Tapasya Loading

The culture around creativity increasingly trains everyone on everyone else's output, compressing references and narrowing the ground from which genuine distinction can emerge. The question, then, is not how to sound different for its own sake, but whether we're willing to let the contradictions and cross-pollinations of our actual lives shape what we create. Read the post Free Artist Training Coa...

There's a gap between what we can feel and what we can name; between sensing something and being able to articulate it to the world or even to ourselves.   Seen Heard Held releases 16th Oct 2026 on Warner Chappel Music. Pre-save the album Free Artist Training Coaching + courses

Official announcement of my upcoming 8th album 'Seen Heard Held' with thoughts on the why, how and what of it all.    Seen Heard Held releases 16th Oct 2026 on Warner Chappel Music.   Pre-save the album   Free Artist Training Coaching + courses  

Sheila Chandra returns to Tapasya Loading for her third appearance to discuss Echo, a collection of live recordings she describes as possibly her final album. Her first album as producer reunites her with Stuart Bruce , a collaboration dating back to Sheila’s Monsoon sessions in 1982 and continued through her Real World trilogy. For Echo, they worked as a team of two, communicating entirely via em...

With roughly a month to go before my eighth album comes out, I’m revisiting the work I’ve dedicated the past decade to, and what I was searching for through it. This is a look back at that search, and how my upcoming album, Seen Heard Held, aims to be the counterbalance to what Re_movement was.  The IG Carousel with photos. Free Artist Training Coaching + courses

Three weeks after a racial attack in Berlin, I move from shock and helplessness into anger, and sit with the discomfort of agreeing with what someone is fighting for without knowing if I could fight the same way. A solocast about racism, belonging, contradictory truths and what humanity means when even that word can be hijacked. -- More Relevant Links: My talks with Equity Coach Tayo Rockson My Ta...

The coaching industry has fractured into two distinct worlds: one grounded in genuine education and responsibility, another built on engineered dissatisfaction and circular profit models. Between them lies a dangerous gap where the language of transformation masks the machinery of extraction, and where the promise of accessibility obscures deliberately incomplete offerings. Read the article. Free...

Five years after her first appearance on Tapasya Loading, New York-based Dutch vocalist, composer, producer, educator and psychologist Vivienne Aerts returns as our first-ever guest to make a second reappearance. Her new album, Current, was created aboard a tiny wooden sailboat that Vivienne and her husband, Ted Steinebach, first bought during the pandemic. What began with a fascination for the ac...

What happens when you stop trying to force incompatible parts of yourself into a single coherent identity, and recognize that the relationship between those parts is the identity itself instead?  Read the article. Free Artist Training Coaching + courses

In an era when machines generate the appearance of creativity, understanding the difference is not sentimental.   Read the article. Free Artist Training Coaching + courses

The boundary between coaching and therapy has become impossibly blurred, particularly for independent artists navigating both creative ambition and psychological weight. Most distinctions you've heard collapse under scrutiny, revealing instead that what actually matters is scope, competence, purpose, and the specific geography in which support is being offered.  Here's my revised take in 2026 Read...

Why a Growth Mindset less about trying harder and more about loosening your grip on who you think you are.   Read the article. Free Artist Training Coaching + courses   Music and Audio Production:  www.everynowheremusic.com  

How the relentless pursuit of "likes" ended up reshaping art.    Read the article. Free Artist Training Coaching + courses

Self-loathing is a harsh word to acknowledge, but what it points to is real. And what it shows up as in our daily decisions are the buildings blocks of the pattern that threatens to pull us away from our own creative centre.    Brought to you by: https://holisticmusicianacademy.com/ https://safeandsound.studio/   Read the article. Free Artist Training Coaching + courses

I was a toddler when two women at a doorstep decided what I was worth. It took me decades to hear the lesson inside that deal. This one is about value decided, not discovered. About us waiting for circumstances to hand down a verdict that was never theirs to give. And about the harder half: receiving. Who taught you what you were worth? And have you been living by their estimate ever since?   Brou...

Why a manager, team, assistant, audience or patron might be useless to us until we understand this first.    Brought to you by: https://holisticmusicianacademy.com/ https://safeandsound.studio/     Read the article. Free Artist Training Coaching + courses    

Uday Benegal is the founding vocalist of Indus Creed (formerly Rock Machine), the Bombay band that  that arguably forced the rest of the world to acknowledge the existence of a culture that had always existed inside post-colonial India amidst the crossfire of an East and West not always as hypothetical as portrayed. Rock Music.  Indus Creed navigated a global music industry with no label, no budge...

Most creatives know that beliefs are holding them back. Some can articulate them, analyse them, even replace them with supposedly empowering alternatives. Yet the behaviour often remains unchanged, and the resistance stubbornly intact.    What comes up: Why "limiting belief" might be the inaccurate terminology  What self-sabotage is actually trying to do  The question I used to ask, and the one I...

The brain mistakes repetition for safety, comfort for understanding, and endurance for choice. This confusion runs deeper than personal relationships; it shapes entire careers, industries, and the inherited scripts we mistake for our own lives.  What comes up: Why the decisions that change your life rarely feel safe at the time Why the brain is a prediction machine, not a happiness machine Liking...

Saying no sounds simple. It isn't, and not for the reasons most people think. In this episode I unpack why the word itself was never really the problem, what's actually happening when we can't hold a line, and why the emotional aftermath of a boundary is harder than the boundary itself. Drawn from real situations — a collaboration that needed a hard conversation, a coaching relationship that got u...

There is an entire chapter of Indian music history that has shaped global music in unknown ways remains preserved only in the human memory of a select few.  Sandhya Sanjana is one of those humans. Long before "world music" became a marketing category, she was part of a generation of home-grown South-Asian artists blurring the edges of jazz, global and Indian classical music by a trial and error me...

In this episode, I unpack two economic philosophies that sound academic but are anything but. The gift economy and the transactional economy. What they actually mean, where they came from, why the gift economy keeps surfacing as an alternative to the chaos of how power and wealth get distributed and why, in the creative industries specifically, the romance of giving freely has been one of the most...

The fear of invisibility haunts nearly every one of us, especially creatives.  We're quick to blame the algorithm, the platform, the saturated market, and AI.    But what if the real source of that pain runs much deeper?   Rooted not in metrics, but in older wounds we're carrying? This piece traces the invisible thread between childhood experiences of being unseen and the desperate urgency many of...

In an era obsessed with relentless output, we often make the subtle but dangerous mistake of confusing our outward capabilities with our internal space. While modern hustle culture demands flashy performances, new skills, and louder opinions, the profound art of truly "holding space" is quietly slipping away from our daily lives.   Read the article. Free Artist Training Coaching + courses   Music...

What does “accessibility” really mean when the door looks open, but power still decides who gets in? Using the music world as a revealing lens, this episode discusses how current culture turns openness, authenticity, and even vulnerability into branding tools that can mask exclusion, exploitation, and control.  Read the article. Free Artist Training Coaching + courses   Music and Audio Production:...