Apni is the spell-weaving sonic persona of multimedia artist Surabhi Saraf—a porous being shaped by deep listening, longing, and echoes of ancestral time. Drawing from Hindustani classical roots expanded through experimental composition, she weaves voice, ambient textures and elemental noise into spell-songs that blur the line between incantation and performance. A quantum listener and a shaper of chaos, Apni offers meditations on desire, chaos, and becoming.
Her debut EP—Apni: a spell for many selves—is a four-part sonic ritual of becoming, where Apni unravels the idea of a fixed self and embraces transformation as an entangled, collective process between body, earth, and sound. She will make her live performance debut at Flow Festival 2025.
Apni was born out of Saraf's multimodal performances that have been shown at shown at SFMOMA, the Asian Art Museum, Crow Museum of Asian Art, the Blanton Museum, Thessaloniki Biennale, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and NETMAGE 10 among others.
ILLUMINEN EP
2013
ILLUMINEN is an account of Saraf’s early experiments in experimental sound, composition, and performance, encapsulating five years of practice leading up to its 2013 release. Rooted in her background in Indian classical music and visual art, the EP marked a turning point—where voice, movement, and electronic media began to merge into a more immersive, multidimensional form. This exploration laid the foundation for the mythic, sonic worlds that would later unfold through Apni.