Khanvict mixes club beats with a touch of tradition
Surrey-based musician riding a wave of popularity
Even in a year as weird as this one, 2020 is shaping up to be a winner for Khanvict. That only seems appropriate for an artist whose tag line is “sentenced to entertain.”
The Surrey-based musician, born Asad Khan, is taking his deep roots in Sufi and Punjabi music and mixing them up with big beats, lively loops and pristine production to take his career to the next level.
With the release of his first EP, Kahani, on the new Vancouver-based Snakes x Ladders imprint, his music is reaching a new audience. They are revved up about songs such as the synth-led, vocal chorus-laden Turiya Turiya and folkier closing trad-techno track Safar.
That last track features frequent collaborator Raaginder.
The Union City, Calif.based violinist and producer, born Raginder Singh Momi, has been remixed by Khanvict on the hit Butterflies and another EP is due later in the year featuring the two artists. A full-length album, titled Escape, is due in the fall.
All told, Khanvict is lined up to produce 20 new tracks this year. The first, Heavy, came out on March 13, and has passed 150,000 plays across various streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music and others. Taste-making DJs such as BBC’s Bobby Friction and Sony Music India have featured his music and fans at festivals such as Shambhala, Bumbershoot, Session Music Festival (NYC) and FIMPRO (Mexico) have all featured him live.
One of the reasons his music clearly resonates so widely is that, while it is certainly club-ready, it also incorporates traditional classical and spiritual music into the material with much more attention to the genres than adding mere sonic window dressing to the material.
“I was raised in Pakistan, in Islamabad, until I was 13 and moved to Canada,” said Khanvict.
“Owing to having very well educated parents, I had the privilege of going to good schools and being taught English, so my transition moving here was easier in terms of language. But my grandfather on my mother’s side was a huge music fanatic and he and my mom grew up on the same street as Qawwali legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, so I got to see him perform at family functions when I was very young.”
That experience led to a process he describes as “learning by osmosis.”
Taking in the sacred music his grandfather exposed him to and others he heard growing up served as a basis for musical direction.
Khanvict used this early experience as a launch pad for later explorations of his spiritual side in his 20s.
His mother’s Master’s degree in Urdu literature meant that he got full explanation of the multi-level poetry in classic songs, which expanded their impact.
“I was just so lucky that I had my mom and grandfather for that musical inspiration, because my dad is so not like that,” said Khanvict. “He gave me my nerdy side, since he’s a maths and science guy, which is why I did a degree in electrical engineering at UBC before I did any music.”
Music found him while he was still at university.
A friend’s father was hiring DJs to play at weddings. Spotting the lucrative business opportunities, Khanvict started his own company and got into sound engineering. In 2013, he won the Best Wedding DJ Award at the South Asian Wedding Awards.
It’s a big deal.
“I started Decibel Entertainment and it’s a big shop now that does about 1,000 events a year,” he said.
“It was my ticket out of working full time, and enabled me to support me and my family, which I’ve been doing. I also did real estate investing which went well.”
Good money didn’t equal job satisfaction. While the wedding scene was great for the cash, driving home one night from listening to more chilled out Qawwali and other sounds, he knew he wanted to make his own music and take it into different settings.
To play music he had as much fun making as performing became the next career goal.
“And I had my concerns about taking the music I wanted to make to festivals and clubs where the crowd is predominantly Caucasian and whether they would dig it,” he said.
“Then I went to my first festival and every white DJs was sampling Indian sounds and I went, ‘OK, this is happening.’ I knew the entire discography of where that sample came from, so I just needed to get better at producing and I’ve been doing that since.”
While Khanvict doesn’t think these examples of cross-cultural fusing come from a place of malice, he does think that they can go badly awry when people are unaware of what they are playing.
“I was at a festival in Costa Rica with a friend and heard someone spin an Indian song that is about female genocide,” he said.
“Anyone in the audience who understood that would be justifiably upset, because that is pretty heavy stuff to play at a party. It’s really insensitive any way you look at it.”