Noise in her head
Canberra-based musician and artist Shoeb Ahmad is embracing new directions.
Words Cher Tan | Photos Krei Manzo | June 2018
Towards the end of 2016, while reconfiguring some older material for her upcoming solo album, Shoeb Ahmad struck upon the realisation of how alien it felt to play her old songs. Just a few months earlier in Melbourne—where she had arrived after a tour with one of her bands Agency and was about to start another one with the trio Sensaround— her hotel room had been robbed. She lost her laptop, musical equipment, wedding ring and passport. This abrupt shock forced her to assess the situation: Had she been targeted because it seemed like she had a secret to hide, making it unlikely for her to go to the police? At that point, Ahmad had just begun the process of coming out as a trans woman—presenting femme in places and situations where she felt safe. This was shortly after a Sensaround tour in Japan where she had experimented with femmehood on her days off, sparking within her an unparalleled sense of fulfilment.
The incident in Melbourne proved an unexpected catalyst. “Everyone was really supportive [about the robbery] but there was also the niggling guilt from not being able to reveal the whole truth of the situation,” Ahmad told me in June last year, shortly before the release of the album’s title track “mask-ed”. “I thought I was dealing with it fine, but I broke down a day after returning home. I didn’t realise how vulnerable and violated I felt.”
The proverbial floodgates had been opened. She started to gain more clarity on issues she had been repressing and began to question the compartmentalisation of her life (navigating public life as male and life at home as female). Other uneasy questions around her selfhood, such as being a brown person in a predominantly white society, also came to the surface. This process of self-reckoning has played an integral part in the development for Ahmad’s new solo release “quiver”. The album, she muses, “became therapy for me to accept who I am and what that means in terms of my place in the world”.
•••
Ahmad began her musical career fourteen years ago in her bedroom in a quiet suburb in Canberra, although back then she didn’t set out to be a musician. An avant-garde and punk aficionado, the then-eighteen-year-old was entranced by the off-kilter sounds of experimental musicians like Kraftwerk and Merzbow, as well as the energetic, no-fucks-given spirit behind female punk. “Discovering bands like the Slits really opened me up musically and made me think about my place as a musician,” she reflects during a recent Skype conversation. “I found it easier to associate with them not only because of the attitude but also because they represented something else within the musical spectrum: it was like the opposite of white male rage.”
As a result, a do-it-yourself ethos underpins much of Ahmad’s work. A self-taught multi-instrumentalist, she plays the guitar, drums, bass, and keyboards, while being adept at electronic experimentation; she’s also a practising visual artist. In 2004, under her own label hellosQuare Recordings, she released her first solo album Roomsound, a lush lo-fi foray into experimental noise. This lead her to form the two-piece experimental act Spartak with good friend Evan Dorrian in 2006. They would go on to tour internationally and play self-funded shows in New Zealand, parts of Southeast Asia and Japan.
“I think any sort of exposure to something outside of the Australian bubble is mind-expanding.”
In 2007, I was living in Singapore and I met Ahmad while she was on Spartak’s first overseas tour. She had yet to transition and we were both young punks eager to make a mark in the world. I put on a show for the discordant duo in a tiny rehearsal studio. Spartak played frenetically despite having little space to move—the room packed and steaming from the tropical heat outside its walls. After the show, we sat at a local coffee shop, trading funny factoids about our respective places of residence and bonding over a mutual love of yum cha, zines and screamo.
At this recollection, I ask Ahmad why she bothered—and still bothers—to tour overseas on her own dime. She casts a sidelong glance and pauses. “Truthfully? I kind of cringe at pub culture and don’t get it.” We both laugh. “Anglo culture is so monotonous. I’d rather get out of this country to make a racket while meeting good people with common interests—just like how we met! I think any sort of exposure to something outside of the Australian bubble is mind-expanding.”
We met up again over the next few years, as Spartak and Ahmad returned to the region to gig with other underground acts. In 2010, I travelled to Canberra and spent a weekend with her and her partner; we watched the Tour de France together one night in their lounge room. I don’t expect Ahmad to remember, but her obsession with the cycling race jogs her memory. “That’s right!” she nearly yells into my ear as our Skype connection crackles. “Of course—I love the Tour de France!”
Her love for the race has also managed to make an appearance within her musical repertoire. In 2016, Canberra’s You Are Here Festival commissioned Twin Pedals, a site-specific chamber composition inspired by a legendary duel in the 1986 iteration. Performed by Ahmad and a band of other musicians, including Spartak drummer Dorrian, Hannah de Feyter and Benjamin Drury, it’s a haunting piece featuring strings over cycling sounds and Tour de France TV coverage, illustrating the gargantuan scale of the race.
Experimental collaborations and found sounds drive a large part of Ahmad’s practice. Apart from Spartak, she also plays in electro-acoustic trio Sensaround, post-punk group Agency, avant-garde quintet Tangents and feminist guitar-pop group Oranges. Some of these bandmates make up her backing band on “quiver”. I wonder aloud: Do any of these bands bleed into her solo work? “There’s definitely a bit of stylistic cross-pollination,” Ahmad responds after some thought. “[But]“quiver” exists because certain narratives and creative ideas that I’m exploring are too connected to my personal being. I need to keep control over how the work is executed and delivered.”
