Chandra Shukla (born Vivek Chandra Shukla, 1975, Alameda, California) is an experimental composer, sound artist, and interdisciplinary practitioner working at the thresholds of minimalism, drone, ritual performance, and transgressive media. His work operates in liminal zones—where devotional practice collides with signal processing, where sacred repetition dissolves into noise architecture, and where performance becomes both invocation and deconstruction.

Formally trained in Indian classical music from an early age, Shukla studied tabla under Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri and sitar with Pandit Habib Khan. This rigorous grounding in rhythm cycles and raga systems remains a structural undercurrent in his work, even as it mutates into electro-acoustic abstraction. Rather than preserving tradition, Shukla destabilizes it—stretching tala into durational drone, recontextualizing tonal systems within modular synthesis, and treating classical form as raw psychic material.

At 17, Shukla entered the orbit of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, performing with Psychic TV during a formative four-year period that immersed him in industrial ritual, occult aesthetics, and radical performance praxis. In 1998, he joined the first incarnation of Thee Majesty on stage in Stockholm, collaborating alongside members of Master Musicians of Jajouka—a convergence of North African trance tradition, spoken incantation, and electronic sampling that foreshadowed his lifelong engagement with cross-cultural sonic rupture.

Shukla has since operated as both catalyst and conduit across a wide spectrum of experimental music. He has performed within Steven Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound live extension Scribble Seven, toured internationally with cluster co-founder Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and collaborated with projects such as This Wilderness and die Angel. Across these contexts, his presence is less that of a session musician and more that of a destabilizing element—introducing electro-acoustic textures, percussive minimalism, and visual abstraction into already volatile environments.

In 2021, Shukla and Carl Michael von Hausswolff debuted Travelogue on Touch, a work of stark atmospheric tension and spatial dislocation—an austere meditation on transmission, geography, and psychic residue.

His primary vehicle, Xambuca, is an evolving electro-acoustic entity merging live signal manipulation, ritual percussion, projected image, and durational drone. More than a band, Xambuca functions as a mutable performance organism—each iteration incorporating rotating collaborators and site-responsive visual architecture. Performances blur installation and concert, often unfolding as immersive environments rather than traditional stage presentations.

Shukla also runs the independent imprint Erototox Decodings, a platform for exploratory sound work and limited-edition transmissions operating outside commercial frameworks.

Formerly based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brooklyn, Shukla now works from Asheville, North Carolina—continuing to construct austere sonic environments that challenge genre containment and resist easy categorization. His practice remains committed to minimal structures, ambient density, drone extremity, and the transgressive potential of sound as both psychic excavation and spatial intervention.

XAMBUCA – カムィ

Travelogue – Nepal

Whalewiper & XAMBUCA – Sisiliskopäiväkirjat

XAMBUCA – Joulupukki

Chandra Shukla – Äkäsh