Making A Noise: Hemant Sreekumar

The Bengaluru-based noise producer on rejecting scale, pitch and harmony for esoteric sounds

- Anurag Tagat

AS A CHILD, HEMANT SREEKUMAR took pleasure in destroying toys and eventually, from the mid-Nineties, magnetic tapes, radio transistors, tape machines, “super detuned bass guitar” and amplifiers, among other things. He tells me something you’d probably never hear from an artist. “Not having any formal musical background, of course, was vastly helpful—since I could approach acoustics as a standalone physical phenomena—and didn’t have to honour Western/Indian systems of scale, harmony and taste.”