Interview: Zar on Vipassana meditation, the build up to his debut release and finding his sound
A fascinating chat with a brilliant musician
I first met Zar (AKA Arun Dhanjal) when I spent a month serving at a Vipassana meditation centre in Herefordshire in 2021. Arun was part of the kitchen team, which I managed for a week, before departing the centre to head back to “reality”. Through our conversations I came to learn that he was a music head, I remember he was quite excited to hear that I worked for Mixmag. We exchanged details and stayed in touch, Arun informed me that he was working on his debut EP, and asked if I could advise him on how to approach labels etc. I’ve witnessed the struggle artists go through with their first release many times, and it wasn’t a surprise to hear that he was finding it hard. Anyway, the EP dropped earlier this year and he’s already followed it up with a second one. Arun is a lovely guy, a talented musician and he’s very thoughtful, so I knew he’d make a great interviewee... And I was right. Read our chat below, buy his EP and listen to the mix below, too.
So, this might be quite a deep way to start, but how did you connect with Vipassana in the first place? And why did that feel like something that was aligned with what you were about and where you wanted to go?
I did my first 10-day course in 2015. It was the New Year's going from 2015 into 2016. I've always had an interest in meditation, that sort of thing. I've tried different courses, and nothing really stuck with me. I discovered Vipassana by accident. I was a little bit skeptical about it at first, because it's a free course, and you go and sit in silence for 10 days. There's that whole thing of, “Wait, what's the catch? Like, what's going on here? This is a bit weird…”. I must have been like 20 at the time. So that's a very bizarre thing for someone that age to go and do, especially when it was New Year's and I knew all my mates were going out and getting wasted in London. But there was this curiosity. I wanted to see whether I could be in silence for 10 days and I was just curious to see what effect it will have on me going back into the real world so to speak. I found the transition from being at uni to moving into full time work really jarring. I found that a really, really difficult experience to wrestle with. I was commuting from Brighton, doing the whole Monday to Friday, nine to five thing and it felt so unaligned. I kind of used that Vipassana course to reset and see what effect it had on me.
Also, I think a big part of why I was interested in meditation in the first place was to be able to look at the difficult emotions that we have… Being equipped with the tools to learn how to deal with them in a healthy way, where you don't hurt other people, is something that I've always quite valued. I've had my fair share of difficult motions to deal with, but in the past never known how to deal with them properly. Doing Vipassana was one of the experiments I set myself, where it was like, “Maybe this could be the thing that helps”. As you're aware, like you do your first course and then you're like, “Oh, it's a lot more than that”...
And how did it come into your field in the first place? You said it was by accident?
Yeah, I was actually at work one day, and I looked up “free meditation courses”. You literally just Google that and Vipassana came up. At the time I discovered Gaia House, I saw the course fees for that and I couldn't afford that at the time. Quite frankly, a free one was a big priority at the time. But I'm so glad I did it. It's definitely changed my life for the better. But recently, I've had to stop practising, because I think I went a bit too deep into it. I've had to put the brakes on a bit because it got intense.
Do you mind talking about that then?
Yeah, sure. So, after we met in May 2021, I did another course. My last course I did was actually going into this year, so I did another New Year's course from 2022 into 2023. I think that was my fourth 10-day course and it was really intense. It was a very, very intense experience. When you go back as an Old Student, you know what you're doing, you're not surprised by it. You know the course schedule; you’ve got to be up at four, etc.. You know that you’ve got to do this stuff and you know that the only way to get the most out of the 10 days is by practising as hard as you can. So I did that, just practised as hard as I could. But in the middle of the course, I started hallucinating. I started to see things and it didn't freak me out, because I was like, “This is gonna pass. It's not permanent. It's fine”. But it left a bit of a weird feeling in me. You go and ask the assistant teachers, “Hey, I've had this experience what do I do?”. They're just gonna be like, “Just observe the sensations”. Unfortunately, I don't think that's the right thing to tell someone who's just been blindsided by just having this phenomenon happen to them. So when I got back in the new year, I read this book called Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, by Daniel Ingram. It’s a tome and a half, huge book. Daniel Ingram claims to be enlightened through practising Vipassana, but he didn't do it through the Goenka style - there's a different way. He’s basically in a circle full of what I can only describe as “Vipassana nerds”, in the best possible way. He outlines the steps of what happens when you practise Vipassana, “What generally tends to happen is you will experience this, and then this happens. And then this happens, and this happens”. What's remarkable is that the way that he describes the steps and stages is exactly what you experience on a course. I stumbled upon the information concerning the point where hallucinations occur and found that they’re normal. So that didn't freak me out. But what it did was bring something to my attention, and that was that I had reached a stage of practising where, if I continued to do it, I'd essentially reach a place of no return. At this point I would have to change my lifestyle to fit around practising Vipassana. I know I'm not ready to do that, so that's essentially why I've taken a step back from it. It's made me reassess things.
