Past/Lives

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Track Artist nanditi https://nanditi.com/

Bio

nanditi conjures sonic rituals from raga, memory, and machine. A musician, livecoder, and cultural technologist, her sets drift through tabla rhythms, ambient strings, emotional melodies, and field recordings — building immersive worlds shaped by classical structures and algorithmic logic. Her music opens portals between the ancient, the intimate, and the speculative, inviting you to lose sense of time, to dwell in presence, to dream. Based in India, nanditi’s musical journey spans Hindustani classical, folk traditions, and generative electronic music — often sampling her own voice. She is also a founder of code.drift, a collective turning urban noise and wanderings into livecoded sonic-visual city dreams through playful performance.

Zine Artist Avani https://avanixr.com/

Bio

Avani Vidhani is a creative technologist with a background in communication design and 6+ years of experience in AR/VR, physical computing, and immersive installations. A former resident at Fabrica, she has collaborated with international teams, led workshops across Europe, and mentored at Maker’s Asylum. Now pursuing a Master’s in Expanded Media, her work explores futurity, public engagement, and making technology more human, playful, and accessible.

Process

I usually begin a new track with a wish — to time-travel to a place, a moment, or memory. Or to invite someone into an inner landscape of feeling. For me, music is about evoking atmosphere. A journey — through space and time, or deep within. This piece - Past/Lives - began when I recently revisited the music school I went to as a child, hidden within Jaipur’s historic walled city. In the courtyard stood a massive banyan tree — my favourite spot during breaks. From there, a whole world of sound unfolded: echoes of riyaaz, tabla, kathak, voices drifting from jharokhas, birds, wind, children playing. A soundscape alive with emotion and memory. I also imagined the sounds that came before me — court musicians, ancient forts, centuries of ragas echoing across time. This track became a sonic drift through both personal and imagined pasts — a quiet thanks to my gurus, and to the traditions still humming in the walls. Composed entirely in code on Sonic Pi, the piece layers field recordings, snippets of my own singing, and generative melodies based on Raag Darbari. The tabla, in Ektal, is coded too — where rhythm and recursion move together effortlessly. The cyclical nature of taal fits naturally into the logic of code. This is how I think, feel, and make music: with raga as my root system, code as my co-composer, and Sonic Pi as my instrument — electronic music, grounded in the classical. When Avani and I began working on the zine, I shared the story behind the track — and she was immediately drawn to the memory of listening beneath the banyan tree. That moment became our starting point. The zine extends that atmosphere visually. Camaraderie and joy in collaboration are central to our practice, so we nodded to our shared heritage by using Ajrakh motifs in the generative elements and colour palette — drawn from traditions that belong to us both. The idea of listening to life around you — and the life that once was — resonated deeply. In the final poster of the zine, we tried to hold space for that layered listening and left the viewer with a quiet prompt to find their own.