Both calming and unnerving: inside Sijya's electronic landscape

There’s a certain gravitational pull to Sijya’s world – thick, rusted, and hauntingly delicate. A New Delhi-based composer, producer and graphic designer navigating the porous boundaries between sound and sentiment, she approaches music not as a polished product, but as a bruised, breathing process. Her upcoming EP Leather & Brass pulses with that very weight: a slow churning of digital synthesis into an analogue abrasion, unraveling among vocal narrations that are both corrosive and soothing. For Sijya, music-making is a craft of slow surrender: to discomfort, to doubt, to the endless regurgitation required to arrive at something that feels right.

In conversation, she’s soft-spoken and sharply present, uninterested in empty performance or pretence. There’s a warm invitation to drop the mask in the way she speaks. Her latest single, Do I Know, arrives with a music video that extends this ethos. Framed in irony, it explores the rituals of faux protection – the gestures and objects we cling to in order to create the futile illusion of safety. We caught up with Sijya to talk about her process, the commodification of South Asian culture, and the dismissed importance of hate. 

Hey Sijya! Lovely to talk to you. You’ve begun putting out your EP Leather & Brass – congrats! How are you feeling?
It’s amazing because whenever you’re putting out music, you forget how it feels. I did remember how it feels in theory – the building up to this moment, and then it kind of feels like nothing actually. It’s a bit underwhelming to release music, to be honest. Every day is different. One day, you might feel like you’ve got some support, so it feels good, and then on other days, you don’t know why you did it or why you worked so hard to achieve it. So yeah, I’m excited for sure, but I’m also realising that it’s going to be mildly depressing. 

This is a very honest response, I admire that, haha.
It is what it is!

The reception of Tabla has been great though, I loved the single myself, too!
Yeah, absolutely. I got a lot of support, especially in India. I think all the Björkheads of India united. It’s been good for sure.

Nice! Speaking of, what’s the music scene like in India right now?
It’s developing. There’s a lot of interesting electronic music happening in India at the moment that’s very much present, but not in the mainstream. The scene is constantly facing challenges like the lack of income and infrastructure, and clubs keep shutting down because they can’t survive. For as long as I’ve been here, there hasn’t been a single long-standing venue for live electronic music. The festival scene is good though, but it’s also limited. It’s very difficult for all of the artists here to make a living because there seems to be no path. But there’s a lot of very interesting music happening for sure, lots of really weird and interesting bedroom producers.

Any names that you could share?
You should listen to Onno Collective‘s compilations. It’s a label, and they do radio shows. In their compilations, there are artists you’ve never heard of from all over India that put out very weird and beautiful music. There’s also boxout.fm in Delhi. It’s shut down now because of the same issues, but they did start a community, and that’s how I got into music. I’m a trained graphic designer, and I was always a listener, but I was never making any music myself. But in my graphic design work, I was doing album art and event flyers, and through boxout.fm’s community, I got introduced to music production and workshops. There were also these British Council workshops for women in electronic music in Delhi, which were very cool, done by a company called Wild City. So yeah, it’s a small scene. Something amazing happens and it lasts for a while, but it then shuts down, and you’re grappling to figure out what to do next.

Yeah, I imagine it’s so hard to keep up momentum with no sustained support… Do you feel like there are changes approaching?
For sure, I think the fact that the West is starting to take notice is definitely interesting, so that could lead to something more promising. And the festival circuit is doing well. 

I want to talk more about your music – especially Leather & Brass. How does the title relate to the textural feelings of the project?
It was funny because leather and brass are two materials that have been in my family due to work. I used to hate that because I was a vegetarian. So I have history with these materials, which is terrible, but I do. I was just talking to a friend of mine and said “leather and brass”, then he said, “that sounds like a great record name”. And I realised it works for me. It made sense because they are industrial sounds to me, they feel like rusted machines. A lot of the soundscapes felt like I could go in that sort of sensual space.

I love that you mention rust – I feel like the EP reflects this industrial, but also lived-in feeling. While it’s electronic, the sound also feels very analogue at some points.
I’m so glad to hear that because it was made entirely in DAW, on Ableton with plugins. When I’d done the composition and the production, I started to explore how to elevate the sound. I was trying to record reverbs in various places and things like that, but that didn’t really work out. What ended up working was using guitar pedals. I’m a bit obsessed with guitars, I think because of the music I used to listen to. We put everything through guitar pedals, even the drums, and then brought them back. I think that led to a more analogue and organic sound. I don’t know if organic is the right word, but an analogue, gritty sound. While I enjoyed it, I’m not sure if I’m going to go ahead with that for the next one. There’s something beautiful about digital sound as well.

What kind of state of mind would you like your listener to be in while taking in the EP?
I do imagine my music to be heard privately. I think alone with your headphones. That feels like how I made it, fully alone and in moments of pause and lots of little quiet moments. That’s probably how it is best consumed. Then again, I do also enjoy it being played live on a big sound system and stuff.

And what feelings did you put into the album personally?
I hate to distill what the track is really about, but if it were to be distilled forcefully, I would say that the song Tabla is about forcing yourself to believe in yourself. It’s really hard to finish things, as we all know. It takes a lot of belief and rigour. It’s really painful to get through finishing something. Overall, in the EP, there is a lot about me being lost and confused. It’s hard to say. Maybe the EP is too much in its own head. 

Listening to it also definitely put me in my head.
People have said the EP is calming and unnerving at the same time. I think that’s what it feels like on most days. 