I know that sounds very dramatic. I don't know if you've experienced this. But, at the end of a 10-day course, I have this real sense of reverence and respect for the technique of practising Vipassana and I don't want to mess around with it when I don't feel ready. When I started doing the 10-day courses, I didn't know any different. But after reading this, and doing some more research online and speaking to some other old Vipassana mates, the ones that have read this book, they’ve found it a bit of an eye opener. So that's why I've taken a step back, but I mean, I still benefit daily from the courses I have done, and I've not, like turned my back on it. I've just got a bit of a wider perspective of the role it plays in my life.
So I wanted to use that initial Vipassana discussion to shift into music because I feel like, for me, and I'm sure so many other people, whether it's personal or whatever, meditation full stop is so conducive to amplifying your creative field and your ability to create. It can be very useful just in terms of finding the ability to ground yourself into your practice, or whatever it is. So what have you found in terms of practising Vipassana regularly? And how that impacts your ability to create music? And even your experience of listening to music, full stop?
That's an interesting question. I don't know if I'm going to be able to give you a satisfying answer here. Because the short answer is, I don't know. I don't know whether it has had an impact on me or not. Because I feel like the experience of creating music itself… when you really get into it, when you're really like completely present with it, feels like meditation in itself. So I don't know if practising something helps me be more or less creative. But I will say that I'm definitely less creative when I'm more stressed. Definitely, if I've got more on my mind, if there's stuff going on in my life, it can very easily act as a barrier to stop me from creating things. So I definitely can see there being an argument of, if you practise meditation more and have a generally clearer mind, you could probably access flow states when you're creating. But on the flip side, I will say that on my last course, I did have a pretty bizarre experience…
So in March this year I put out my first EP, which is called Practice Makes Miracles and I was having a complete nightmare trying to figure out how to promote it online. I didn't want to do the whole, “I'm just gonna post about it and that's it” route. I wanted the way that it was rolled out to be like an art project in itself. This EP meant so much to me, I'd been working on it for two years, and I went through so much trying to get it out. I was just like, “I'm not gonna fall at the last hurdle”. I didn't really know how to promote it. Weirdly, during one of the meditation sessions I had on that last course, I felt like I just downloaded what I needed to do. It just appeared in my brain like a vision and I was like, “Oh yeah, I know what to do”. Then I got home, executed the plan. So, it took seven days of meditating in silence to get that state of mind where I received a creative download or whatever. But maybe I got lucky. Maybe because it was obviously on my mind, parked in my unconscious or something, that meditation unlocked some of the workings in my brain. I don't know what happened. But when I read this book, having extreme states of creativity is one of the stages of practising Vipassana. So you know, I suppose it does help, but it doesn't at the same time. I'm not sure. I was reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. The way that he talks about creativity and stuff is… he talks a lot about meditation and how it's about learning to quiet the things that are distractions to what you're trying to do. I can totally see how meditation helps with that.
I hear you. With a lot of life experiences I don't think there's ever really a black and white answer or a right or wrong. Tell me about the EP because, when we first met, it felt like you had some momentum around yourself and you were doing things that were like, you know, what some people from the outside would deem as being successful, but you hadn't yet had your debut release. There was this journey towards this release coming out and it feels like that it's been such a pivotal moment for you.
Yeah, I mean, you pretty much nailed it on the head. It took a lot out of me to get that out. So much of it was bound up with working through the self doubt, working through “What are other people going to think? Is anyone gonna care?” It was a massive, massive learning curve of how the industry works and “How do you talk to people? How do you get this done? How do you get that done? How much of it do you have to do yourself?” I definitely came out the other end of it with a really thick skin of like, “Okay, well, this is how it works”. I do feel like the timing of when I decided to put it out wasn't helpful in the respect of being post-Covid. Everything was beginning to open up, there was a lot of discourse around the electronic music industry and how it was all gonna fall apart, and putting out music was a bad idea. I feel like a lot of the labels that I approached, who wanted to work with me, were suffering a little bit in that respect. So I don't think that helped either.
