
Free.wav 2.0 is a week long sonic arts & electronic music residency hosted in the lush Bhoomi Farms in Kerala from March 14-20th 2023.
About the Residency
Free.wav 2.0 is the second iteration of a residential sonic art and electronic music production workshop programmed by Nithin Shams & Aditya Kapoor. This is a paid residency but we offer need-based financial aid.
This year’s instructors are Bint Mbareh, Flux Vortex, Krishna Jhaveri, Nicolás Jaar, Nithin Shams & Rana Ghose
Click here to Apply
The first iteration of the residency took place in January 2021.
Find out more about Free.wav 1.0.
Video Credits
Edit | Rana Ghose - REProduce
Music | Nicolas Jaar
Footage | Neelansh Mittra, Nithin Shams and Free.wav Alumni
Instructors
Aditya Kapoor is a music producer, sound designer, DJ, Guitarist, Synth enthusiast and educator from New Delhi, India. He has released and performed extensively with his electronic alias, flux vortex, focusing on bass ,dub and ambient music as well as with his band DEE EN , with a more psychedelic rock focussed sound. As a sound designer and composer, he has forayed into film, theatre as well as dance, having designed the sound for the Goethe Institute funded play, Muhnochni, as well as having his music used by brands such as Bira. He has previously taught and facilitated at Synthfarm, a synth residency held in Duttapkur, West Bengal.
Bint Mbareh works with all formats of sound (radio, live, installation) and is driven by the superpowers of communal singing human and more than human. She conducted research initially to combat the myth of water scarcity pushed by Israeli settler colonialism. the songs that she learned helped communities summon rain, and at their core helped people build a relationship with their environment, decide what time of year it is, communally determine how to share resources, mainly the resource of time, fairly. Bint Mbareh makes music and sound today because she believes these uses can still be evoked, rather than remembered. She now studies death and rebirth as analogies for necessary communal upheavals, still looking for these significations in Palestinian landscape, now in the shrine of Nabi-Musa (AS), the prophet Moses.
She has performed at Mophradat's Read the Room festival (March 2022), at the Hiya Live Sessions in Dalston’s Jago (May 2022) , She co-founded Exist Festival in Palestine in 2019, She was Café OTO's Youth Music Resident for 2021, She has shown sound and object work at Chapter Gallery in Cardiff, curated by SWAY Barry, Qanatin August 2022. She has performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York as part of Unsound Festival's December 2022 Weavings curated by Nicolás Jaar. She has shown sound work at the Mardin Bienali in May of 2022 invited by Adwait Singh. She represented Exist Festival in 2022's edition of Tehran Contemporary Sounds. She was Mophradat's Art Time Resident at BUDA Kortrijk's NEXT Festival in 2021. She has performed several times in London's Shubbak and AWAN Festivals.
She has performed at Mophradat's Read the Room festival (March 2022), at the Hiya Live Sessions in Dalston’s Jago (May 2022) , She co-founded Exist Festival in Palestine in 2019, She was Café OTO's Youth Music Resident for 2021, She has shown sound and object work at Chapter Gallery in Cardiff, curated by SWAY Barry, Qanatin August 2022. She has performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York as part of Unsound Festival's December 2022 Weavings curated by Nicolás Jaar. She has shown sound work at the Mardin Bienali in May of 2022 invited by Adwait Singh. She represented Exist Festival in 2022's edition of Tehran Contemporary Sounds. She was Mophradat's Art Time Resident at BUDA Kortrijk's NEXT Festival in 2021. She has performed several times in London's Shubbak and AWAN Festivals.
Krishna Jhaveri is a Music Producer, Mix Engineer, Sound Artist and Bass Player from Mumbai, India. His background includes a Law Degree(!) and a MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in Oakland, California. He has also been a touring musician with the metal band Skyharbor since 2013 and hip-hop artist DIVINE in 2018 and 2022-2023. He is also the co-founder of Ears to the Ground, a project that is a young exploration of the oldest mountain range in India (The Western Ghats) through sound.
The central tenet of his current solo performance and composition practice is activated listening. His work has evolved from a personal philosophy of listening, and draws influence from the experimental music world, soundscapes studies, interspecies communication, field recording, mixing, and meditation practices. His productions cover a broad spectrum from innovative ways of reimagining field recordings, to scores for listening, synthesis, noise, and live processing of acoustic instruments. His sonic world mirrors his movements as he blends aspects of culture, soundscape and beyond.
The central tenet of his current solo performance and composition practice is activated listening. His work has evolved from a personal philosophy of listening, and draws influence from the experimental music world, soundscapes studies, interspecies communication, field recording, mixing, and meditation practices. His productions cover a broad spectrum from innovative ways of reimagining field recordings, to scores for listening, synthesis, noise, and live processing of acoustic instruments. His sonic world mirrors his movements as he blends aspects of culture, soundscape and beyond.
