Ruhail Qaisar (IN, 1995)
Residency period: November-December 2022
Composition, arrangement, performance, and demo tracking of “The Three Hymns of Cruelty” in collaboration with Swedish musician Gottfrid Ahman (Ex -In Solitude, PAGA) from Uppsala, and accomplished Swiss percussionist Michael Anklin from Biel.
A first attempt at deconstructing the primordial processional music of Ladakh and the Himalayas with three hymnodies in the Ladakhi language interlinked by interludes of noise and bare-boned blues written with detuned guitars and the found percussion premiering on the first day of Les Urbaines 2023 at Arsenic in Lausanne.
A first attempt at bringing together the poetics of the Ladakhi lexicon and an approach to finding the line in the sand between music and anti-music.
These compositions will be released later as a release, and will hopefully take the shape of a commissioned live project. — Ruhail Qaisar
Ruhail Qaisar is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and producer from Ladakh, India. His work focuses on sound art and experimental filmmaking. He has been performing all over India since 2016 under his previous moniker, Sister.
As a musician, he explores the confines of memory, intergenerational trauma and the operational swarm of the unconscious through the incorporation of vernacular poetic gestures and improvisation.
His work serves to transmit memories carried through events and local mythos as developed through his recollections of growing up between the remote agrarian villages of Ladakh and the military-occupied, tourism-industrialised urban-centre Leh. His compositions form haunting drones of hypnosis disrupted by spastic barrages of post-industrial noise and unnerving power electronics with tropes of vernacular theatre.
1-3: Ruhail Qaisar, Les Urbaines, 2023, photo Les Urbaines
4-6: Ruhail Qaisar in La Becque's studio, photo Aurélien Haslebacher
7-8: Ruhail Qaisar, La Becque Open Studios Fall 2022, photo Aurélien Haslebacher