I read a quote by you where you said that with this EP, you feel like you have become a musician. What does becoming a musician mean to you?
Before this, I never thought that I could actually have a life as a working musician. It was unimaginable. When I made my first EP, I didn’t expect anything at all. I just sent it to some people, and I got to perform at the Magnetic Fields Festival, which is the biggest festival in India. I was completely unprepared for it. I was thrown into this life of being a musician , in some sense. There were a lot of shows I wasn’t ready for. It feels like I’m starting to get comfortable with the idea that I’m a musician, and I’m taking this more seriously now. More seriously sounds frivolous, but I’m doing this with more intention. It took me two years to accept that I’m a musician. 

It’s time to own that title! Let’s talk about Do I Know – I don’t want to make you spell out the meaning of the track, but can you tell me more about what inspired the music video?
For the EP, I wanted to make one leather video and one brass video. This is the brass video. I was talking with a friend about brass, and how it’s used in armours and things, but it’s actually a very ineffective material. It’s only used for ornamentation, and it doesn’t protect you because it’s very weak. We found that funny and interesting. So we thought of making an armour that is completely useless, that doesn’t even try to protect. It makes you feel some semblance of protection. It’s like an ostrich putting their head in the sand or whatever. That’s what the video is about in some sense. 

It feels like irony, in a very discreet way, is a big part of the project. It also makes me think of Tabla, and the satire behind its title [the tabla is a pair of hand-played drums widely used in South Asia].
There’s one tabla sound in there from a recording that I found on the Internet. And so I was calling it tabla, and just kept it in the end. I still don’t know if this was a good idea. This is me being controversial, I suppose. There’s a lot of pressure on South Asians currently. Probably not only South Asians, but we are talked about a lot now, at least it feels like that. Suddenly, the world is paying attention. And now, a lot of South Asians feel the pressure to perform their culture or to commodify it at all times. It’s sad because it is always going to be part of what I make. I’ve grown up listening to Bollywood. You can probably find influences if you listen to my music. But my everyday life is not like this. I don’t walk around with a bindi, it’s just not the truth. It just feels very inauthentic to me that a lot of people end up performing that.

It’s something that I’ve noticed so much as well – it’s this level of self-orientalisation almost. Being a diaspora kid here in the West, it feels conflicting because tapping into certain culture codes can feel like a beautiful way to reconnect with your heritage. But then you almost fall into a stereotype, and it becomes easy to forget that culture is dynamic and young people in Europe or in South Asia are exposed to the same trends and tastes because of the Internet.
Yes, we’re all scrolling on reels now. At least in big cities, we’re all really very similar. I absolutely feel like that. It’s almost annoying to me that first you colonise us and you make us speak your language. Now we have to monkey around and perform something that we’ve moved away from because it just happened. I didn’t want to move away from it, but I was born here with this life. I didn’t choose not to be surrounded by mango and saffron, but that’s not my life now. And now I have to perform it to get your attention. So fuck you. 

Thank you for saying this! There’s so much fetishisation of South Asian tropes, but they have to be performed in a very specific way to be deemed ‘interesting’ or ‘authentic’. This expression has to be perfectly palatable, shiny, both traditional and rebellious – but not too much.
I want to be able to make what I make, and it is authentic. I’m not trying to be a white person. This is what I make. If you don’t want to let me have a seat at the table, then because I’m not wearing a bindi, then that sounds like a fucked up situation.

You’ve played a few shows internationally, have there been any moments where these expectations affected the reception of your work?
I had one bizarre experience at a gig. A DJ had been booked to open for me, this white guy. He played classical Indian music to open for me. It was so clear he did this because he saw that I’m Indian and didn’t even listen to my music. It was so ridiculous and hilarious. 

Haha. Sorry for laughing, this is really sad actually. But apart from that, how has your experience of touring been? You played a lot in London, and the South Asian scene is really booming there at the moment.
Yeah, I’ve had a really good time performing in the UK, because they have venues and audiences that actually want to listen. I played at Dialled In, which was great. I felt that there should have been more non-South-Asian audiences because that would have been more interesting. I felt like it was South Asian people playing for South Asian people, which felt like it defeated the purpose a little bit, maybe. But that was interesting. I’ve opened for Nabihah Iqbal, and did a remix for her. She’s amazing. In India, we don’t have a live gig culture of that kind. My theory is that it’s because Bollywood is everywhere in India. A song becomes huge, and then you go out and listen to it at a stadium. There is no roadmap for a smaller artist to reach the stadium from a small venue, because I think it happens through movies. It’s changing now, but that’s how it’s been for all of my life. 

On a slightly different note, I really appreciate how you talk about hate and it being a sentiment that’s important to vocalise on your upcoming single Safe. Could you expand on what that means to you?
I don’t know if that’s a fully responsible thing to say, to be honest, haha. But yeah, I think hating is real. There’s nothing wrong with hating things. No one’s allowed to hate anything anymore. I think it’s important because you have to hate the wrong things to change things, right? Everyone’s so positive all the time. It doesn’t feel real.

What are the top three things you hate at the moment?
Commodification of South Asian culture, commodification of women’s bodies. I hate the hate against Islam. My best friend is muslim and we live in a very muslim-dominant country, and there’s just so much prejudice against muslim people.

Very valid! What’s on the horizon for you?
I’m writing an album, but now that the release cycle has started, I’m very distracted from working on it. But I’m very excited, I don’t have any idea what it’s going to sound like. Right before its release, I’m going to play a lot of shows in India, and then I’m going to try to come to the UK and the EU. I don’t have a booking agent at the moment, but I’ll figure it out!