About Ami

Baltimore City

Amrita “Ami” Kaur Dang is a South Asian-American vocalist, sitarist, composer and producer from Baltimore. Her sound ranges from North Indian classical fused with noise/ambient electronics to beat-driven psych and experimental dancepop. The work references her hybrid identity as a first-generation South Asian-American, Sikh upbringing, musical education, as well as the chaos and spirituality of the landscapes of both Baltimore and urban India.


Picking up her… more

Uni Sun

Uni Sun is my 2nd full-length album that features eight experimental, indie pop songs. I wrote these songs between 2011 and 2014 which the record finally being released in 2016. Kate Levitt played and composed the live drums on this album, and we co-produced the electronic beats, with the exception of Sublimate, which was co-produced by Adam Schwarz.


  • Album Art for Uni Sun
    Album Art for Uni Sun
    Photographed and edited by Andrew Strasser, concept by Ami Dang.
  • This Charm
    The Punjabi lyrics are written by my great-great-grandfather, the late Bhai Vir Singh, and I wrote the English lyrics inspired by his words. His poem tells us of a Sikh guru (or prophet) who visited many towns and influenced many people. When it was time for him to leave, the people don’t want him to go. But he tells them that everyone who is doing positive work and encouraging social change shouldn’t just stay in one place, isolated, but that those people should travel and spread their values far and wide.
  • Sublimate
    I wrote the melody and produced the song in collaboration with Adam Schwarz, who contributed to the rhythmic production. The lyrics are a Sikh hymn from the Guru Granth Sahib that encourage us to focus on a universal consciousness and that honoring community will lead us to enlightenment.
  • Yes No
    This song is a meditation on belief and duality, what is real and what isn’t? and how do we come to believe or decide what is the truth?
  • Nazm
    A nazm is a Urdu form of poetry, and this poem is written by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. It is a love song of remembrance that says, "suddenly, in the night, your memory comes to me, just like the spring comes on quietly and as the wind sweeps across the desert, as when one who is sick, without any reason, finds peace.” I arranged the song with a Roland Juno synthesizer going through various effects and distorted drums performed by Kate Levitt.
  • Satgur Hoye Dayaal
    This Sikh hymn is a traditional tune I learned as a child, but I produced this track with a very nontraditional arrangement featuring samples, sitars, and drum kit.
  • Arrange It
    The lyrics of this song were inspired by an advertisement for gold jewelry that I saw in India featuring a young boy and girl dressed to the nines, specifically, in garb that a bride and groom would wear to their wedding. Essentially, the advertisement featured child marriage. I started writing the song feeling outrage about the practice and the fact that this billboard so blatantly promoted this horrible practice in India. As I continued to refine the lyrics, the song turned into a song about defying what is expected of you and using your free will to create your own destiny.
  • Udeekna Live Video
    A live performance of "Udeekna" with a full band, featuring Zach Christensen (bass), Josh Laskin Garcia (drums) and B Taylor (guitar).

Raw Silk

Ami Dang is 1/2 of Raw Silk, a Baltimore-based duo featuring sitar, voice, cello, and electronics. Raw Silk emerged from Alexa Richardson’s and my experimental improvisations. We released our self-titled debut album in June 2018. On this album, I performed and composed sitar, vocals, and produced the electronics. Raw Silk is often a weave of two fabrics, especially two colors that are woven together to create a duo-tone effect. This duo-tone texture represents the combination of Alexa’s and my work together to create a glimmering, yet sometimes rough, musical landscape.

In this debut album, we present five pieces that create a rich and complementary dialogue. Cello and sitar discuss, get heated, grab wrists, and twirl wildly over an electronic landscape of textures. My vocals interweave throughout—yearning, cerebral and commanding. 


