in conversation with t. l. mazumdar

What question do you keep coming back to in your arts practice?

“If I’m doing a decent job of fulfilling a higher purpose beyond egoic projections by practising my art. It’s not a decision thats taken once in a lifetime but once a day. The honest answer to the same needs to be confronted at the same interval as well.”

What discipline, other than your own, do you draw most from?

“Probably martial arts. It’s something I grew up with and even though I’ve never really been particularly good at it, the parallels between music and the same are way deeper and prevalent than apparent. The challenge and the lesson is the same. Nobody is competition. Both are practises whose highest purposes are to fight our demons. Heal. The only real enemies are the ones hidden in the darker corners of our mind. Knowing I am not helpless makes me a kinder person and more at ease with acting from a place of love and not fear. And while music is always my primary guide, the more explicit physical expression and challenges of the latter have been a fantastic therapeutic tool for me.”

What do you enjoy most about the process of creating new work and what recurring challenges do you encounter?

“The challenges are self-doubt. Self-loathing. Anxiety. Peer pressure. And all of this often snowballing into more of the same. The enjoyment comes in those rare moments where the practice transcends time and space and all the noise fades away. It’s a constant cycle of rebirth and death. Sometimes feels like having lived multiple lifetimes.”