Davison Room, Loeb Music Library
Studio Collabos: Musical intimacies in Afro-Asian Delhi
In this talk I discuss how the language of and aspiration for collaboration becomes the undergirding for Indian musicians in Delhi to make tracks with their African counterparts who temporarily make their lives in the city. Collaboration or, more appropriately, the widely circulating slang term found in social media spaces, collabo, signals the desire for cross-cultural and cross-genre digital musical production. Collabos index the exciting and inventive sonic potentials that can emerge out of a remix of popular music associated with a particular national or regional context while also signaling the frictions that occur when the nitty gritty of production reveals aesthetic differences, differential economic stakes, and the uneven social locations of the artists involved. I ground this talk in the DIY studio spaces I was privy to actively participate in while conducting fieldwork in Delhi, spaces of shared production where musical intimacy, the pleasure of proximity that comes with making tracks together during the long hours spent in a makeshift home studio, reveals the opportunities and challenges of the collabo and the broader ‘Afro-Asian’ sonic histories in which they are ensconced.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is an assistant professor of Anthropology, core faculty in the culture media program, and affiliated faculty in the department of music at NYU. For the last decade he has utilized collaborative, multimodal, and speculative approaches to research how media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of migration, gender, race, and urban space in diasporic and postcolonial contexts. He is the author of two books, The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, masculinity, and urban space in Delhi, India ( 2020 Duke University Press) and Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the age of Social Media (2023 with Sahana Udupa, NYU Press). Gabriel’s films have screened in international festivals, including the Tasveer International Film Festival, Ethnografilm Paris, The International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), and the German International Ethnographic Film Festival. He has exhibited his video and sound installations in various venues, including Khoj Arts (Delhi), the Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), and Bow Arts (London).