh and mutates it using electronic frays and
sounds. This is part of Qaiser’s efforts to preserve and repurpose totems that
uphold memories of what Ladakh used to be. As the album opens with ‘Fatima’s
Poplar’, it is particularly intriguing how Qaisar borrows from English
philosopher Nick Land, contextualising and transforming Land’s words based on
his own experiences. Another track, ‘The Abandoned Hotels of Zangsti’, relies
less on words and philosophy, and more on the chirping of Choglamsar village’s
birds that reach a calming yet cautionary crescendo before they quiet down.
Qaiser’s journey
as a noise musician was a subversive attempt to break away from the stasis and
polished over-curation within the music scene in
Through these
links, he released his album under Aisha Devi’s Berlin-based record label,
Danse Noire. Devi, whose paternal lineage comes from Kathmandu, liaised between
Qaisar and Nischal Khadka, who works on curating and combining different audio
and visual media within the Himalayan region. “He has been trying to form this
trans-Himalayan nexus of artists and I resonated strongly with the idea and
motivations. I wanted to do something in Nepal,” said Qaiser.
This
resonance brought him to Beers N’ Cheers in Jhamsikhel for an event called
‘Noise Trepanation’. The event’s name was inspired by one of Qaisar’s favourite
Concrete Winds songs of the same name. Alternating red and blue lights
illuminated the dark space as a niche group of people gathered for the event.
After the event,
Qaisar spent the remainder of his time in the valley exploring junkyards and
post-earthquake ruins. This is not the first time the artist has been
interested in exploring the concept of earthquakes through his art. Last year,
he was involved with an industrial band called Xalxala (from
the Urdu word ‘Zalzala’ meaning
earthquake) where Ladakhi lyrics formed a conjecture with industrial music.
This was Qaisar’s segue into noise music. “The idea of that was to try to make
music and not make music at the same time. Keep anti-music and music going on
at the same time. Like a double mirror expression.”
Qaisar’s time in
Kathmandu enabled him to draw a juxtaposition between Kathmandu and Ladakh. Walking
through Thamel, a spot curated for tourism, strikes a chord of familiarity
within him because it reminds him of home. Both regions once ravaged by natural
disasters, were rebuilt on the promise of a blossoming tourism industry.
Resultingly, buildings of concrete cement replaced the old architecture in both
regions. Qaisar goes as far as to deem the two eras of architecture opposites
of one another.
While Qaisar
observed Kathmandu’s post-earthquake commercial rebuilding during his visit, he
witnessed this process firsthand in Ladakh at the age of ten. He saw the mental
headspace of his community deteriorate as commercial tourism rose. Qaisar holds
the memory of the phasphun tradition,
an old Ladakhi practice where communities took care of each other irrespective
of religion. He also recalled the anthropogenic damage done to the region,
reminiscing how “things were much purer” during his early childhood. “Rivers
weren’t tainted and mountains were clean.”
With his work,
Qaisar does not only write an elegy to what Ladakh used to be, but strives to
preserve its memory. He is now exploring this in mediums beyond sound. In the
past year, he has worked on compiling old home videos into a 30-minute montage.
This brings his aspirations of simultaneously preserving and mourning Ladakh
into the visual realm.
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