Maliha Mohsin illustrates how Nuzhat Tabassum, a young Bangladeshi music producer has boldly stepped into the relatively new male-dominated electronica music scene in the country
Tin Whiskers is a persona – a shapeless form with colours, made of layers of silhouettes. It is made of sounds from here and there, blended into an ambiance that calms you but also wants to make you dance.
BorderMovement, a German initiative that aims to connect the electronica scenes of South Asia with Germany, ranks Tin Whiskers aka Nuzhat Tabassum as one of the top 10 Bangladeshi electronica artistes to look out for in 2015-16. Only six months ago, Tin Whiskers was featured on the first release of Polychrome Kollektiv, a Bangladeshi series of compilations that aims to feature the best of local work. And most recently, she has been featured on Translations, Bangladesh’s first physical album of electronic music, pre-launched at the Dhaka Art Summit 2016 earlier this year.
Nuzhat Tabassum, who is a graduate of Electrical Engineering from American International University-Bangladesh, stands tall and catches attention as the person behind Tin Whiskers, not only for the music she is making but also for being one of the very few women in Bangladesh who have ventured into electronic music production. It hasn’t been long that she’s been producing music, but she has been making waves (pun intended) with features, performances and ratings worth noting.
Electronic music, a popular form of music and culture all over the world, has had an organic, independent scene in Dhaka for just a little over four years now. While DJs and club parties have been around for far longer, it was with Dhaka Electronica Scene (DES), an online platform founded by a handful of young Bangladeshi music producers, that an organised space for the form, culture, growth and representation of electronic music was formed for the first time.
And as is with the rest of the world, Bangladesh’s scene is male dominated as well. The initiative started with an all-male group, and every major DES event and project so far has had mostly male participants and contributors. While the scene entertains plenty of female listeners and women have been at the management back-end of projects as managers and designers, there have been very few women who have actually made an attempt to create music as electronic music producers in Bangladesh.
Nuzhat is one of these very few women.
Her work only surfaced on SoundCloud and in social media circles sometime in early 2015, with works that heavily rang with percussions and vocal samples.
She says, ‘I have always been an avid music listener and have worked on eight tracks as a voluntary DJ, making more than 100 mixes. And I am always looking out for sounds that aren’t ordinary. So basically, my love for unconventional sounds and glitchy beats encouraged me to start producing my own tunes.’
Because electronic music is still a recent concept and form in Bangladesh, most artistes working in the scene right now are self-taught and constantly utilizing the vast pool of resources that the internet holds. Nuzhat is no different, as she picks up from YouTube lessons and uses open sourced material in her work.
‘In today’s age, I guess it’s safe to say YouTube is my favourite teacher. Obviously, there was no school that could provide me any guidance so YouTube was my only resort and to be honest, it is the best of them all! I found tons of helpful tutorials to guide me and well actually, I am still learning!’ she elaborates.
Not all music producers perform, but Nuzhat’s interests started with DJing and making mixes. And in a scene inundated with so many male performers, it’s refreshing to see a woman turn the beats on for a crowd. We have had very few women like DJ Sonica who have broken the convention for the Bangladeshi woman by choosing to DJ and perform fearlessly, whether or not the audience has appreciated them. But an electronic music performance is more than just DJing; to perform originals live after you have produced them electronically is a challenge. Electronic music producers may play instruments but the productions themselves are largely based on electronic devices and gears that hardly ever look anything like a conventional instrument. Launchpads, turntables, MIDIs, synthesizers – they are a strange sight to behold. But they create a new form of performance, one that has been around globally for decades now but is still almost non-existent in Bangladesh. One can’t hope to learn of the use and engineering behind analog synthesizers from an institution here in Bangladesh while in the US, University of California Berkeley has programmes dedicated to sound and music technology. And in a region where the form is almost non-existent, to source the gears and instruments is also difficult and most often, expensive. But that isn’t stopping Nuzhat.
‘I have performed live once and it was super fun. I would love to perform more but I lack the proper gears to practice on, But I do hope soon, when I’m no longer a poor musician, I will be able to move into performance,’ she says.
Nuzhats describes her music as downtempo largely, and it’s hilariously fantastic when she attempts to describe her sounds in words as she goes, ‘drop drop drop the tempo’. She is influenced by Radiohead’s ‘zoned out beats’ and ‘the funky beats and robotic sounds’ of Gorillaz, explaining that she didn’t really listen to electronica specifically growing up. She is influenced by various genres, all of which now comes through electronica in her music.
And one can hope for big things for Nuzhat. Her work ‘Headlock’, ‘Bloom, ‘Desire’ are just some of the tracks that show how talented she is and what a cohesive body of work she has created in just a little more than a year.
It’s not always enough to just be talented though. That she has to push through the scene as a woman in Bangladesh is a reality, and quite often a harsh one.
‘It makes me feel sad that women are still so underrepresented in the scene all over the world. For an instance, when I tell someone I’m a musician I instantly get asked “oh you sing?” Whereas a male musician would face a totally different reaction like, “which instrument do you play?” It’s sad to see how it’s embedded in people that a woman can’t do “technical” stuff. It’s 2016! It’s about time we change that mentality. But I guess we still have a long way to go,’ she adds.
Nuzhat is currently looking to work on her first EP and keep on collaborating and experimenting with local musicians.
You can listen to Tin Whiskers on SoundCloud and find her work on channels like Polychrome Kollektiv, Dhaka Electronica Scene and Akaliko Records.