Rhythm Alliances: How Sri Lanka Integrates Contemporary Art and Electronic Music

One night after arriving in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s commercial capital, I was in a bare, concrete room listening to fresh electronic dance music. Dialled In, a leading South Asian contemporary music platform, was in town to host a fundraiser to help alleviate Cyclone Ditwah’s crippling aftermath. The opening performance by Paris-born Sri Lankan Da Ya Ja unfolded in layered waves on the dancefloor, drawing my body back into a familiar alignment with the island’s creative spirit.

However, I was in Colombo for the ninth edition of Colomboscope, Sri Lanka’s leading contemporary arts festival. The Dialled In fundraiser set the tone for the next two weeks of an unprecedented level of integration between electronic music and contemporary art. Both fundraiser and festival signalled a thriving, sophisticated, and underground culture of deep listening rooted in traditional instruments, avant-garde jazz, drum machines, and analogue synthesisers.

This edition of Colomboscope, titled Rhythm Alliances, was directed by Colombo-based curator Natasha Ginwala and curated by Berlin-based curator Hajra Haider Karrar. Karrar explored rhythm as a framework extending beyond sound to encompass the complexities of social, political, economic, historical, spiritual, and ecological lived experience and discourse.

Rhythm Alliances supported over 50 artist projects across venues ranging from contemporary art spaces to a scarred relic of the civil war and a controversial port. The festival examined how rhythm and sound can cross man-made borders, beginning with the transmission of sonic frequencies. It also supported sound archiving initiatives, including efforts to document the multiplicity of aural practices and histories in the region and beyond.

An inspiring experience at the festival was Berlin-based ambient electronic musician and sound artist Joseph Kamaru, also known as KMRU. His analogue synthesiser performance, L25, conjured an exquisite forest of sounds, full of strange details, that made my skin delightfully crawl at certain moments. Time became denser and more textured in this improvised drone music derived from field recordings made while researching oceanic archipelagos, port cities, and coastal ecologies.

Another presence inhabiting the transient space of ports was the epic art vessel Akra Kinari. This magnificent ship, a solar-powered marine cultural platform, was created by musicians and climate activists Grey Filastine and Nova Ruth. Its opening performance delivered pressing messages about the climate crisis, urgent yet hopeful, through fast-paced, electronic, and polyrhythmic structures infused with haunting Javanese melodies.

The Akra Kinari also brought Laut Loud, a sonic archiving project for rare and disappearing musical cultures and rituals encountered during their oceanic voyages. Similarly, South African sound scholar, journalist, and selector Atiyyah Khan presented her work in preserving music from the subversive and endangered Apartheid-era jazz label As-Shams. Khan’s practice is

grounded in Sufi spiritualism and currently explores Islamic traditions on the east coast of Africa, where music is integral to religious life and ritual.

Sound artist and producer Dinoj Mahendranathan contested the notion of ritual with an interactive, kinetic sound installation. His installation featured artist-made North Eastern percussion instruments and drums, activated by a switch-based mechanism. This mechanised system challenged the idea of mathematical precision in modern robotics and automation, highlighting the value of heritage and the élan vital of craftsmanship.

The intersection of contemporary art and electronic music in Rhythm Alliances was further developed in its cutting-edge, interdisciplinary performances. Audiovisual performers Thomas Burkhalter and Daniel Jakob’s Melodies in My Head was an intense, existentialist exploration of what it means to be an artist today. The artists presented their generative live work and sharp sound design in a cinema space well suited to innovative musical acts, a recurring feature of Colomboscope.

Another compelling performance was a reimagined musical score for The Song of Ceylon, a historic 1934 documentary embodying the British colonial gaze. Sri Lankan electronic musicians Asvajit Boyle and Nigel Perera subverted the original narration and score by presenting a liminal and hybridised soundscape. This interstitial space reinforced electronic music as both a medium and a material practice with its own agency.

Coincidentally, the Song of Ceylon was joined by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka, which hosted its own exhibition about the documentary. Three Songs of Ceylon examined artists’ engagements with the film, presenting alternative perspectives. These viewpoints explore how colonial narratives align with moving images–and how to disrupt them.

Rhythm Alliances presented an expanded notion of rhythm through the intersection of art, sound, and music. Leaving Colombo, I carried with me a heightened attunement to Sri Lanka’s appetite for deep, resonant listening. The island’s songs now tell renewed stories not just about its past, but also about its future.



Feature image: Akra Kinari – Performance. Courtesy Colomboscope