Amit Rai Sharma is a London-born Indian, based between London, UK and Changhua, Taiwan. Frontman and singer of notable London band Ex Libras, Amit has cultivated a career in creativity over the years through various disciplines including sound art, composition for theatre & dance, and public installations. Now, as a solo artist, Amit is ready to share a project that began to blossom as far back as 2007.

In this interview spotlight, I chat with Amit about his powerful new single, AI in music, dream collabs, and more. This interview is a really good one so click play, relax, and enjoy.

Full Q&A along with links and music below.

Let’s get this hot topic out of the way from the start. What are your feelings on AI as a creative tool? Have you experimented with it? Or released any projects where it was used?

Well, let’s get into it. Most of my day-to-day life orbits the arts – working with painters, sculptors, photographers, installation artists, the whole fine arts spectrum – so I’ve very much been around the types of conversations you might expect. But I’m always looking to find my own position.

Just last month, in one of those personal mental meanderings, I landed on something that felt pivotal to me. Wasn’t planning to share it here but hey, since you asked…

Calling AI a tool— yes, I think it is. But right now, we’re too close to entirely see it that way. I tried to imagine the moment the camera first hit the art world. Some people must’ve scoffed—”pressing a button isn’t art”, and portrait artists worrying about being replaced. In the immediate and early stages, it’s too close in time to see it as anything other than a threat, or a disrupter of a status quo, and yes, the camera was disruptive in its own way. But today, it’s a default. Everyone has one. Yet not everyone takes great photos. These are people who know how to use the tool, and I think this is the same with AI. The tool’s accessible; mastery is something else entirely.

So, quality outcomes still depend on skill—on prompting well, knowing the craft. Right now it’s messy and experimental, but it feels like we’re laying down the foundations of a future creative language. I guess I’ve landed at a surprisingly optimistic position about our creative future being filled, in part, by people who know how to properly prompt AI to get beautiful, intentioned results.

That said, it’s not without friction. No matter what, people will get hurt or short-changed. The arts are already overcrowded, and AI makes visibility even harder. Distributing this record via Distrokid gets you onto their playlist, and the number of AI artists releasing music means mine and other real human artists work is just harder to find. Worse, the AI output often feels… beige. Derivative. But my bigger frustration isn’t with AI itself—it’s with how platforms like Spotify or SoundCloud let AI and humans alike use artists’ work without attribution or compensation. That’s not a tech problem. That’s people making these choices.

That AI uses datasets without permission, breaching the realm of copyright… sadly I have to resign myself to the fact that this is all part and parcel of what happens with new technologies. But sadly, I’ve seen worse from humans. A friend of mine had his graffiti work stolen by a designer who built a platform off it—lectures, local awards, T-shirts, teaching job. All he could do was send a cease-and-desist letter to her. Nothing came of it. No compensation. No consequences.

So yes, AI pulls from existing datasets, but that is arguably a very human thing, no? Progress has been built on each backs of others—sometimes with credit, often without. It does cause hurt when work gets taken. I go overboard tagging collaborators to avoid just that. But I live in a world that rewards theft and shrugs at attribution. AI didn’t create that dynamic—we did.

And yet, AI hasn’t stopped people from making great art and music, in the same way the camera didn’t stop people getting portraits painted, nor did someone stealing my friends work stop him from making more art. It all sometimes just fucking sucks. But if you live, breathe, and bleed your creativity, and you’d continue to be creative no matter the circumstance, nothing truly infringes on that.

Have I experimented with it? All the time. A recent highlight: running a solo D&D campaign with ChatGPT as my DM. Right now, it sits somewhere between toy and tool for me—good for streamlining admin, fun for odd experiments. I don’t feel any particular urge to use it creatively in my practice, but I do try to keep up-to-speed with the developments of it. And yes, I say “please” and “thank you.” Just in case the AI overlords are taking notes.

Photographers you should follow:@unreelcity@kevinmccollum@bluewein_@joylensclub

My friend: @vinnikiniki

What is your earliest music memory? Or a moment that sticks out for motivating you to write, record, and release music?

My parents say that when I was a baby, all they would need to do to occupy me was to put me in the crib and place headphones on me and stick some music on. The music was things like Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk – not your typical Indian household in the UK. I’d love for that to be my earliest memory, but because I’ve only been told it (many times) it feels like a memory. Though, I do remember that record player and those headphones.

