hree years and more than 60 shows later with a truly diverse list of artists, Salt Arts, a music and arts production company based in Karachi, is slowly breaking long-formed trends that were never good for the industry.
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Having sold out tickets to their first live show in the New Year featuring Zoe Viccaji in just 18 hours, Salt Arts has, with time, changed industry dynamics. Even more promising is their #futureisfemale programming for the year 2019. Instep learns more…
Three years and more than 60 shows later with a truly diverse list of artists, Salt Arts, a music and arts production company based in Karachi, is slowly breaking long-formed trends that were never good for the industry.
One such trend is tickets over invites. For a long time, people have expected free invites to concerts. Other live shows go through the same thing, more often than not. It hurts the artist and those who put up the show.
But Salt Arts began their journey with the premise of audience development, collaboration and respecting artists. If it’s a Salt Soiree show, which is intimate in nature and held in a closed space, it can accommodate a small audience for a reason. The audience advisory, for instance, about the number of seats available is not a gimmick. As for the show itself, as Salt Arts team explained to Instep, the music at Soiree events is such that it allows artists to experiment with their set and sound, something they cannot always pull off at major gigs.
For those upset about not getting tickets, the trick is to buy them the minute Salt Arts makes a post on social media about an upcoming show. As Salt Arts told Instep, there are more shows in the pipeline and they hope to accommodate listeners in future days, weeks and months ahead. Hope is alive.
Why are Salt Arts shows suddenly gaining so much traction, you must be wondering. It took me time but having attended a series of their shows and spoken to the team as well as artists who have played with them, the answer finally emerged.
It’s the Salt Arts aesthetics that go into each show that have started mattering to people. It’s the value they place on design and how to connect it to the narrative of the artist that has given their shows such a beautiful reputation. It is their belief in Karachi as a hub of Southasian music. People are learning to spend good money for good music minus terrible branding that is part and parcel of nearly every major gig.
Salt Arts has, since starting out, always placed a high premium on audience development and given the sprawling city Karachi is, this very idea is now working as more and more people have become interested in attending a Salt Arts show.
Now to their first show in 2019 is with singer-songwriter Zoe Viccaji; they first collaborated approximately three years ago “for the #bringingdiscoback campaign and her global release of disco-funk inspired track ‘Jaanay Do Zara‘” which was produced by the very talented Mubashir Admani. In the upcoming show, Zoe Viccaji will be joined by Ajay Wilson, Shane Kerr, Joshua Keyth Benjamin and Abid Wilson.
Apart from announcing that something else is also coming up soon, Salt Arts noted on their Instagram page: “Join us as Zoe leads us into the #futureisfemale programming of 2019. We are a women led team, and this year we aim to engage with more women artistes, collaborators and audiences.”
Speaking to Instep, the Salt Arts team, who have onboard Chapter 2 as “art enablers” and strong season partners, notes that this year their ethos, like every year, is on two things that will remain a part of the overall design: a) be more eco-friendly and b) collaborating with women musicians, artists, designers, writers, photographers etc to create a more gender-balanced creative community.
– Photography by Sitwat Rizvi, assisted by Hamna HaqqiCourtesy: Salt Arts
