Aditya Prakash Talks Music, Identity and the Sound of Belonging

Aditya Prakash doesn’t just make music, he embodies it.

A vocalist trained in the rigorous tradition of Carnatic music and shaped by a life lived between Los Angeles and Chennai, Prakash weaves ancient ragas into the pulse of jazz, the urgency of hip hop, and the spirituality of Sufi sounds.

His art isn’t about fusion for fusion’s sake, it’s about confronting identity, reckoning with diasporic dissonance, and asking bold, uncomfortable questions.

Whether on his critically acclaimed album ISOLASHUN or in live performance, Aditya Prakash turns the personal into the universal, carving out a soundscape that holds both rage and reverence.

In an exclusive interview with DESIblitz, he opens up about his evolving relationship with tradition, the politics of aesthetics, and what it means to make music that refuses to be categorised.

How would you describe your music and performances?

I always find it hard to describe my music because I feel like my music is me, it’s my identity.

And how do I describe myself? I think my music has changed with me as I’ve changed over the years.

And today, I feel like the expression of my music has an intensity to it, both in an emotional context and in an aural context. It is more on the intense side of things.

ISOLASHUN and ROOM-i-Nation explore identity and belonging. What inspired you to focus on these themes?

I think this theme of identity and belonging has always been a part of my music since I can remember.

Growing up as a kid of the diaspora and feeling like I belonged neither here nor there created a sort of tension that also became a source of inspiration.

“Through trying to navigate the tension between these poles of identity, art has been a form of expression.”

And the resolution is really about accepting that these poles exist and I am neither the poles, I’m the in-betweens.

With my most current work – ROOM-i-Nation and ISOLASHUN, this is the central theme.

You call a raga a “living being.” What is your favourite raga and why?

At one point, I used to have so many favourite ragas and I still have a proclivity towards certain ragas like Todi, Shankarabharanam, Begada, Kirvani, just to name a few.

But today I don’t feel I have a favourite raga. It really depends on how that raga is expressed.

I think all ragas have something beautiful about them, something deep about them, if the medium through which they’re being expressed comes from a source that’s deep.

So it’s really about how it’s expressed.

How has your relationship with ragas changed as you mix Carnatic music with Jazz, Sufi, and Hip-Hop?

I think raga depends on context.

Even if you look within a “classical” context, if you take two ragas and you just isolate one phrase of both ragas, they may be the same sounding phrase, same notes, same sound; but you have to look at the context in which it’s placed, the phrase before it and the phrase after it.

And that’s really what determines a raga.

And similarly, when using raga with jazz, it’s all about the context. Because in jazz or any sort of Western music, the harmony plays a factor.

That means the tonic note is changing. And raga is really defined by its relationship to the tonic note. Its identity sits on this Sa, what we call the Sa or the Shadja.

This is the tonic and this is a very foundational marker for the raga. And so when that changes, the raga’s sound will change first and foremost.

And second of all, the approach to it needs to change. It’s all in the detailing.

It’s not that it needs to drastically become something different, but how you respond to the shifting Sa is very important.

“And so I think it requires experimentation, time and detailing.”

And yes, how has my relationship with ragas changed?

I’ve been more acutely aware that more effort needs to go into raga exploration when it’s used in a different context.

I’ve learned that I can’t just copy-paste a raga over chords or over certain different instruments. The raga needs to respond to the context, and that’s something that has changed from my beginnings of experimenting with raga and different styles to now.

Growing up in LA and training in India, how did these different worlds shape your balance of tradition and innovation?

For me, tradition and innovation can’t be separate.

Tradition is innovation. It’s happening now.

So many times we equate tradition to being something of the past that we are recreating now.

It’s almost relegated to a museum piece, an ancient relic.

But if we look at “traditional” artists, people that we consider traditional artists today who lived back then, they were innovating in the NOW.

They weren’t recreating something from the past. They were, of course, influenced from the past because the past is the foundation for the now. They were responding to now, whatever their socioeconomic environment that they were living in, they were responding to that.

And nothing should change today when we think about tradition.

We’re of course influenced from the past because that is what has led us to make the music we are today.

But tradition is happening now and it is being innovated now.

And yes, growing up in LA and training in India, those two different diasporic identities are a huge part of my lived experience.

