“Sound of Yonder crashes across emotional and political gaps — a raw, industrial beat that won’t let you look away or pretend it’s not there.” writes YESHE to METAL, whose Tibetan-language banger touches universality and ambiguity, despite being a sort of broadcast. The artist explains, “The Sound of Yonder is refusing to be ignored.” It’s true.
Sound of Yonder produced by Tobias Koch is the second release off YESHE’s album Dust (coming in June), executive produced with Asma Maroof, featuring tracks co-produced with Palmistry, Mobilegirl, FaltyDL, Chino Amobi and Aska Matsumiya. Today’s song and video is a sound of resistance. YESHE explains to METAL, “The chorus Om Ah Ra Pa Tsa Na Dhi (ཨོཾ་ཨ་ར་པ་ཙ་ན་དྷཱི།) is a Tibetan mantra. This mantra is believed to sharpen intelligence, deepen insight and inner wisdom.” We don’t all go dancing to meditate, but with altered states of mind leading to new ideas it’s great to hear a mantra “often chanted by students, monks, and practitioners seeking clarity, learning, or mental calm” in this context.
We’re told the lyrics were written in collaboration with Ten Phun, a Tibetan poet and writer based in Dharamsala are about “the unstoppable power of collective movement, equality and justice.” Rousing words from an artist born and raised in Switzerland as a Tibetan in exile. YESHE has strong ties with the world of artistic activism; she showed a durational performance titled Forbidden Songs co-curated by Marina Abramović at the Rubin Museum in New York, as well as performing at the Tibetan Artist Festival in India. The country where the Dalai Lama lives in exile.
When asked about the banner “You can’t protest like this in Tibet” in the opening sequence, YESHE and her team’s response is, “In Sound of Yonder YESHE steps into the spotlight as an anchorwoman, delivering the breaking news: local children are erupting into an unstoppable, excessive dance craze — a phenomenon that defies explanation.” Going on to say, “As she [YESHE] repeats a Tibetan mantra of insight and equality, the line between the newsroom’s controlled chaos and the children’s uncontainable energy begins to blur. The images in the news-intro give a general feeling of news — including a running protester. It says what it says: “You can’t protest like this in Tibet”. This is part of the intro of a fictional news channel (somewhere in yonder). But the breaking news is about children erupting into a sort of unstoppable dance craze. Why? No one knows. “Is this an unconscious protest?”” Both rhythmic and slightly dissonant, the track itself is as feverish as the dancers. The impulse to stand up to authority seems to run through it.
Speaking on the Tibetan music scene itself, the artist laments, “I strongly suspect that the circumstances make it almost impossible for a rave scene to develop.” YESHE knows Ruhail Qaisar, an emerging experimental sound artist from Leh, Ladakh, and Tashi Dorji, a progressive guitarist and improviser from Bhutan. She shares, “unfortunately, Tibet doesn’t have a widely recognised EBM or rave scene comparable to those in Western contexts. Only a few artists and groups incorporate electronic elements into their music and these are mostly within Hip-Hop and R&B genres.” Performing at Tibetan Artist Festival she did connect with Tibetan artists creating R&B, Hip-Hop, traditional, and alternative music including Gtashi, rytha and Namgyal Nangmi. For now, the images of widespread ecstatic dancing presented might be fictional, but there is hope.
“Sound of Yonder definitely plays with the idea of distance — not just geographical, but emotional, political, perceptual and regarding media (news and images). It speaks to how easily we in so-called safe or privileged spaces can tune out what feels far away: systemic violence, the silencing of oppressed voices, the slow erasure of cultures, or even excessive dancing of children.” YESHE summarises.