It reached October in 2022, where I had to, like, sit down with myself and just kind of go, “Why do you want to put this out in the first place?”. I had one of those, I need to be real myself moments… I thought, “It doesn't matter what the outcome is, you just need to be honest with yourself”. I was just like, “Why do I care so much about how other people perceive this? Because you didn't make it for other people, you made it for yourself, really”. And I got so lost in the whole trying to get it released on a label and trying to do all this stuff. I dealt with so much rejection in such a short period of time that it completely threw me and just trying to get out of that was like a really difficult experience. I had to make peace with the worst case scenario of, “If I put this out, and no one listens to it, I have to be at peace with that”. From that point onwards, I realised it doesn't matter what happens from here, I will just put it out. Because if I don't, I'll regret it for the rest of my life. That has paid dividends… Doing that, getting it out there, has instilled so much confidence in me and I'm about to put out my next EP. Two in the space of a year, I didn't really plan it like that, it just kind of happened. Funnily enough, the process for doing this has been the complete opposite.
I'm now a bit more self assured about how to go about doing things. I have more self assurance in what I want to make and what I want to share with people and I don't think I would have that foundation if I didn't go through the process of doing the first thing. I still feel like I'm really new to this idea of putting out music and being an artist because I didn't go to an art school. I went to a school that was very science and tech-oriented. I went to uni and I studied neuroscience. I feel like I've had to teach myself how to be an artist. I'm trying to stop comparing myself to other people around me and just learning that, considering that I've had to learn everything pretty much myself, that's an achievement. It’s quite remarkable and I have to just keep on reminding myself of that. Not in an egotistical way, but learning to back myself a bit.
My daughter has just started school, and I feel a bit sad, because she's going into an education system that's mostly rooted in competition. Your achievement is all about how you're graded in terms of how good you are at remembering things, etc. All of us have grown up in this system of achievement, where it’s equated to whether you got an A or B. Someone else in your class got an A star, you feel bad about yourself. That kind of environment is quite damaging in a way, because as an individual, you don't always want to be pitted against each other, but then you end up just doing it yourself. So it's really important for all of us to try and break through that conditioning, because we have to be our own biggest cheerleaders. We have to just stop and focus on ourselves and think, “You know what, I'm doing pretty well”. Someone might read this who's a peer of yours and they might go, “Oh, wow, he does 10 days of silent meditation. I'm so rubbish. I only do five minutes a week”. You can always find something to beat yourself up about.
Exactly. I still fall into the trap of doing that. The age old discourse, social media is a massive problem when it comes to that. Everyone's heard that, but sometimes South Asian families can be quite competitive as well. I don't think anyone ever means any harm by it, but just being in environments where you always have it at the back of your head, like, “Oh, my God, if I don't become a doctor, what’s my family gonna think of me? If I don't get good grades, what am I?” Being in that environment has been quite helpful sometimes when you are working in music, because it's kind of made me go. “Okay, well, I don't know the competition side of it. But I have a good work ethic”. I'm glad that I don't succumb to laziness. It's more like learning when you need to have a rest. There's definitely a balance of: there's good aspects of it, there's bad aspects of it, but I definitely feel like part of the journey is learning what aspects of those things work best for you. On the competition side of things, my whole mantra is, “There's always gonna be someone who's doing better than you, but there's always gonna be someone who's doing worse than you”. And that's pretty much true for 99% of the population.
So tell me about the next EP. I'm really excited about this. Are you going to do a similar kind of rollout in terms of making it an art project in itself?
Not so much, mainly because it came around a lot quicker than I anticipated. I finished up a bunch of tracks last year, and then I started sending them out to labels again. This one label in San Francisco called Tabula Rasa Records picked up on it and they were like, “We would really love to work with you on these tracks”. I was a bit skeptical because I just cold emailed them. I didn't expect anything to happen. We had a chat and they say they really loved the songs. They asked me, “How do you anticipate putting them out? What do you want to do?” I couldn’t believe a label was asking me how I wanted to put the music out.So I told them, “I want to have it released on vinyl, I want to have it distributed around the world, I want to be able to get a press campaign around it. And they're like, “Yeah, cool. Let's do that”. Again, I was very skeptical. I felt like, it shouldn't be this easy. But this label, they've been so kind and supportive. Anything I’ve wanted to do, they’ve backed me.
