You almost squint from the lightbulbs circling tanvi everywhere’s head.
Tucked beneath a hidden dragon tree off the M line, she pulls from her canvas bag a half-dozen books, three journals, fidget knickknacks, backup gem rings, and blueprints for a future she approves of. It’s all here: lyrics, textile experiments, lighting references, zine schemes, and set concepts to accompany her Ableton brainblasting.
The Delhi-born, Bay-raised artist makes something along the lines of graveyard rave music. Glitched breakbeats, dressed in Victorian black, fuse with adhesive pop writing to summon the underground from the dirt, onto the dance floor. Contortionist vocals mesh with boomerang percussion on “Down n Out.” Whispered lyrics of absence crackle like a locust storm on “Gauzz.” In just a few years of making music, she’s put an earcatching foot forward, and it’s exciting to think about the steps that’ll follow.
Tanvi chatted with us about microsounds, DJ prophecies, her debut EPs, her first sets for Elsewhere and NTS, plus hunting for swords in London. This is Tanvi’s first-ever sit-down interview and we’re grateful to help share her story. To everyone out there: thank you for reading, watching, listening, supporting :)
tanvi everywhere gets paid the moment you buy her music on Catalog.
Tanvi: I’ve never been interviewed in my life.
Siber: It’s just yapping! We’ll start easy.
Tanvi: Easy?! Is this about to become a Socratic seminar?
Siber: Question one. [Laughs] What’s the origin of the “everywhere” in Tanvi Everywhere?
Tanvi: My inability to sit still and stay in one place. I can’t commit to making someplace home. When I was in Boston for school, I never signed a lease or did long-term student housing. Just three-month sublets back to back, all four years. What if I want to leave? I almost dropped out 10 times. I like to know I can go. It’s a matter of freedom for me. Leases feel like the opposite. So, I’m everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
Not having Instagram for a while, before making a new account for music, contributed to that feeling of being unbound. My name was just TANVI, all uppercase. Then I was like, “Why am I screaming at myself?”
Siber: Where do you land on the scatterbrain spectrum?? Are you speed-running 10 Ableton projects at once or focusing on one at a time?
Tanvi: There’s a lot going on. I have at least a handful of projects because I can’t work on the same song all day. When I get sick of one, I need another, and I’ll make a new beat, and a new beat, and a new beat. When a song really needs to get done, I can sit and focus on vocals for a few hours, but I’m not like other people I know who can work on one track in a studio for 12 hours. At that point, I’m just not hearing the song anymore. [Laughs] Having a body of work is a goal of mine, too, which takes a lot of music.
Siber: I have memories of high school sleepovers when my best friends and I would stay up working on music. I’d think I had a real good idea at 2 a.m., fall asleep, and wake up to realize I was fully hallucinating. At what point do your eardrums start malfunctioning? How many audio tracks deep are these projects?
Tanvi: I’d say after four hours of the same song coming out of my monitors, I’m good, it’s time to stop. I usually have a lot of tracks because I’ll toy with different effects and glitches and it adds up. But I was listening to Smerz, and I can hear there aren’t that many tracks in a song, and it still hits. Making a small handful of tracks sound complete is harder than what I usually do.
My goal with "Say You Want Me" was to use as few as I could, which meant 20 to 30. Another song of mine, [redacted], has way more. And almost every sound is constructed out of [redacted]’s voice. Granulated to shambles. Will that get me in trouble…
Siber: We’ll be redacting some of that, for sure. [Laughs] If it’s manipulated beyond recognition, you cleared the bar, I think. I already forgot who you granulated. That approach guided your NTS mix too.
Tanvi: For the NTS mix, the prompt was specialization. Focusing on a microgenre you feel like you know better than anyone. I chose granular synthesis because it's my favorite production technique. It takes tiny snippets of sounds and overlays them with repetitions at different pitches. You can modulate a lot, manipulate which sample layers get used.