  • Argonaut I
    I composed, produced, and performed the electronics and vocals in this piece. The watery, droning electronics give way to this introductory song. The vocal composition is an interpretation of the traditional alaap, the arhythmic section of a Hindustani classical music performance. Alexa’s cello dips and swoons in tandem with my voice to set the stage for the remaining works.
  • Argonaut II
    We move into the second part of this two-piece movement which features a tarana, a Hindustani classical vocal composition with nonsense syllables to highlight the voice as an instrument rather than a lyrical source. The voice playfully calls, “Dirana ohdata yadaya, dira naya, oh dha ta nanana, yadhata, tanana!” while the cello mimics this melody. The two instruments deviate and venture into different directions—staccato and puncturing at times or legato and sailing over the electronic sounds—but always return to the main tarana theme.
  • Malpresentations
    “Malpresentations” builds a conversation between cello and sitar. The two instruments call and respond to one another while finally coming together in agreement but then move forward in heated discussion. We named the song “malpresentations” for a phenomenon that occurs in Alexa’s work as a midwife. Malpresentation is when a baby is coming down the vaginal canal in a non-traditional way (breech or otherwise), and the baby has a difficult time making its way out. The song is a piece that is in phrases of seven beats per measure, which is quite nontraditional and atypical for rhythmic music. Most listeners want to hear music in two beats per measure or four (or variations on 3). As the piece is in seven, it is a little bit off from what the listener might expect—like a malpresentation.
  • Commie Baby
    The lyrics of “Commie Baby” are taken from a Sikh hymn from the scripture the Guru Granth Sahib that describes how all people—whether kings or paupers—are equal and that class (or caste) doesn’t determine one’s spirituality or moral compass. I wrote the vocal melody and performed it in this piece, a meditation on human equality.
  • Love Child
    This piece is Raw Silk’s first experiment in form, a duet of sitar and cello.
  • Argonaut II
    The official music video for Argonaut II, directed by Emily Eaglin.

Hukam

This project features a selection of works from Hukam, a full-length album released in 2011. Ami Dang composed, produced and performed voice and sitar on all songs attached here.
  • Interlace
    “Interlace” is part 1 of 2 movements which flows into “Manali,” the second track on the record. This piece invites the listener to get acquainted with the sound palate of these works by drawing them into my soundscape. I used a distorted sitar riff recorded from this piece as the main driving theme in “Manali.”
  • Manali
    This song reflects on the contrasting experiences and intersection of a female foreign-born woman of South Asian descent (me) with a young girl growing up in the early 21st century in Manali, a Himalayan town that is a popular destination for tourists from around the world. In this song, I wonder what it would be like to be that young girl who is exposed to so much Western culture, behavior and practices through the tourists who are ever-present in the town yet living in a family and society that contains her within a tighter set of traditions and values.
  • Treasure
    I wrote the melody to “Treasure” but took the lyrics from a Sikh hymn from the Guru Granth Sahib that reminds us that “Ratan padhaarat maankaa, suinaa rupaa khaak,” that is, that all treasures, pearls, gold, and precious things ultimately turn to dust. The song is a meditation on consumerism and reminds me that I shouldn’t bother too much with material goods since they ultimately aren’t important. I also use a sample of a sarangi, an Indian violin.
  • Where Nothing Grows
    This ecstatic uptempo tune calls out the fact that we build simulacra (“a planetarium”) at the expense of actually seeing the stars. The song mocks those who “build us up and shut it out”—the “it” in this case being the stars and the sky. I ask, why is it that we prioritize industry and artifice over the natural world?
  • Amorphous Matter
    This piece uses recordings from a Hindustani vocal music class and uses these recordings to create a soundscape over which my voice sings the Hindustani classical music scale. It is part 1 of a 2-part piece that continues with “Amorphous Absolute."
  • Amorphous Absolute
    Both Amorphous Matter and Amorphous Absolute are a study in vocal form using sargam, Hindustani classical solfege, as the lyrical content. The lyrics don’t have any meaning, but instead, the voice explores Raag Maulkauns, a pentatonic scale intended to be performed at night.

Ruins

Ami Dang, Alexa Richardson and Jonna McKone collaborated on “Ruins,” a multimedia installation and performance at The Walters Art Museum featuring film by Jonna McKone; sitar, voice, and six-channel electronic sound by Ami Dang, and cello and sound art consultation by Alexa Richardson. The work premiered in August 2017 as a part of The Walters Art Museum Art.Sound.Now contemporary works series.

