The Republic of Discostan cannot be found on any map. It does not have a government, an official language, or citizenship requirements. Its borders transcend space and time. “Discostan is an idea, an imaginary nation that draws its identity from the old silk routes crossing from the Caucasus Mountains into Southeast Asia and expresses itself through the music of the region,” says Arshia Haq, who founded Discostan in 2011.
Discostan is now a monthly radio show on the global platform NTS that champions underground music, and a fledgling record label with a semi-regular performance space in Los Angeles, Delhi, Mumbai, Mexico City, Beirut and more. Its March 18 show in Los Angeles was a celebration of the Persian New Year, Nowruz, in collaboration with musicians such as Omid Walizadeh and Sahba Sizdahkani. The event was also a fundraiser to help communities in Turkey and Syria affected by the recent earthquake.
Earlier, it also played opening sets for Omar Souleyman, Bappi Lahiri, and a recent stop on Ali Sethi’s American tour in January. “From an early age,” says Haq, who moved from Hyderabad to the US when she was a child in the mid-1980s, “I had this deconstruction that happened for me in my own life, of what nationality am I? Which place am I a citizen of? There was a desire to create a fictional nationality that was based not on location, but on this sonic archive I had access to while growing up. There’s been an aspect of what Discostan does around mutual aid. It’s crucial for our project to think about how to return something where we’re sourcing from, otherwise it’s just extractive.”
Haq’s life and career reflects her trans-border approach. “Sound is one of the few things that you can’t really contain across a border,” says the Los Angeles-based artist. “In a time when borders are being reinforced and locked down more and more, to think about how sound and music is resistant to and free of those confines is important. You can name a song as belonging to a certain country, but the reality is the music has evolved from travelling across trade routes, across cultural alliances and differences.”
Regardless of the format or the location, Discostan’s core ethos remains the same—providing a space where music from the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region can be showcased. It aims to be a place where marginalised and often-overlooked communities can come together and, at least for those brief moments, feel like they’re home.
“It is important for these voices to be heard,” she says, adding, “As the idea of home becomes more elusive or more unattainable, I think these kinds of spaces of imagination, of imagining a different future or a different place become necessary, a reservoir of certain histories in a more amorphous form.”
Songs from the SWANA region are particularly rich with often forgotten or repressed histories. “In every song, there’s decades and maybe even centuries of history that come into where that melody is or where that song is today,” she says. “I’ve heard Bollywood songs being reinterpreted in Russian music, but then those melodies might have come from a Pashto folk song. When you listen to the music, all of those timelines are present, all those migrations are present. It’s one of the few ways we have to freely access each other across those borders.”
As Haq looks to the future, one way she hopes to expand on the musical archive is through the Discostan record label, which she co-runs with creative partner Jeremy Loudenback. The label reissued a 1984 Urdu-language synth pop album by the Pakistani-British siblings Nermin Niazi and Feisel Mosleh in 2021.
“The idea is not just to do reissues,” Haq says, adding, “We also want to feature contemporary musicians. Nostalgia is so alluring and definitely a place of entry for many people, but to only focus on the past does a disservice to a lot of music at the present moment, especially from places that might be in the news for a lot of other reasons.”
“In a time when borders are being reinforced, to think about how sound and music is resistant to and free of those confines is important.” Arshia Haq