There is a vivid memory that comes back to me, and it is sort of mundane. We had some family friends over and their children were older than me. The older sister, Nina, was playing with me. I must’ve been 4 or 5, she would’ve been a little older, maybe 11. And she decides that we should ‘record’ the song ‘Always look on the bright side of life’. Her method to do this was to say that we plug the headphones into the mic input and sing into the left ear of the headphones.

Even now I can remember trying to record this song, with the headphone flipped around on my head, one earpiece on the back of my head and the other in front of my mouth as I press ‘play’ & ‘pause’ together and hope that it was a good recording. It makes me smile thinking about it and probably my first real taste of experimental audio engineering. As much as I’d love them to be… headphones are not microphones.

The moment that sticks out most to me though was around 8 or 10 years ago. My mum has always been a huge supporter in helping me explore my music side – taking me to piano lessons, buying me my first instrument. But when I wanted to pursue music in a band back when I was a teenager we got into a lot of heated battles. She was a single mum raising two teenage boys, and she kept a roof over our head, clothes on our back, food on the table, and she struggled immensely – at times having a full-time job, an evening part-time job, and then weekend work – and so the thought that I would want to pursue any career that didn’t offer a guaranteed income it was definitely something she wasn’t going to let slide without a challenge. Yet despite that, she still supported my choices, and even now she comes to my shows.

Having pursued a creative life for as long as I have means that I’ve been through many ups and downs. I’ve struggled with my own well-being and a few times I’ve reached the low point where I thought about quitting it all. One day, I can’t recall when, I was at mum’s house in the kitchen, and she was asking how the creative work was going and if I was thinking about any other possible more secure work. I told her I was struggling with some opportunities and that I wasn’t sure about what would be happening next. She started telling me to find something else and this time I didn’t put up much of a fight.

At that moment, in that conversation, all my thoughts of inadequacy and failure were weighing me down so much that I felt defeated. And in that moment she said to me, something along the lines of, ”You know, when you used to talk to me about music you would say ‘I don’t care if I starve and have to live on the street, I’m going to do music!’ and even if I didn’t agree with you, I couldn’t argue with your conviction. But now it looks like you’ve lost your fire.” And she was right. I was barely myself. I felt like I didn’t have any fight left in me.

That moment, and two others, are the reason this record even exists and is being put out. Thanks mum.

What’s up with this latest release? Any cool back-stories, bloopers, or notable inspirations?

‘Pieces’ is the second single from an album called ‘Bnju’ which I’m releasing later in the year. A lot of the work on the record takes inspiration from very difficult moments. Moments that I think we all face at one point or another, in life. This song in particular is about my grandmother’s dementia.

There’s a line in the song “…it’s strange I think I’m lost in my own home, and my face ain’t quite the same face that I know”. My mum and I were with her, visiting one day, and she turned to my mum and said she was scared, that there was a woman over there that she didn’t recognise, an old woman looking at her, and she wanted to leave. The woman that was ‘over there’ was her own reflection in the mirror. In her mind she thought she was a 16-year-old girl back in India, and she had somehow ended up in this house that belonged to a strange older woman who kept staring at her.

This is what her dementia did to her. There were moments where it seemed like she was lucid, conversing and laughing and joking, but then she would say something like “I’m sorry but what’s your name again?”. It guts you.

Writing about personal things is quite new for me. I’d grown up being a fan of lyrics penned by Chino Moreno, Thom Yorke, Maynard James Keegan – painterly lyrics, abstract phrases that took on momentum and meaning through emotive vocal performances. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really started to appreciate the craft, perhaps too much so – I’ve got a kind of reverence for the art form – and so I’d ended up pushing myself into a corner that I didn’t know how to get out of when it came to lyrics; I was afraid what I’d write would be crap or contrived.

‘Pieces’ in particular, was finished musically in 2010. But it wasn’t until my grandmother passed from dementia in 2018 that these words started to form around this song. Since 2010 I had placeholder lyrics – vowel sounds, fragments of lines that I thought sounded cool, abstract ideas – but when I started to shape them, it gravitated to these moments that’d happened with my grandmother.

