Debashis Sinha
www.debsinha.com
www.eemarecords.com
www.posttraditional.ca
Interview for SIP – SoundLAB Interview project
Debashis Sinha is a Toronto based percussionist interested in seeking out the threads that bind disparate musical and percussive traditions. He is a member of autorickshaw and Maza Mezé, 2 of Canada’s most well known world music ensembles. In demand as a percussionist with a unique voice and imagination, Sinha has also appeared and recorded with a wide variety of ensembles performing everything from French Canadian to Yiddish New Music. A fixture on Toronto’s dance scene, he has collaborated and performed with Peggy Baker, Dancemakers, Peter Chin, Julia Aplin, Sukalyan Bhattacharjee, Hari Krishnan, and Winnipeg’s Fusion Dance Theatre.
As a composer and sound designer, Sinha has created work for his various groups as well as for CD, dance and theatre, all the while guided by his own vision of what he terms the “post traditional†ethic, where focus is placed on the flow between traditional music making and modern compositional and improvisational techniques, thereby embracing the full spectrum of sound and performance. This overall concept has guided his first 2 solo CD releases, quell and tumma. Music from quell has been included in the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio Art 2005, and music from quell and tumma has been featured on CBC Radio and TV. Current projects include a website for post traditional music advocacy, exploring the possibilities of live signal processing in tandem with traditional percussion, and leading his own improvising group Ima Ensemble, which has just released their first CD bad monkey bad bad monkey. Sinha’s new attention to the world of audio art has resulted in his first artist-in-residence commission at the 2006 Deep Wireless Festival of Sound Art.
Sinha is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Chalmers Foundation, and the Toronto Arts Council.
Debashis Sinha participates in