Latch Explores: British Asian Identity in the Music Industry with Hilang Child

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Written By Hannah Thacker
 

We’re continuing our exploration of British Asian identity in the music industry with Ed Riman, a musician who records and performs under the moniker Hilang Child.

This investigation was sparked by the launch of our companion record label, Bad Key, a platform for British Asian creativity. As the label’s manager Alex Treharne shares, “I started Bad Key in order to platform contemporary sounds from artists across the Asian diaspora in the UK. I want to show that the audience for Asian artists isn’t limited and that you can have multiple Asian artists on your roster without compromising on opportunity. I’m also really passionate when it comes to international audiences, fans are incredibly valuable regardless of their location and yet Asian audiences have been viewed as ‘other’ traditionally in the West. I grew up with a genetic connection to both the UK and Malaysia, and I want to explore that culture blend in all its beauty and complexity through Bad Key.”

In the interview below, Ed Riman touches on some of the issues raised in the first installment of this interview series, such as how the broad-strokes approach to diversity completely misses the mark and how the music industry as a whole doesn’t truly reflect the makeup of the British population. As Riman discusses, British Asians are especially left out of indie spaces and if you try to do any research into Asian representation in this corner of the music industry you’ll be disappointed as it quite simply doesn’t exist.

While there have been some efforts to bridge this gap, such as with the Arts Council funded Decolonise Festival, which showcases the burgeoning resurgence of POC guitar bands, or as the festival organisers themselves say “created by and for punx of colour”. It’s apparent that there’s clearly a systematic and deeply entrenched idea that indie music is white, but as Darren Louciades reports for The Guardian, “British guitar music wasn’t always so white”. Decolonise Festival’s organizer and current writer for Gal-dem Magazine June Bellebono furthers this by stating the fact that “Bands with people of colour have always existed and lots of them have been successful.” This attitude is a stark contrast to just a decade ago when 2008’s Love Music Hate Racism festival at London’s Victoria Park at which only one British Asian musician, namely Jay Sean, was on the line-up. You might be wondering, “surely we’ve come so far?”, but let’s challenge that assumption with the much maligned Reading & Leeds Festival line-up, often the topic of men-only band redaction to make a point about the lack of gender equality amongst performing artists. Despite much of the well-deserved criticism in recent years, Reading & Leeds is still considered a cornerstone of the indie music scene and yet this year many shared their disappointment at the fact that representation of women (as you can read about at Indie Is Not A Genre) is still falling far behind that of the global population. As it’s technically an international festival, we’re looking here at Asian identity as a whole rather than specifically British Asian, and even with that discretion you’ll only find Beabadoobee and Bloxx guitarist Taz Sidhu, with MCs Central Cee and Mastermind tracing some of their heritage to the Asian continent, and special mention for the American import Michael Sue-Poi, bassist for Nation of Language. Once again this mainstream okay-ing of white, cis-gender, heterosexual men as the majoriy party in music (and especially indie music) rears its ugly head and it’s as tiresome as ever.

All this considered, you can totally understand Ed Riman’s frustration as an indie artist in a space that quite simply isn’t doing enough to change.

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Tell us about yourself and your role in the music industry.

 I’m Ed Riman, a musician from South London now living in Brighton. I principally write and record under the moniker Hilang Child, with which my latest album has just come out on Bella Union Records (in January 2021). I also variously tour as a drummer with other acts and have worked on a few soundtracks and production bits. For context with regards to this article, I'm mixed-race British and Asian (half-Indonesian, half-Welsh).

What do you think about the representation of British Asian people in the music industry right now?

 It’s a cold hard fact that compared with the actual level of diversity within UK society, the indie music world is overwhelmingly white, not just in terms of the the music and musicians who break through, but also in terms of behind-the-scenes decision makers, the journalists, the gatekeepers, people in positions of power within the industry. And those peoples’ personal preferences then naturally have a trickle down effect on what is given a platform. I sometimes wonder if I just haven’t looked in the right places, but then even the fact I’m having that thought tells me something’s wrong if from the get-go one has to actively scour to find what should be a more accurate representation of society’s diversity within music. I do think that’s changing and obviously there are exceptions, you do have artists like Rina Sawayama and Nabihah Iqbal breaking through recently and I have a few non-white friends working in great roles the industry. But if you look at the rosters of many of the main indie labels, or the lineups of many music festivals in the ‘indie music’ world, or the list of DJs on lots of the indie music stations, the level of general POC representation is often still tiny, let alone British-Asians, compared to the percentage of the population which is made up of people of colour. Many of these people are well meaning and a lot of the time they don’t realise the role they’re playing in it, it’s an unconscious one, but the results are there to see.

Also on a related note, whilst I’m personally proud to wear my heritage on my chest, I’ve noticed there’s sometimes this weird expectation that everything you do has to be defined by it... I recently saw a review for my new album which literally marked me down for not 'making more use' of my ethnic heritage in my music, as if having one Asian parent means I have a duty to bring something mysteriously foreign to proceedings. Some British-Asian musician friends of mine regularly put up with this too, we often share these pieces and reviews with each other when they come in and it’s mad how often it happens.

Which platforms do you think are doing a great job at highlighting British Asians in contemporary music culture? 

My pal Helen Ganya Brown (a.k.a. fellow Bella Union artist Dog In The Snow) has a great radio show called Mixed Tapes where she spotlights music from people of colour in general in the indie music world, she’s doing a great thing and has probably been my main source of discovery recently!

 
Hannah Thacker
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