Neil Kulkarni, in a column reflecting on the year 2023, wrote of having perhaps finally found a space of belonging at an event of Black-Brown experimental noise. That this 51 year-old British Asian was slowly coming to a place of belonging, however contingent, feels heart-breaking in the wake of his untimely passing. Being second gen, it speaks very much to the failure of an anti-racist movement to truly build alternative–let alone oppositional–spaces, and the hollowness of a deracinated multiculturalism presided over by the white masks of the likes of Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly, [insert your choice of comprador here]...
It felt like Kulkarni had a lot more to give. His project, his riffs and cascading rhythms slowly forming and re-forming. I had written about his memoir Eastern Spring, and Kulkarni graciously read it, enjoying himself described as possessing unhinged erudition, mentioning he was working on a follow-up. Nation, identity, style, the popular; there is still much to learn from him. We lost him too early.
But timeliness is a strange thing. Dhangsha, Kulkarni's interlocutor at the noise event and one of his fellow wanderers, – previously incarnate as Dr Das in Asian Dub Foundation – gives us a model. His name means destruction in Bengali, and the abstracted noise that he produces in a virtuosic mode takes aim at the sort of representational politics and modes of identity we are meant to purport – as racialised subjects, but also as subculture fanatics. This abstraction of course is found in Indian music, in the East and South as much as the West. The NID Tapes unearthed by Paul Purgas is testament to a contemporary iteration of that. But Kulkarni, in Eastern Spring, also pushes that argument further, proposing the ancient, originary trace of the raga suffuses through prog and jazz and jungle. These things are not linear. Lineage, inheritance, tradition are slippery things, much harder to track than what may appear.
At a base level it is an ontological thing. To live through the unevenness and imbalance of immigrant life, and of modern life more generally. He speaks of his beloved Cov, in his tribute to The Specials Terry Hall, with such verve:
Coventry endlessly tumbles and rebuilds, continually and brutally tears down vistas you’ve grown up with to build monstrosities you’re not prepared for, always destabilises and renders perilous any kind of psychogeography you might want to throw around it.
[...]
It was the sense that our unbelonging, our unfashionableness, our fractured uncomfortable relationship with the dazed and deranged reality of our hometown, was being rendered without bullshit, without self-pity, and with the rancour and romance of being a Coventrian both intact.
I can read my post-brutalist (sub)urban Croydon here too. This imbalance is somehow an enigma which colours some of us, tints us with a spirited unhingeness, the tilt towards modernism and counter-culture. To the stranger parts of our psyche, places where we search for meaning amidst all this cascading banality.
It's all about the swag in the end. Living in the contradiction and fronting up.