Arushi Jain is a composer, vocalist, modular synthesist and engineer, whose 2024 album Delight, which was named one of the best albums of the week and month by Pitchfork, Fader, Guardian, was a document of her efforts to cultivate joy through intentionally, and search. Her 2021 album, Under The Lilac Sky, was hailed as an Experimental Album of the Year by Pitchfork and a Global Album of the Month in the Guardian. It took an evocative approach to the act of listening: how time of day influences the way a listener processes music. Since writing these records, she’s recently found her practice shifting. Jain is no longer interested in reaching static, arbitrary end states, and is being a musician, writer, and thinker as she makes art. This change in perspective, or “de-escalation” as she calls it,  has been necessary. “The shift is gradual. ” she says. “Soon I will have no one place to be”, she says with a childlike excitement. Her work is based on how it feels in her body: “I’m listening as I go,  with less of a predetermined idea of my sound” she says. “My ears will select.” 

When Jain made her first two projects, 2018's just a feeling and 2019's With & without, the natural sense of playfulness and unrestrained experimentation guided her compositions. Synthesis masters such as Terry Riley and Laurie Spiegel, Indian classical experiments like Sheila Chandra, Charanjeet Singh, and Shiv Kumar Sharma, designer of the avant garde drones such as Sarah Davachi, Kali Malone, and Coil,  compositional marvels of Kara Lis Coverdale and the eclectic world of Donato Dozzy, Autechre, Alva Noto, Kangding Ray, Actress, Aphex Twin all greatly impacted her. 

With her following releases, 2021's Under The Lilac Sky and 2024's Delight, she chose to hone her craft as an ambient experimental musician. “And now I'm coming out of a phase of sorts,” she says.  Jain is taking the approach she used at the start of her career, this time equipped with the skill and poise of a much more experienced artist.  “I wish to explore other sides of myself, and to return to the original curiosities and genre fluidity I felt as I was just beginning, focusing once again on any aesthetics I haven’t had a chance to experiment with for years.”  Though she’s been less focused on funneling her output to meet specific goal posts, Jain’s ethos of boundless curiosity has been creatively fruitful. “Everything lately,” she says about what kind of music she’s working on. “I’ve been singing, writing lyrics, playing energetic guitar riffs on my synth, writing breaks, experimenting with dubby downtempo, some gabber too.” While she’s not making much ambient music on its own at the moment, the genre’s sensibilities will always exist in the music she writes. “Writing ambient music taught me how to build a textural world, a process that has brought me closer to younger versions of myself”, she says.

Jain grew up in Delhi surrounded by lots of siblings and cousins, whom she describes as having “Von Trapp-y energy,” as they were always putting on performances for the adults around them. She, her mother, and her sisters also took Indian Classical singing lessons together. When she turned 18, Jain moved to Palo Alto to attend Stanford University, where she studied computer science. Her senior year of college, Jain discovered the university’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). She took a class called “Laptop Orchestra,” which introduced her to the world of sound synthesis. After graduating, she started working as a programmer and immersed herself in San Francisco’s underground dance scene. “I was unaware of the power of making music until this phase of my life,” she says. “I suddenly felt really committed to writing – I saw there was space for all cultures within electronic music, and for the creation of new cultures, third spaces, with the artform. My initial and deepest interests are in being free.”

She’s also inspired by her many learnings from years spent touring. Jain toured with Oneohtrix Point Never and with Glass Beams last year, and has played with synthesis pioneers like Suzanne Ciani (who headlined Hidden Notes in 2024), and in 2025 plays with Four Tet, Floating Points, and continues to tour her latest record. She played 30 live shows in 2024, which taught her she wants to sing more, utilize words in her compositions, employ choreographed dances in her live performances, and meet and learn from the audience. She learnt of her desire to separate in-studio and performance practices, as she realized that the former is about connection with the self while the latter is about communication with others. 

A sense of timelessness, of creating and existing outside of rigid external definition, is an extremely useful framework for an artist like Jain, who lives between New Delhi and New York City, and pulls inspiration from her time spent in both of these cities, as well as a formative decade  in the Bay Area. Her work draws as much from Indian classical music artists like Ustad Z.M. Dagar, Sharan Rani, Shiv Kumar Sharma and innovators such as Sheila Chandra, Terry Riley, Laurie Spiegel, Charanjit Singh as it does from artists like Kangding ray, Alva Noto, Donato Dozzy, Aphex twin, squarepusher, HTRK, Cocteau Twins, Mazzy Star, Coil, to name a few. Her music is less a form of “fusion” than it is an organic expression of taste.Her music is less a form of “fusion” than it is an organic expression of taste, that which she explores in depth on her monthly NTS Radio and Lot radio residencies. 2025 may well be her most free year yet…