There are a lot of thoughts to gather here…

Arts & Parts mentors individual artists from many musical backgrounds and is fortunate to be able to work directly with artists across several territories and genres.  Meeting online via the Australian Art Orchestra during the pandemic, Sia Ahmad stands out in the adventurous music landscape of Australia.  She is a proud trans femme composer, performer, programmer, record label curator and advocate for diversity.  Arts & Parts commissioned this piece from Sia, and we are so pleased to publish it on the eve of a tour in Europe, where she will perform with the Scottish saxophonist and composer Raymond MacDonald.

Tour dates:

Fri 2 Dec: GIOFest XV, CCA, Glasgow, UK
Mon 5 Dec: Blank Studios, Newcastle, UK
Tue 6 Dec: Worm, Rotterdam (NL)
Wed 7 Dec: Le Petit Theatre, Groningen (NL)
Fri 9 Dec: Shift, Cardiff (UK)

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With a rich and extensive background in Australian music, Sia Ahmad has been creating idiosyncratic sounds over the last decade and more.  Using guitar, keyboard, voice and electronics, she works both as singer/composer and improviser, when performing solo, as Shoeb Ahmad, as well as collaborative projects.⁠

She has released a diverse range of original music while also working on sound design for dance and theatre, installation pieces and contemporary chamber composition, and is inspired by 20th-century avant-classical works, Indian raga form and minimalist electronic music.⁠  Her latest recording ‘Breather Loops’, was released in 2022 on US label Atlantic Rhythms.

She has performed throughout Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the UK and South-East Asia as a solo artist, and with acclaimed groups such as Sensaround, Spartak, Tangents and the Australian Art Orchestra.  In 2021, she spoke as part of the annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address for the creation and performance of Australian music and in 2022, she received an APRA Art Music Award for Electroacoustic/Sound Art Work of the Year.

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There are a lot of thoughts to gather here.

A lot of ruminations that come together and swirl around as uncertainties for the future, conjured from decades of thinking and wondering what is the place that I inhabit within society at large, let alone in the world of music making or the spectrum that is ‘art music’.

I never set out to achieve anything really. All I ever wanted to do is write songs and play in bands, sometimes play shows but just to hang out and make friends. A pretty simple premise and still at the core of what I do now.  But each year, things get scaled up higher and higher and I wonder whether I’ve stayed true to my guns or if I’ve become absorbed by the machine.

However, perhaps if I’m now embedded within the machine, maybe I can be part of breaking the machine down from inside and help rebuild it with better structures in place, ones that support people like myself who feel like they belong from the start and don’t have to grapple with inferiority or imposter syndrome?

If I go back right to the start, I was very stuck in my own cultural cringe. Each weekend, I would learn Bengali with my community friends, and we would do traditional Bangladeshi songs and dances, sometimes perform stories as theatre pieces. This was all an effort by the adults of the community who wanted to see their culture preserved through the diaspora gatherings that they worked hard to organise and pull together. 

(Maybe seeing this happen every few months was the actual start of my DIY journey?)

However, these activities were well and truly compartmentalised, something kept to the weekends and never spoken of during the week. Whatever life I led at school Monday to Friday was very much steeped in the Australianness around me and I took it on without much dilemma. I wanted to be just like everyone else around me and that just happened to be very mono-cultural in the Anglo-European tradition. 

(Well, mostly - I couldn’t disavow the food cooked in my mum’s kitchen because I knew Biryanis and Gulab Jamums were pretty much the best food around and there was no cringe about flavour!)

I took to music through Video Hits and the Austereo network - first it was Kylie and New Kids on the Block, then it was Crowded House, U2 and Silverchair. Not a brown person in sight but it was fine - it was pop music and it spoke to me for some reason. I never did have the urge to learn an instrument, but I picked up a trombone for primary school band. I didn’t really have the mindset for learning the instrument as it should be, but I did like what sound it made, low rumble but with a beautiful sonority if you let it be rather than a bassline replicant.

I don’t think it was until high school that my sense of cultural reclamation took hold. I could say that I found a new sense of joy and pride in being Bangladeshi, but it wasn’t that at all, it was pretty much the opposite - it was from a sense of feeling more different than ever before, noting that whatever normality was felt was slowly stretched and torn by the newfound view of certain people post 9/11. However, as things felt like they were closing in, something changed in what I was able to hear and view in the world again. A positive reaction to the shift in mood, an information overload where once it was all myths in my mind.

