Nep Sidhu’s message

Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit album cover, featuring ‘The Sound Sculpture Forms & Knowledge of Kahil El’Zabar’ by Nep Sidhu.

The pursuit to collaborate and collect people’s experiences of merging into oneness through song, script or form has been a pluriversal pursuit in human potential since the early 1700s during the collection of said experiences for the Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji. These sets of exchanges personally carry on today by way of one’s own participation as well as witness.

In The Sound Sculpture Forms & Knowledge Transfers of Kahil El’Zabar, the tapestry acts as a visual capture of both. By looking into Kahil El Zabar’s innovative musical vocabulary and approach to percussion, there is an eruption of interdependence through ancestry and ritual that shouts ‘The Time is Now!’ (Something he usually ends his phone conversations with when we speak). The percussion not only looks at Kahil’s own playing but further into the continuum of his teachers and peers who shared in a common conduction such as Kelan Phil Cohran, Muhal Richard Abrams, Malachi Favors and multiple other contributors to Great Black Music. The mapping of sounds is merged with the multitudes of listening through a Sikh understanding of melody to become one with it. In this sense, we see the iconography of swords, shastars and other weapons levitating in a dance of protection and exaltation. Here we see the true resonance of objects and materials take towards their own flight into a higher sound experience, beyond form, beyond shape. Spirit Music.

– Nep Sidhu