Raw Silk performed the electric cello, sitar, and vocals next to the muses in the Greek galleries. As listeners move into the two adjoining gallery spaces, the live performance is altered with electronic effects. The peak of the manipulation occurs in the front gallery next to the Tel Halaf Fertility Figurine, the oldest object in the museum. The music spills into the other galleries, creating a layered soundscape—paralleling the ways the modern museum experience is mediated by reconstruction, contextualization, text, conservation and curation. 

The video clip features a 10-minute excerpt of the 28-minute performance and installation. Both Greek Movement A and B are captured in this live video.

1. Egyptian Movement (not featured)

This movement uses a rhythmic structure of stomping and clapping drawn from Sufi Zikr music, thought to be the closest contemporary music to that of ancient Egypt. The rhythm is cyclical in nature, building and speeding up and then slowing down, only to restart the cycle again. The tonality is a traditional Arabic scale. Ami opens the piece by singing an inscription from an ancient Egyptian tomb from an ancient God and directed and people of the future, in transliterated ancient Egyptian:

O you who are alive on earth,
And you who shall be born,
Come, let me lead you to the way of life.

2. Syrian movement (not featured)

This movement is based on a fragment from a Hurrian hymn (no. 6) that is claimed by some to be the oldest known melody, which dates to approximately 1400 BC and was found inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets excavated from the ancient Amorite-Canaanite city of Ugarit, a headland in northern Syria.

3. 
Greek Movement A 

Uses an Ionian modal tonality.

4. Greek Movement B

The tetrachord is the foundation of ancient Greek tonality and provides the backdrop to this final movement. Ami sings in two ancient languages, including a segment of the Old Testament written in ancient Aramaic warning people to abandon the old Gods in favor of the new:

Thus you shall say to them, “The gods that did not make the heavens and the earth will perish”

Ami Dang also sings in ancient Greek a quote from Heraclitus in the 4th century BC:

No man steps in the same river twice; Nothing is permanent except change.

The movement ends with a stripped down and minimalist mournful elegy to the ancient cultures and objects of the past.

__

As of December 2018, Raw Silk (Alexa Richardson and Ami Dang) are currently revising the music and sound composed for this installation to adapt it into a full-length record. We hope to be finished in mid-2019.


  • Ruins I
    The trio collaborated to create a 3-minute digital video work using Jonna McKone’s decayed film and music taken from the installation by Raw Silk. The sound features Alexa Richardson on cello and Ami Dang on vocals and sitar. Additional electronic sounds and samples were produced and engineered by Ami Dang with consultation from Alexa Richardson. Password: walters
  • Raw Silk live at the Walters Art Museum
    This video clip features a 10-minute excerpt of the 28-minute performance and installation. Both Greek Movement A and B are captured in this live video. (Please pardon the poor resolution and recording quality, but I hope this gives you an idea of the experience.)

Various Collaborations, 2014-2018

This project features a selection of collaborations with other artists from 2014 to 2018.


  • Suspend the Time
    "Suspend the Time" by Animal Collective (featuring Ami Dang). In the fall of 2018, Animal Collective invited me to play sitar on their delicate ballad “Suspend the Time,” to benefit The Ocean Foundation and to raise awareness for the problem of seawater acidification. The song plays out like a soft lullaby, but it is really a wake up call to the problem of seawater acidification, which is worsening at a more rapid rate than any time in history. The song plays when you visit http://ocean-acidification.org/, and anyone can download the song upon signing up for the campaign's mailing list.
  • Water
    "Water" by So Drove feat. Ami Dang. I have frequently collaborated with So Drove (aka Adam Schwarz), and in 2018, he asked me to contribute some vocals and sitar onto his song "Water."
  • Azu Were
    "Azu Were" by Craig Williams feat. Ami Dang Electronic dance musician asked me to contribute sitar on his song "Azu Were."
  • Pink Panic
    Poncili Creacion's "Pink Panic." In the summer of 2014, I wrote and performed music with Poncili Creacion, a puppetry troupe from Puerto Rico, and also performed as a puppeteer for part of the show. We toured this performance for five weeks throughout the eastern half of the United States. Here is a clip from a performance in Gainesville.
  • Time to Blow
    I wrote and performed sitar and vocal harmonies on Slag Ralden's "Time to Blow."
  • 13 Knives
    I wrote and performed vocal harmonies on Slag Ralden's "13 Knives."