NTS was a dream, even if it was just a supporter mix. We’re getting there. I rabbitholed through specialized granular synthesis forums, synthesizer research from universities, a book about synth music in India… I included one girl I know, JEWELSSEA, who makes amazing music. The show is called Microsound. On N…
Siber: T…
Tanvi: S…
Siber: Do you preserve all your ideas, or do you kill your saplings as you make progress on a song?
Tanvi: There are so many tracks I have in there that are turned off. Different ideas, muted forever. Especially on my second EP. Because what if I want to go back? What if an idea could be perfect somewhere else?
Siber: Do you ever go back to them?
Tanvi: No. [Laughs]
Siber: Me and my 50,000 photos…
Tanvi: I was working with someone not too long ago. I suggested, like, “Maybe remove this part,” and they just deleted it. I never delete. Let me duplicate it, mute it, store it as a reference. I save everything. They cut that take right out. It was kind of inspiring... make art, destroy art, feel free. Meanwhile, I’ll have muted ideas in multiple versions of one song.
Siber: Would you know where to look at least, if you did get drawn back to an idea?
Tanvi: No. [Laughs] It’s a hot mess. But I do delete all the unused tracks in the final version of a song.
Siber: I wonder if Smerz’s project files are as clean as the music sounds.
Tanvi: In my DJ set at Trans-Pecos, I played one of the Smerz songs with no drums, just singing. Like, pure opera and a bunch of claps. I maxed the echo on the controller and blared it out, having the time of my life. Smerz don’t really promote themselves, but they use their email list. That’s still underrated. I check my email almost as much as I check Instagram.
Siber: You have to check it, or else you might miss Smerz merch. Or, you know, a hospital bill. Maybe a credit check alert. At your Elsewhere set, you dedicated a chunk to cumbia…
Tanvi: I brought the BPM down by 20 or 30 and shifted the genre completely, moving from house into cumbia. I’ve been to the seamless DJ sets that take you on a journey, put you in a trance. And then you have the “what the hell is going on”, all-over-the-place, muddied sets. I love both. I did the latter. [Laughs] House to cumbia to house to reggae to dub to jungle/DnB. Had some Eartheater in there… I’d look out at the crowd, and they seemed into it. I don’t know, maybe everyone was like, “Wow, such a normal set.”
Siber: I’d pay to witness “Spilled the Milk” turn Elsewhere into a séance. We’re talking about some of your first sets ever. How much time had you spent at that venue as a listener?
Tanvi: Elsewhere was the first club I ever went to in New York, back when I was 21, just visiting the city. Before I ever even made a beat. My friend and I stumbled in and saw the decks, and I pretended to spin as a joke, talking about how “I’ll be a DJ one day!” I was a computer science student. And loving it! [Laughs]
Siber: Was it a ghost town in there, or did you just confidently walk up to the decks in full swing?
Tanvi: There were people everywhere but that room. It must have been the Loft. We didn’t even go clubbing! After that, we walked to the roof, then left. So fast forward to now, it couldn’t have felt more full circle when they reached out asking me to DJ. It was a two-and-a-half-hour set, which was my longest. It’s been my dream to play cumbia and reggae in the club since I was 15.
Siber: Do you remember how you crossed paths with those genres
Tanvi: It was CDs and YouTube. I’d go to record stores and, honestly, judge the cover art, which led to a lot of great music. Those were my most prized possessions. I was big into SoundCloud, but that was mostly lofi and electronic music for me. XXYYXX, The xx. I was obsessssed with Whoarei and Saito and nosaj thing and saib and knife girl. Reggae came at the end of high school. I was in the world music section a lot, learning about psychedelic rock from Singapore and Malaysia. A lot of that stuff just isn’t on the internet.
Siber: The world music section… infinite portal, insane genre name. Did you have an emo phase?