My hope is that I’ve done a good enough job in conveying the confusion that comes with dealing with someone with dementia. It’s an awful affliction and being part of a larger family (my mum was one of six children) sometimes made it difficult to come to a consensus on how to deal with my grandmother who was declining.

It might also be an Indian thing but it’s not the first time I’ve encountered a situation where an elderly person who has declining health gets ‘hidden away’ from sight, or that it is somehow a mark of shame on the family that this person behaves in this way. I imagine this isn’t so much the case anymore, most people are much more empathetic and tolerant and aware that things like dementia are more common parts of people lives.

And whilst she did have violent episodes towards the end, not often but some, like the voice recording says at the end of the song (my mums voice) “the boundless love she had, it came through even though she was going through dementia. It came through.”.

What keeps you going, especially on the “bad” days?

When I was younger, one of my first jobs was working with young people on the severe end of disability. We had young children (up to eighteen) who had multiple disabilities – physical, motor, neurological, etc. There was a boy who had no sight or hearing and could only recognise people by touching their elbows. Most were young people with severe autism – the complete lack of self-awareness and sense of safety, run-into-traffic, burst into violent episodes type of autism. Very quickly, at a young age (sixteen or so) I had a huge appreciation for being able to breath air into my lungs unaided, to do simple things like hold a spoon with either hand and feed myself, to be able to see someone and hear their name, and be able to speak it back to them.

This alone has given me a lot of patience, a lot of humility, and gave me a resilience that allowed me to brush off a fair bit.

Most of the time I operate as quite an insular person. I don’t mind being by myself and I’m good at occupying myself, but it also breeds a familiarity with a mental state that can easily slip into loneliness, and I’m not often aware that at times I feel lonely. Living out in Taiwan for the last year, with little common language between me and the people around me has amplified that – made me much more aware that I need to communicate with people to feel settled.

The sadness that comes from loneliness is like damp rot in the soul. A remedy, if you can catch the signs early, is sharing a good meal with a friend, or family member. There have been a lot of bad days that have been somewhat tempered by eating a good meal and sharing a laugh.

But there have been periods when it felt like nothing could cut through the deafening wall of my own darkest thoughts. I’ve had a few cripplingly low periods. Thankfully less now.

My last dark episode was quite significant. Usually, I’ve been capable of pulling myself out the gravity of these dark thoughts, but this time was different.

It was after I had had that moment with my mum in the kitchen. It was winter, and I was crying myself to sleep next to my (now) wife. I wasn’t crying over anything specific, but it was like I had an enormous, weighted blanket that was suffocating every ounce of will to take another step forward.

Thoughts like; why am I putting myself through this? Am I chasing something that won’t happen? I had had moments of near success before with bands, feeling like being on the verge of breaking. But nothing had really worked out so far and here I was, getting older. Was this it? Here I am, next to a woman I love and want to marry, and yet barely living; all my friends; married, children, houses, mortgages… Me? Still chasing a dream. No security? I didn’t mind it for me, but how long could I put her through that? She SHOULD be with someone who could give her a good life. Am I a victim of sunk-cost-fallacy thinking? Why don’t people get ‘me’? Why should anyone even care if I don’t? Am I broken? Etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. et.c e.t.c e…t.c…

Trying to be a creative and live a life existing solely from creativity is a tremendously difficult and arduous task. It depends on the type of creative you are, but I’ve always given my all, and then some, in any creative venture I take part in – I don’t know any other way. And maybe I’m just not compatible with… the world.

A few weeks of silently crying myself to sleep led to the only conclusion that felt like a way out – give everything up. Stop music altogether, after all, I had no fire left in me. I was drained and burned out… am I really done? Maybe, yeah.

It took me the month to work up the courage to talk to my partner, to tell her what I had been going through each night lately, and how I felt. She just embraced me and told me that nothing mattered to her more than me being alright and she sat with me for weeks and she helped me feel normal again. She pulled me out with her own hands.

She, and this period of time, is moment number two in why this record exists and is being put out.

Everyone needs someone every now and then to really listen, and really care. Feeling heard and understood and being cared for goes such a long way in helping anyone feel normal.

And what is ‘normal’? I think that just means a relative state of operation. I don’t think there is objective ‘normalcy’. I still have bad days and bad days and both-at-the-same-time days. Like a boat on the water, even if I’m leaning too far on one side or the other, or being rocked around like crazy – and these may feel like not-normal states – as long as I’m right-side-up, that’s a relative good state of operation.

