GAME ON

WORLD BEATBOXING PHENOM DHARNI ON BREAKING RULES, NFTS AND HIS NEXT BIG CRYPTO MOVE.

- JEFFREY YAN

From the moment he could walk and talk, Dharni knew he wanted to be different. “I’ve always had an interest in music, but I’ve also always been a nonconformist,” he says. “I took up the piano when I was four, but then I quit because the teacher was too stringent and boring and classical.” At 13, he discovered beatboxing on music-sharing platforms, found a community of fellow enthusiasts on online forums, and was hooked. “I was listening to these MP3s and I was just so inspired. I started beatboxing, rapping, just playing and producing music— everything developed from there.”

Those developments have taken Dharni halfway across the world and back. The musician has been residing in Poland for the past 10 years but moved back to Singapore in January this year. “I left because I felt very trapped and sheltered here,” he shares. “Art is about expressing yourself and I couldn’t really do that in Singapore then, because I didn’t really have experience in many things. It was comfortable, which was a good thing, but for an artist, it can be quite suffocating. I wanted to step away from people who were thinking alike.”