Tanvi: I don’t think so. Well, I was emo, but I didn’t look emo. Well… I was wearing all black. [Laughs] But I wasn’t listening to emo music. It was lots of indie rock. The Growlers and Mystic Braves. I was going to lots of shows on my own because I was so shy. I had, like, two friends for most of my life until after college. I took the Caltrain an hour north to San Francisco for concerts. Most nights, the Cal stops running at midnight, and most nights, bands don’t go on until midnight, so I’d just see the opener, then go home.
Siber: Honestly, brave of you? Solo-running that train trek night after night. Spending so much time in the crowd, did you ever feel pulled by the stage? A preview of your first visit to Elsewhere?
Tanvi: I had to leave before a headliner started their set, and I really loved them at the time. I think it was Acid Dad playing at Rickshaw Stop in SF. I burst onto the stage while they were preparing so I could apologize to them for leaving early. They were so nice. I remember looking out at the crowd. It was probably only 20, 30 people in the room, and I did have this feeling of, I want to be up here. But it wasn’t…
Siber: It wasn’t quite that “I need to make music” awakening.
Tanvi: Not yet. This was in 10th or 11th grade. The band I missed was going down to SoCal for their next show, and I was like, “Oh my god! If you need a place to crash, my house is on the way!” [Laughs] We traded contact info. They texted at like 4 AM to tell me they decided to drive through the night. High school me was just elated to get a text from this band. Despite my shyness, I did love public speaking back then. The issue was when I got offstage. I’m a lot more confident now…
Siber: Acid Dad’s alternative rock In your music you’ve released so far, the influence of those electronic discoveries on SoundCloud feels more in the foreground, I think.
Tanvi: When I started making music, I did less digging and listening, more making bleep bloop stuff. Lots of bleeps and bloops on my laptop. Just making noise all day long. When I first started, I also wanted it to feel raw and pure, so I tried to remove as many external influences as I could. I just wanted to create the culmination of what I had loved up to that point in my life. When I started producing, I refused to watch a YouTube tutorial, even though I didn’t even know things happened in four bars. I got a free trial of Ableton and insisted on fucking around.
Siber: You honored the beginner’s mindset. I also appreciate that even as you withdrew from fresh influences, you still accepted your life had a soundtrack so far. A true experiment of before and after. Versus claiming 100% isolation from any and all music ever. Did that approach ever change?
Tanvi: Oh yes, it did. [Laughs] That lasted about four months. I wanted to get really good, and, in my head, starting to make music at 22, I felt very late. I didn’t know anyone in the arts, and I didn’t know how to change that. So I literally Googled, How to learn electronic music the best way. This one-year LA production school popped up. They’d market a bunch of big-name electronic musicians who went through the program, though they didn’t really make styles of music that appealed to me…
Siber: …mostly pop dubstep, EDM?
Tanvi: Very much that. But through a friend of a friend, I was able to talk to one person who went there, and he raved about it. I decided to apply, but they required three songs, and I had never made one with any structure. So then I searched learn music theory fast on YouTube, watched a 15-minute video, and started getting ads from that account. One of them was like: “WANNA LEARN PRODUCTION?!? JOIN MY ONE-MONTH CLASS AND YOU’LL LEAVE WITH THREE SONGS.”
Siber: [Laughs] Alright, so you got served some divine algo-intervention. How much was the YouTube class?
Tanvi: 50 bucks. It was perfect timing. I made the three songs, submitted them to that school, the interview went well, and I ended up attending. Everyone was making dubstep, which honestly taught me a lot about sound design, which is my favorite thing to do in Ableton. It helped me learn that tool inside out. My first few months using it, before the class and school, I assumed everything I was making was terrible. But looking back…
Siber: Kinda sick?
Tanvi: Kinda sick!
Siber: Are those first steps you took archived anywhere?
Tanvi: I honestly barely saved any of it because I had the free version of Ableton, so I couldn’t store or export anything. I didn’t even think twice about that at the time. I was like, Obviously I won’t be making anything worth keeping. The three songs I made for the YouTube class are probably my earliest exports.
Siber: Classroom dubstep aside, were you still maintaining that force field against new music?