In a nutshell, when I’m low it’s; good food in the company of my wife, or family, or friend. Then; try to find some sort of gallows humour perspective that leads to finding something to be grateful for. And because I’m somewhat familiar with my own negative headspace, I can keep taking steps and carry it for a while because, even if it doesn’t feel like progress, I’ve done that before and I know I’ll always wander out.

If you could collaborate with anyone – dead or alive, famous or unknown – who would it be and why?

I don’t think I’d be able to collaborate with any of my heroes, not because they’d disappoint me, but because I’m prone to fanboying – hard. I wish I could rein it in, but if I admire someone’s work, I turn into this earnest mess of gratitude. Which, of course, never lands quite how I hope. I have a few cringe moments hard coded in memory.

That said, if I could somehow be ‘not-me’, then I’d love to collaborate with Adam Betts (Colossal Squid, Three Trapped Tigers). I saw him years ago playing with a band called Optimist Club. Didn’t know who he was at the time, but even then, could he drum! Plus, anyone playing full-throttle and still finding time to adjust their eyewear… that’s a flex.

Or maybe go completely outside the box and work with someone like Derren Brown. I like the challenge that comes with collaborating across disciplines, taking ideas from one sphere and seeing how it interacts with ideas from another. That’s always been a way to push my own ideas and grow outside my comfort zone.

Come to think of it, I’ve been quite lucky to have had lots of cross-discipline collaborations within the arts. In fact, this current record is one of the rare things I’ve made entirely by myself.

Of the other things I’m doing, there’s a project called ‘Aux Volta’ – a left-field/experimental electronica record that I’m hoping sees light later this year. And then there’s ‘Thleep.Earth’, an ongoing collaboration with visual / light artists exploring sound and light therapy for better sleep. It’s not a scientific symposium by any means, and it’s not new-age either, rather an artistic investigation into how rhythms of sound and light can induce states of rest, especially during the darker months of the year.

I’m also quite excited about being in Taiwan because the experimental noise scene here is pretty fertile – tiny nights with twelve people in the audience, with performers that no one outside the room would know. Free-form level-clipping distortion, circuit-bent pedals, no-input mixing boards (NIMB), even bits of old tape machines and found objects with currents running through them. It’s raw and unpredictable, but some of these sounds that are getting produced are really insane.

I’ve been thinking about reaching out to a few of those artists, to see if they’d be up for remixing some of the tracks. Though, if I’m honest, this is just a cover… as I have a master plan to eventually pull together an experimental post-rock noise orchestra.

I know it’s hard…but favorite song (or artist) of all time? Or Top 3 if you can’t choose one…?

Damn. Of all time? With apologies, I can’t do it. But at this very moment three things I’m listening to; 

‘Lost Realms’ by ‘Aroma Nice’, ‘Absurd Matter’ by ‘Shaped Noise’, ‘Resort’ by ‘Skee Mask’. There’s actually so much more… Hobnob trio (Japan), Paris Death Hilton (Japan), Emma Harner, Shan Vincent De Paul, Joshua Idehen, Redolent, My Head is Empty, Bent Knee…

And I’ll stop.

Where’s the best place to connect with You?

My website www.amitrsharma.com has the more comprehensive collection of my work and releases, and I always welcome an email.

For socials, you can follow me via Instagram @amit.rai.sharma – but please know that I don’t post very much, but I am becoming more regular with stories, little insights into the projects I’m doing, often art related, and that’s where I’d be talking about upcoming shows / events.

I still maintain a presence in the weird-scape that is twitter (just can’t bring myself to call it X), and you can find me there @soundletters

Via YouTube it’s @amit.rai.sharma – I’m planning a few things in the next year or so which will have a home on YouTube primarily.

And Bandcamp it’s amitraisharma.bandcamp.com

I appreciate Your time. Any last thoughts before signing off?

I appreciate the questions and giving me the opportunity to share my meandering thoughts. I’m thankful that I kept practicing and making music because at times I didn’t think I’d be able to.

Last thought is to the reader; the world is not forgiving or compromising, so don’t let your art be. No matter what you do, don’t be derivative. Don’t play it safe. Be the entirety of the messiest ‘you’. Your most unhinged noise is needed.