Ukali Orali

When I first learnt the guitar after I passed out of 10th Grade, I did not imagine music would basically become my life. I always had an ear for it. I heard small things nobody around me seemed to hear. When I started learning guitar, I came across Pink Floyd and The Beatles. They changed the way I thought about music. I don’t make music like them. What stayed with me was how freely they reached for whatever instrument a song asked for. The small things mattered to me most. I grew as a musician and went looking through other genres, and the one that held me was synthpop, or electro-pop, all those synths moving underneath. Daft Punk and The Weeknd and their signature sounds got into my head. The problem was that most Nepali listeners were still living inside breathy vocals and acoustic guitars, and would not look past them. The heavily marketed Bollywood machine has its hand in that. Still, I hope the smoke lifts, slowly, and my people find their way into a higher room of music, where an acoustic guitar sits beside other genres that sound just as beautiful.

I do not make it for an audience. I make it for myself, and now and then it lands with someone else too. I fold genres together, synthpop and soft-rock and hiphop pressed into one song most times. What comes out sounds like nothing else, and plenty of people won’t follow it. I don’t expect them to. The music was made for me.