Out of nowhere, I heard talk of Asha Bhosle on the radio because Cornershop had their homage to the legendary Bollywood singer go #1 around the world (courtesy of a Fatboy Slim remix). The bane of my teen existence is now celebrated and made hip?? What a world I was living in. Something that hit me harder was hearing about the artists making new form, tradition meets technology explorations known as the ‘Asian Underground’ - Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Joi, State of Bengal and my favourites Asian Dub Foundation. There was something so magical about what they were doing, sounds that were a cut above what else was going on around them and then some. Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan singing together is one thing, but this was proper 21st century music made and owned by people like me that blew most minds who came across it.

Until now, I hadn’t heard musicians that I wanted to listen to talk about being of subcontinental background, let alone zero in on being specifically Bangladeshi. I found something to be proud of and explore further, something that could make sense of the culture clash that I had been grappling with as I got older. These guys talked about club culture and punk rock, their avenues into feeling like they had the agency to be who they are, rather than who they should be. They did things that broke against tradition but also revered their heritage, giving new contexts for the past as they look forward.

This new sense of being freed me from feeling like I needed to be, that I could look for things that came to me more intuitively. Another breakthrough moment was watching a documentary on John Cale and retracing his classical education that led him to LaMonte Young and the Dream Syndicate. In a simplistic way, this was his Beatles go to India moment. He tapped into that raga form and aesthetic before going electric. The outcomes are magical, and it wouldn’t have been without the knowledge that it is indeed all about the raga. Without these moments, John Cale doesn’t take the drone to rock music and make a statement for repetition. 

Punk rock was my guiding light, attitude over aptitude to drive my bedroom sonic experiments, but more importantly, that greater sense of being had become clearer and that I could push myself to have a voice, even with my ‘otherness’ being quite obvious. As the Dead Kennedys said, ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off!’

I found myself being allowed to think as a creative being and take hold of whatever inspiration I had in mind. Quite quickly, I went thinking of pop songs to sound collage and then onto pure drone, the acceptance of sound as an emotive outlet with colours to map out my thoughts. This had nothing to do with punk rock or ‘art music’, it was sound as art and without boundaries. The internet had just come into my hands and the barriers were withdrawn even further. Typing into Google ‘noise music’, ‘jazz’ and ‘raga’ to see what the search engine brought up led me into new directions yet again. I mowed lawns to raise pocket money and then I finally have enough to buy Ornette’s “Free Jazz”. The great typography and Pollack inner really didn’t prepare me for the onslaught but I knew that this was something I could hold in the back of my mind for further thinking. 

How was this not punk rock I kept asking myself? 

What was the throughline in musical narrative from this to punk rock?

Why weren’t people talking about that?

Yet again, mind blown in my Belco bedroom but find ecstasy through sound. I could barely remember a chord shape on my $90 electric guitar, but I felt the energy of jazz as a free explorative music, intellectual in concept but could be equally meditative and serene as Alice’s “Universal Consciousness”, as it could be tough and with gusto as Shepp’s “Attica Blues”. Just as Asian Dub Foundation spoke of Community Music and coming together to be stronger, this fever dream of 1960s improvisation spoke to struggles and the need to fight, but not without reflection, even if at times there was an inherent sadness connected to social resignation.

I knew punk rock found me many allies who I knew would stand side-by-side with me, but it was clear that the music that dug itself into my core was because it was made with voices that felt true to me, voices that understood life as a person of colour in a colonial world and saw the need to speak up, reclaim the rich cultural heritage that we are so lucky to have in our lives and be proud of who we are.

Come to this point in time now, I still believe I didn’t want to achieve anything special in this life but just live an honest life true to myself. What I do know now though is that being true to myself is not avoiding the hard questions and not speaking up when necessary. I know I’ve worked hard to come upon the opportunities and chances on my journey and I know there have been sacrifices too, hardships that I’ve only recognised in hindsight. I’m proud that people want to hear from me, be thought of as a voice that is respected for what I bring to a listening space, and I’m proud that I’ve not compromised myself as I’ve kept a foot on this path. I was lucky to find those guiding lights in my life when I did, and while it isn’t easy taking on the responsibility of “otherness” from those before me, I hope that those after me find their guiding lights too so I can sit back quietly and hear what they have to say with the same stupid smile on my face as when I first heard something that felt close to me.

Sia Ahmad, Ngunnawal country, November 2022