Imaad Wasif

Imaad Wasif is an Indian singer, guitarist and songwriter whose music combines elements of both folk and rock music. Wasif’s music has been described as “unbelievably intense with sparkling, raga-influenced guitar and a mystic bent.”

Wasif was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada but was raised in the desert in Southern California. He began playing music as a teenager and formed his first band lowercase; “a guitar-drums duo that played a weird hybrid of minimal lo-fi pop, post-rock and slo-core.” In 2001, he formed the psychedelic folk-rock group alaska! in addition to joining Lou Barlow’s New Folk Implosion. In 2006, he shifted focus to a solo career. During 2006–2007, Wasif also played with Yeah Yeah Yeahs for the Show Your Bones world tour playing acoustic guitar, bass and synths. He performed his solo work as the supporting act for most shows. He stopped playing with the YYY's in 2007 after meeting Patti Smith, who suggested that he follow the path of heightened resistance and work to dispel his perceived connection between negativity and the creative impulse. He returned home to Los Angeles and furthered his writing discipline while undertaking a study of drone, Indian raga music and American Primitive guitar. During this time he subsisted on a steady diet of hashish and coffee (after reading that Paul Bowles and Bob Dylan had also used a similar methods during the writing of Sheltering Sky and John Wesley Harding.) He studied historic spiritual texts and maintained what he called "an active form of silence in music," until finding what he claimed to be the "origin of the voice within." At the end of this self-imposed period, he quit using all psychoactive stimulants and claims to have "received" the songs that would appear on his first solo album.