‘I saw fan-made compilations. It blew my mind’: the music producer who found accidental K-pop fame

The Middle-Eastern guitar melody in Blackpink’s How You Like That. The whistle at the very beginning of SClass by Stray Kids. The sax melodies in Money and Lalisa by Lisa. The crowd chants at the beginning of Seventeen’s Super. Each of these sounds, instantly familiar to fans of K-pop, came not from the Korean genre’s raft of super-producers but from one man, thousands of miles away.

Very few people associate Niles Hollowell-Dhar with K-pop. Currently working under the mononym Kshmr, he first made a name for himself in the mainstream pop world for co-producing the 2010 electro-house banger Like a G6. For the last decade, he has performed as a DJ at festivals including Coachella, Ultra, Sunburn, and Tomorrowland. “I’ve actually never been interviewed about my samples being used in K-pop,” he says warmly, speaking via video call from Croatia, where he is on the lineup to play at the Noa Beach Club. “Let’s do this.”

In recent years, Hollowell-Dhar has become a legend in the music producer community thanks to his sample packs, Sounds of Kshmr. The packs, featuring a range of different sounds, are uploaded on the online music creation platform Splice. These sounds are usually only a few seconds long, and can consist of loops (repeated musical phrases such as a guitar riff) or oneshots (one single sound, like a cymbal). They can also be layered under the main instrumentals to add colour to a song.

All of Kshmr’s sound packs are currently royalty free, which means that artists are not required to pay or credit the maker when a sound is used on a track. Subscribers to Splice can buy a sample pack in a one-off purchase, and use the sounds as many times as they like: generally speaking, HollowellDhar

charges a maximum of $99.99 for every sample pack he uploads to the site (the largest of which comprises a whopping 7,000 sounds). To the average person, this may seem a relatively small amount, especially when your work ends up on chart-topping songs.

Hollowell-Dhar sees it differently, however. “It’s like if you made a guitar, and then you sell a million guitars,” he explains. “Now, some of them get used in the newest rock hit single. Do you feel like you should get royalties from the single? You can’t expect that.”

Born in California to an American mother and a Kashmiri Indian father, Hollowell-Dhar first started tinkering with production when he was 11. In the early 2000s, he would put different loops together, record over them and pass CDs around Berkeley high school, where his schoolmates included the rapper G-Eazy and the actor-comedian Andy Samberg. “The music was still quite bad at this point,” he laughs. “I didn’t know how to play a single chord.”

Hollowell-Dhar would invite other students home to record in his makeshift studio. It was also at high school that he wrote a diss track about fellow studentDavid Singer-Vine’s acne. Fortunately no offence was taken, and a