•••
Nowadays, Ahmad presents as femme on a daily basis. She is currently contemplating the best way to tell her son’s school about her gender identity. “I’m in the zone now,” she says emphatically. “People are either going to be a part of my journey or they’re going to check out very quickly. I’ve accepted so much of myself.” Reading about other trans-femme musicians and collaborating with them has been liberating, she says. She mentions the first time she came across Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace, and talking to Chloe Alison Escott from Tasmanian duo the Native Cats while working on remixes for them. Incidentally, the drummer on those songs is another trans woman from the US, whose work Ahmad had come across a decade ago. “It’s a circle; a trans melting pot,” Ahmad says. “There’s this common thread, and to be honest, we don’t really care about what else is going on.”
As a trans and Muslim musician, Ahmad is aware of how her identity can become commodified. Like many other marginalised folk, she’s quick to point out that her experiences are not representative of a whole, despite being in the public eye: “Some people call me a trans artist, and that’s fair enough. I’m a trans person, and if anything I’m becoming more comfortable with that as my identity. But I was someone before I came out as well. The person I am was always there, just like the person I was is still here, except I felt insecure in being able to bring them together.” This sentiment reveals itself through a close read of the lyrics from “quiver”, particularly in the song “status anxiety”. As a guitar loop floods in during the verse, Ahmad’s gentle lilt carefully sings “No need for reminding me where I sit on the line / far removed from what you continue to reveal / But they will be side by side, friends in arms / with our point of view, weaving its way into their life.”
An intimate, confessional tone runs throughout “quiver”. Ahmad’s soft vocals are interspersed with melodic, dreamy harmonies, evoking a feeling of deep introspection. There’s fear and vulnerability too: “I call it ‘noir-pop’,” Ahmad says with a smile. On the first single “mask-ed”, she’s almost whispering: “When I get dressed, I’m the softest that I’ve ever been / Two steps out, full of doubt / tight at the chest, oh breathless.” Some of the songs on the album are also a love letter of sorts to her partner, who has been present even as she herself has been grappling with uncertainty amidst Ahmad’s transition. This dynamic is laid bare in “low contrast”, as Ahmad sings “It won’t be easy to understand / Somewhat at odds with who you think I am / but no less a genuine feeling in my heart / I hope you’ll have your hand because I’ll need you there.” Other songs, like “rinse”, address outside perceptions of her identity; beautiful piano accompanies a tight rhythm, but Ahmad’s voice is always in the foreground: “Why you so caught up in your insecurities? / So don’t judge me for all that you can see.” As Ahmad’s autobiographical lyrics work towards self-discovery, she gently invites the listener to come along with her.
•••
In broken-binary-brown, Ahmad’s recent installation at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, a video channel takes centre-stage: abstracted, pixelated images of Ahmad flicker on the screen, representing her life in transition. Accompanying music—composed by Ahmad—draws upon influences like Björk, Romanian folk and the post-hardcore band Refused. It’s a visual and sonic interpretation of life’s ongoing philosophical journey. “You can spend twenty-plus years of your life on a journey and not even confront anything as part of that journey,” she says, cheerfully. “But you’re always on a journey and it’s not going to stop until you die.”
“Ahmad sees discordance as both the inspiration and the conclusion; she knows there is an element of calm beneath the ruckus, if you only care to look.”
These days, Ahmad also goes by the name Sia, but she is nonchalant about keeping her birth name associated with her musical work—it’s a duality she embraces. “Maybe it’s a weird thing to say, but I also enjoyed my life a lot pre-transition. I don’t regret my past. People can call me either Sia or Shoeb and that’s cool; how comfortable I feel about my identity is not really contingent on my name.” I mention I saw her post online about an upcoming show as Alicia Sparkles, another new project. Is it a persona? “Not really,” she says. “It was a drag queen name I came up with once before I came out. It’s stuff I can dance to, stuff I’ve always liked and done but never put out: a mix of dubby dancehall, minimal techno and samples from my mum’s old Bengali pop cassettes.” A pause. “The funny thing is, I always end up finding a way to chuck in some noise. But as much as I love noise, I can’t have it on everything all the time.”
During our phone conversation, Ahmad pays attention to random background sounds that other people may dismiss. She remarks that my location—my backyard—is unusually chirpy, and laughs when I tell her about a wattle bird that was disturbing the household last spring: “I would have loved to record that!” Amid all the noise in the world, Ahmad sees discordance as both the inspiration and the conclusion; she knows there is an element of calm beneath the ruckus, if you only care to look. “I feel so comfortable with myself now,” she tells me. “Just having that kind of liberation... and not being worried or scared about what other people think—not giving a fuck! I’m really happy to be me now.
This piece first appeared in Swampland issue four.
Photo: Krei Manzo.