So yeah, the EP is called Unfurl. It came out on the 26th of October. It's definitely more clubby than my first one. I made it so that it could be played in the club. I have treated the EP as if it's a story in and of itself. I put a lot of thought into the artwork, as usual. How I’ve sequenced the tracks. The whole premise, and I suppose influence, behind the EP… I suppose the clues in the title, feel like I've bloomed out of something. I feel like I'm rooted and grounded into something and I'm ready to just unfurl. It's a bit of a confidence boost. A reassurance of like, “Yeah, it's cool. You got this. You want to put this out, that's fine”. Having Tabula Rasa Records behind me the whole time has been so good. It's so funny. The release has been the complete polar opposite to the experience to putting out the first EP. It's so weird.
Tell me a little bit about your kind of your signature sound. What influences do you draw from in terms of the sounds that you've kind of cultivated as your identity?
That's something that I've really, really struggled with and I still kind of feel like I struggle with now. My journey through understanding and loving electronic music really stemmed from hip hop. That's probably quite common for a lot of people. I love the way that like Madlib and Doom and the way those albums come together like Dilla, Tribe Called Quest… I adore the way that they composed those beats and the sampling and the way it's all come together. It's in my bloodstream. I feel like sampling… I've really taken that and I've always applied that into how I make electronic stuff. Some of the first electronic artists that I really loved were, people like Four Tet and Floating Points and that sort of thing. There's some sort of element of innocence in their music that I feel like I've probably taken a little bit. Especially Floating Points is one of my biggest influences. I love the way he crafts electronic pieces, it’s so atypical compared to what you generally hear and club stuff. It just does something indescribable to me. There's definitely aspects of Flying Lotus in there with a bit of the trippier sounds, or the more psychedelic kind of thing. I really pay attention to production styles in non dance music, because I play drums in punk bands and that sort of thing, too. So like, I'm always like, paying attention to how things are produced and mixed. And I try and incorporate those kinds of things into electronic stuff. Theo Parrish is another absolute… Oh, man, I remember reading an interview with him once where he was describing how he makes tracks. And he described it as he's got a marble in front of him and he's chiseling away, working to find the sculpture underneath it. And I love that way he described it because it does feel like that sometimes when you're making music. I started working on some new stuff and I'm trying to move away from so obviously referencing things I'm influenced by. That's quite a scary process but it's slowly paying off.
I've been doing graffiti for nearly 25 years now and when I first started out, there was a lot of imitation and a lot of heavy influence from people that I looked up to. Over time, you’re just yourself, you are your own unique self, so, even if you're copying someone, you're copying through your own unique lens. When you're drawing influence from people, it's still being channeled through you. So it's still unique in its own way, even if it does feel derivative. Over time, there's this process of refinement, where you get closer to the essence of what it is that's actually inspiring you. And that's not necessarily 100% the person that you're taking inspiration from, it's how what they’ve created is touching you and how you're expressing it yourself.
Honestly, I've never thought of it in that way. That's really cool. Really cool. That it's the essence of what the thing is. That just blew my mind.
Haha, I blew my own mind there! So, to finish up, why do you think you've gravitated towards music as one of your channels of creative expression, because it could have been anything. Why do you think that was something that became part of your life?
I don't know. That's a really, really big question. The first thing that came to mind was that I grew up in a household where my mum was very passionate about music. She was into rock music and that kind of thing, which, out of all my friends and relatives and stuff, was a very odd thing - especially in an Asian household. Yeah. My mum's a bit of a rebel and that definitely rubbed off on me a bit. So I think that was probably a big part of it, to be honest. But then, when you start going down that route of getting lessons for instruments or whatever, that's where you begin to learn what you're good at, and what you're not good at and what your tastes are, and whether or not it's worth pursuing. At school I wasn't particularly sporty. I wasn't on football teams or anything like that. I learned in school that I was good at it. You just get obsessed with it. It's a really difficult question to answer. It could have gone any other way. What's weird is that not many people in my family are that musical. One of my cousins is, but that's about it. It's really, really odd. Then there's me and my brother and we're complete anomalies in that respect, because he's a brilliant guitarist, and we actually play music together. It's one of those things that also provides a sense of your tribe of people. You get the things that make you feel a certain way in music and then you bond with people that feel the same way and it becomes like a snowball…