To me, one important facet of art is that it is about expressing your lived experience.

And for me, being both American and Indian, and on one hand being a practitioner who comes from privilege in a tradition that has a messy history of erasure and marginalisation and on the other hand, being a brown artist in a very white-dominated music industry; how to navigate these poles?

At a time when the news is constantly war, violent rhetoric, toxic masculinity, all of this filters through the music in some way; it affects not only the content of my music, but the sound of my music.

“I don’t distinguish my music as traditional or innovative. It’s just music that is an expression of me and my experience.”

I think this tendency to bifurcate traditional music from contemporary music is something I have learned to drop.

Today, it’s all just music and music is a form of expression. And expression is a form of your lived reality.

And Thyagaraja, one of the great Carnatic composers, who we consider the epitome of “traditional”, was creating music that was very contemporary and ground-breaking then and still is now.

And it happened to be a long time ago, so we call it traditional music. But it was contemporary music. It is contemporary music.

Who or what influences your music?

At this point in my career, my two biggest influences are my mentors. One is TM Krishna and the other is Akram Khan.

What influences me is what I see, what I hear, what I listen to.

As artists, I believe we have to be receptive to our external stimuli and our internal stimuli in the form of emotions.

At times in my life when I feel a bit closed off and not receptive, it also ties in because I’m not as creative during those periods.

What’s important is your intention.

I think we often confuse tradition with convention. If it’s a practice or convention in the art form that you feel limited by, why do you feel limited and why do you want to break away?

And when those questions arise and there is a deep urge to find the answers for them, I think that’s when you decide to stick to or break away from convention.

You’ve spoken about “decolonising” your music. How do you put this into practice and challenge inherited musical habits?

Well, I guess I’ve asked questions about my choices in the aesthetics of a sound.

My choices in my aesthetics, were my choices in my aesthetics of sound a product of my identity?

Did I feel like I needed to fuse Carnatic music with Western music styles, with jazz, to make it appealing, accessible and worthy of acceptance?

So when I started asking that question, did I need to fuse Carnatic music with Western music styles to make it appealing and more accessible, I started to ask myself the counter question.

Could I trust the power, depth and layers of this Indian music training which I’ve grown up with without presenting it through this Western lens?

And that compelled me to dig deeper into my Indian music, Carnatic music.

Was this music only about upliftment?

Were the aesthetic sound constructs of beauty and refinement able to also reflect the tension, violence and messiness of what’s happening around me, around the world that I live in?

Was it going against the form to open up the space for the abrasive and the jarring sounds to coexist with the melodious, beautiful ones?

So I think it’s about exploring these questions that I started to unpack things and decolonising is one of those things that were being unpacked.

What do you do to relax and unwind?

First and foremost, I like to start my day by relaxing and unwinding.

And to me, that is making my own coffee.

To me, it’s a ritual every morning and that really starts the tone for my day. And if I can’t do that, then I just go out for a great cup of coffee!

Other things I like to do are:

• Go on walks, solitary walks if possible.
• Sitting in quiet spaces around nature.
• Playing and watching basketball.
• Being around dogs!

Are there any unconventional collaborations or new mediums like film, VR, or AI, you want to explore in future projects?

I am not sure how I feel with the growing emergence of AI and VR in the artistic spaces, but I see that it is becoming inevitable.

And I know that I can’t keep avoiding or running away from it and I have to adapt my ways to blend VR and AI into my artistic process, but that hasn’t happened yet.

“And with film, yes, there are two exciting film projects that I have finished and they’re unreleased.”

And one of them, I can’t say too much about them, but one of them is a short film that was directed by Akram Khan and Maxime Dos. It’s a short film that is centred around songs from my album, ISOLASHUN.

Another exciting thing is that I’ve composed a small section of music for a new full-length film by the Oscar-winning duo, Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed.

Aditya Prakash is not chasing trends. He is questioning them.

His music draws from deep training and lived experience, giving it weight.

He challenges what we call tradition. He pushes Indian classical music into global conversations.

Prakash does not separate the personal from the political. He lets sound carry both.

Through every note, he is asking: What does it mean to belong? And who gets to decide what music is worth hearing?

In a fractured world, his answer is simple. Expression is resistance. And music is the bridge.