Tanvi: I was. Well, even driving around LA in silence is a nonstop auditory experience. It was the opposite of when I had a college radio show when digging was constant. Now that I’m DJ’ing, I’ve gotten back into it. Years after starting, I kind of feel just as lost as I did the first day I tried, just with more tools, a better ear. I’m still fucking around every day. Ableton’s infinite. Plugins make it more infinite.
Siber: I feel like there’s a range of stigmas around ‘music school,’ whether or not they’re always true or felt by everyone. The wealth of a typical Berklee student, the creative ‘impurity’ of YouTube courses…
Tanvi: It was honestly hard for me to take that path at first. I felt very anti-teaching art, and I grappled with that a lot at school. I think it’s a gift when people don’t know anything, and a lot of the rules, including the four-bars thing… you don’t have to do that! But ultimately, I decided it was better, for me, to know what was what, and then decide whether I want to follow the knowledge or ignore it.
Siber: Can you trace that initial rebel streak back to something?
Tanvi: For most of my life, I genuinely didn’t think it was possible to do art unless you were Beyoncé or born into it. Then I found that book The Artist’s Way, read the first page, and was like, “Oh, maybe I can.” And I became really committed to the idea that you can know nothing, know no one, and still figure music out. Turns out, a whole lot of music people have no idea what they’re doing. I just didn’t realize that. [Laughs] You just need a good ear. Loving to listen so much helped a lot. My mom would dance and sing at home. She played lots of Bollywood, Indian classical. My dad played AC/DC. [Laughs] Pop radio, too.
Siber: As much as you say you didn’t know about making music, you entered that school environment knowing more than just the ‘correct’ Western standards. I wonder if that helped you discard certain rules?
Tanvi: I think about that a lot. Even Ableton’s default is set up for the Western scale. But I’m still ignorant of so much. I just make sounds. When I’m making music, there’s zero thought. What’s crazy is that sometimes I’ll play unreleased music for my mom, and she’ll tell me she hears a Bollywood influence, which shocks me. My parents like my music when I tone down the glitch. They want vibes. They got exposed to electronic music when I was getting into it in high school, so now when I go home, they’re playing deep house. My dad was like, “All that noise you have on top of your beat… is there an audience for that?”
Siber: We love our CMO dads. What steps did you take between music school and your first EP, 01100001?
Tanvi: It came in bits. “Gauzz,” off that EP, was the first song I ever released. At the time, I barely knew what a distributor was. That was in March of 2023, and “Mine” didn’t come out until that November. The whole period in between, I was doubting whether I could release music. It felt intense. Out in LA, I emailed my music to a bunch of labels I liked, but talking to most people just led to overthinking, and I’m a feelings person. Rollouts and presaves and this and that. I just want to make random shit and put it out. [laughs] People were like, “Well, you can’t do that,” and so I just stopped everything.
Siber: What got you unstuck?
Tanvi: I left the U.S. and went to London, where I ended up working on a music video, before moving very impulsively to New York. I felt free. Few friends, a blank slate. I could eat pizza… I wanted to get back into it. I just DM’d a girl with art I liked on Instagram and we made a music video for “Mine,” and I decided to package these songs as an EP. Started to hit visual artists. There were no managers talking to me. I stopped responding to the label. I did whatever I felt like. I was working my software engineering job and I felt connected to computer science, which led to the title of that project. It means "u and I.”
Siber: That's the meaning of your first EP, in binary. And then the second, 01111101, translates to "you or i." What's that shift signify?
Tanvi: The two EPs go hand in hand and are opposite sides of the same coin in my head. The period of making both encompassed the entire course of my last relationship where we started together and got pulled apart. Everything started so strong and beautiful hence the "u and i," but I feel like I have a tendency to run away and self-sabotage and towards the end of making the songs it felt like there could only be "u or i." They are like the a and b sides, the light and the dark. I can't decipher were EP1 ends and EP2 begins. I love the moment in "Three Zero Three" from 1:28 to 2:20 when the bpm slows down, I think from 152 to 130. It feels like I'm in limbo but it's warm but still so sorrowful and everything's falling apart but maybe everything’s coming together.
