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.”

For about nine years – between 1994 and 2003 – Sreekumar took apart old, unused cassettes of devotional albums as well as other tools and paraphernalia. He played bass from 1997 onwards, while he was studying art history in Vadodara, which he calls “the breakthrough mind- expanding instrument.” He had recently pored over profiles of experimental artists such as U.K.’s Throbbing Gristle and Germany’s industrial/noise act Einstürzende Neubauten in a second-hand 1995 issue of