Since 2008, Nicolás Jaar has released music under various guises spanning shades of pop, ambient, noise, and club music. Since 2013, he has curated the Other People music label (www.other-people.net), releasing the visual & audio work of artists Africanus Okokon, Jena Myung, Maziyar Pahlevan and the music of Sary Moussa, Lucrecia Dalt, Patrick Higgins, and Lydia Lunch among others. He is a current member of performance ensemble ¡miércoles! alongside dancer and choreographer Stéphanie Janaina, and part of the band DARKSIDE alongside multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington and Tlacael Esparza. Since 2018, Jaar has collaborated with Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, a grass-roots independent artist–run initiative founded in 2014 located in Bethlehem, Palestine. Jaar transformed Dar Jacir’s food shack into a sound studio where he has held multiple sound workshops and artist residencies. In 2019, Jaar assembled a group of 12 researchers (Shock Forest Group) in order to explore the history and future of a military complex-turned art institution in the Netherlands. The resulting exhibition, entitled "No Camouflage' (het Hem, 2019) uncovered the myriad layers of accumulated colonial, ecological and institutional violence that interlink on the site through archival media findings, data gathering, performances and sound installations. Since 2020, he has mainly centered his practiced around education, facilitating long-form sound workshops in the US, South America and most recently (2023) in Palestine in collaboration with Alrowwad cultural center.
Fascinated by all things ‘sound’ and ‘listening’, Nithin Shams stumbled across his passion for curating listening experiences. His artistic practice revolves around facilitating listening spaces that allow listeners to enter an open, empathetic and attentive state of mind. In his free time curates mixtapes and tries to make a living producing podcasts. Nithin is also a violinist, and is trying to build a practice around live improvisation with the violin, field recordings and electronics. Nithin grew up in a multicultural environment in Sharjah, like many migrants from his home state Kerala (India). On moving back to India, he was faced with the conundrum of 'identity' - feeling like he always belong-ed 'else'-where and 'every'where. Listening paradoxically helps him ground his being in the space he finds himself in, while also allowing him to fly around in the dreamscapes of various musical traditions from across the world.
Nithin is interested in creating/inviting experiences that propose ‘listening’ as a practice of opening portals to disarm preconceived ways of thinking-being-perceiving. The artist asks himself and his audience, “Can I listen without the influence of my internal dialogue? Can I listen to sounds outside of myself by trying to settle into silence within?”
Nithin’s work has found homes in various platforms like Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa), Hyderabad Literature Festival, Ashoka University (Delhi), OtherPeople (NY), Radio Al Hara (Ramallah, Palestine), BoxoutFM(Delhi), BuchBasel (Switzerland)
Nithin has been programming Free.wav since 2021 at Bhoomi Farms, set up by his family as an arts residency space.
Nithin is interested in creating/inviting experiences that propose ‘listening’ as a practice of opening portals to disarm preconceived ways of thinking-being-perceiving. The artist asks himself and his audience, “Can I listen without the influence of my internal dialogue? Can I listen to sounds outside of myself by trying to settle into silence within?”
Nithin’s work has found homes in various platforms like Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa), Hyderabad Literature Festival, Ashoka University (Delhi), OtherPeople (NY), Radio Al Hara (Ramallah, Palestine), BoxoutFM(Delhi), BuchBasel (Switzerland)
Nithin has been programming Free.wav since 2021 at Bhoomi Farms, set up by his family as an arts residency space.
Rana Ghose is a curator, economist, writer, and filmmaker. He steers REProduce Artists, a collective of artists, organizers, and content creators that produce interventions in non traditional spaces, engaging with music and video in modular, sequential plays – all taking advantage of the aesthetics of spaces as varied as former mills, bakeries, and decommissioned hotels. His doctoral research was on risk construction in a regulatory context, and the underlying dynamics of how we explore uncertainty with regards to new technologies. His current focus is building and managing REProduce Live, a live streaming platform inspired by the signature event series he oversees, REProduce Listening Room. He is currently based between Goa, India, and Halifax, Canada.
Bhoomi Farms
Nestled in the wilderness of the Western Ghats in Kerala, Bhoomi Farms is a family-run fruit forest which seeks to hold space for creative arts and regenerative lifestyles. Bhoomi Farms is managed by a family of artists and agriculturists. It has a history of hosting artists and activists from the region. In its new iteration, Bhoomi Farms hopes to be a space for contemporary arts as well as a space where the new meets the seasone in an attempt to share wisdom and knowledge. The atmosphere of the farm reflects decades of co-existence between humans and non-human beings. The space is scaped in accordance with the natural movement of the trees and plants, and the creative
inspiration of sculptor, Shamsudhin Moosa.






