Multi-instrumentalist Zak Khan will open the night with new music, followed by Slowspin’s dream-folk melodies and reverb-drenched vocals on SP-404. The night will end with collaborative songs and soundscapes born from their week-long residency together in Minneapolis.

Artist/producer Zak Khan has been creating music intercontinentally for over a decade. Having frequently produced for artists in his home city of Minneapolis, this Pakistani American artist is ready to show everyone the more personal side of his expression. His music blends the fidelity of the digital age with the timelessness of analog texture to create a sound that is massive and intimate. Khan pays homage to many greats through his art, including Jai Paul, Jon Hopkins, Children of Bodom, and Sade.

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Slowspin is a project of Zeerak Ahmed, who is a New York–based sound artist. She produces vocal scores, sound installations, and uniquely fragile sound collages that explore notions of identity, memory, and longing. Raised in Karachi, Slowspin has a distinct sound practice grounded in Hindustaani classical vocal traditions, dream-folk, ambient, and experimental-electronic music.

By taking the thumri and recontextualizing it for contemporary music—ambient, dream pop, guitar-based folk—she is excavating this buried alternative history. These centuries-old songs and traditions send down fresh roots into new soil on TALISMAN, still aching for home but open to new possibilities for growth, new histories to write. Much like Ahmed herself, and millions of others in the South Asian diaspora. “They tell me not to plant things where they don’t belong,” Ahmed sings in understated defiance on the closing “Belong.” “What if that’s all I know?”" – Pitchfork