Siber: So you're translating the rise and fall of a relationship as it happens, in the form of your first songs, and sharing them with strangers. Did those early industry brushes offer anything worthwhile?
Tanvi: I will say that up to that point, no one had really ever heard my music, and it gave me some confidence to see people fucking with it. I didn’t consider myself an artist or musician until that. I felt like that helped me say, “I make music,” when people asked me what I did.
Siber: I think sometimes, earlier in artists’ careers, that external validation can become a honeytrap, but you took that feedback and walked away. Flew away to London, actually. What’s funny is that doing what you wanted to do, filming a music video across the Atlantic for “Kisses to Fame," probably aligned with what those labels wanted to see from you. How did that project materialize?
Tanvi: I had found this guy, Delphino Productions, probably through the work he had done with Nia Archives, and I loved everything he did. I sent him a DM appreciating his work, he said “Thank you,” and I was like, “Sooo where are you located?” [Laughs] He was in London, so I said, “Okay, maybe one day…” When my LA lease ended a few months later, I got a one-way ticket there, crashed on my friend’s couch, and sent him another message telling him I was in the city. He was down to meet up. I didn’t have an international sim so I think I memorized the map route. We really hit it off and he was down to work.
Siber: WiFi hopping to your first music video.
Tanvi: Fully offline on public transit. I was so excited, but I had also never been in front of the camera like that, and I was really shy at the time, without a very strong visual library or vocabulary. He was like, “What’s your idea?” I was like, “…What’s yours!” He was like, “What song?” I was like, “…What do you think!” [Laughs] So we freestyled it. At first, I really wanted a sword in it. My uncle lives in London, and his partner teaches chess. One of her students mentioned owning a sword, so she recommended hitting this guy up. I met him in central London for the sword, then went back to Delphino in Uxbridge, the last stop.
Siber: I somehow missed this sword in the video…
Tanvi: You didn’t! After all of that, we didn’t use it. Despite the nerves, it was really fun, just running around filming random shit.
Siber: It’s surprising, honestly, to hear how uncertain you felt about the visual direction, because all the imagery you’ve shared so far has felt really coherent.
Tanvi: I knew what I liked, the type of location, but it was subconscious. Delphino had an idea to film printed photos of me beneath water, with wisps of dye, along with clips of little sea critters.
Siber: At the start, it’s like you’re buried in quicksand.
Tanvi: We just bounced thoughts off each other in real time, and he’d bring these crazy ideas that sounded great to me. I wanted it to be something he really enjoyed and felt proud of. We filmed it together in a day, then it took us eight months after I left London to finish the edit. Delphino deserves more flowers.
Siber: Did you approach the video for Mine on the fly too, or did you conceptualize that before the production? I love the typography in that one, it’s like an embroidered screen.
Tanvi: Delphino did the effects for that one! Me and Kelli, the girl who shot it, edited together. I knew I wanted to shoot Mine in my room, I knew the outfit, and I knew I wanted slime. And Kelli had a huge tub of slime. [Laughs]
Siber: What’s the term ‘pop music’ mean to you?
Tanvi: Anything catchy. Maybe the pre-chorus-chorus-bridge structure. If someone called my music pop, I’d be kinda surprised, but pop also encompasses so much. I feel like there’s a lot of experimental production in pop now. I almost never think about genres, though. It feels pointless to me. What’s experimental or pop to one person isn’t to another. I don’t care! Words feel pointless.
Siber: Does that include your lyrics?
Tanvi: It’s so hard for me. Sometimes I feel like my lyrics are hella basic. But they serve a purpose. They’re meant to be sung along to. I’m not an intellectual.
Siber: What’s interesting to me about your lyrics is that almost all of them seem to deal with absence.
Tanvi: We’re all lonely people. We all know nothing.
tanvi everywhere gets paid the moment you buy her music on Catalog.
