Like laying out in the sun for too long or taking expired prescription painkillers, the music of Koushik will leave you genially woozy, spacing out to questions you never took the time to consider: how did a patch of lotuses mysteriously take root in Echo Park’s manmade lake? What are the reproductive habits of jellyfish? Have I ever met anybody who traveled back through time from the future? It is a wonderful state of mind to be in.
Out on Stones Throw, Be With is a compilation of Koushik’s three vinyl-only EPs where psychedelic hip-hop beats are matched with Koushik’s own easy, muffled singing voice.
Biographically speaking, Koushik Ghosh is the 27 year-old son of two Indian immigrants who settled in Dundas, Ontario, a town just outside of Toronto. He is also the younger brother of Himadri Ghosh, a techno producer best known by his alias Teste. Currently Koushik lives in Burlington, where just over a year ago he completed master degrees in both ethnomusicology and biostatistics at the University Of Vermont.
As for further insight into who Koushik is, he isn’t much of a help. Like all Stones Throw artists, this dude barely talks. The two best quotes I got from him were “Madlib is my hero pretty much” and “I’m so unhip to everything new right now except hip-hop.”
Thankfully for everybody, there is the music and that’s where I believe the answers probably exist, if you listen deep enough. There’s a lot to be unsure of these days–from making rent to thermonuclear war–and I’ll admit that I can get pretty shook. On one particularly bad night I reached for the headphones to listen to some Koushik. As I fell asleep I heard these lyrics: “Pretty soon I’ll be ready to die mumble mumble mumble mumble know why, but I will be happier with you.” I hoped that somewhere inside the undecipherable was a promise that everything is going to work out, somehow.