Keralanka – embracing the beauty of everything going wrong (Shortened Version)
Embracing your quirks – the things that make you stand out – and being open to the unexpected, is something that captures the very essence of Toronto-based hip-hop duo Keralanka. In this interview they talk about embracing their identities, everything going wrong, what defined their childhoods and the catalyst which triggered them to lunge towards their dreams.
(This version is a harshly cut down version of the original article, skipping a lot of interesting stuff. I’d recommend reading the full in-depth article here: Aspekt.nu)
Keralanka is a hip-hop duo that know plenty about embracing aspects of yourself. While based in Toronto, Canada, the name stems from totally different roots — the name Keralanka is a combination of their places of origin — the Indian State of Kerala and Sri Lanka. Plenty of their content embodies different aspects of their lived experiences, some reflecting their racial identity. While being proud of, and cherishing their racial identity, they’re striving towards representation far away from filling quotas or being tokenized. With the slogan “Corny as fuck, but the music bangs!” they clearly also embrace something most find negative, especially in hip-hop.
Keralanka consists of Rohan (rapper, producer) and djAP (producer, engineer).
Rohan Raj
Rohan was eight years old when he immigrated from India to Canada. He’s dabbled in a lot of things, from rapping during his teens, being involved in online communities, to marketing and entrepreneurial endeavors. While growing up and trying to figure out his identity, hip-hop was something he found especially intriguing. One of his biggest influences as a rapper is Kendrick Lamar.
Apiram “djAP” Kamalakanthan
djAP has a background in DJing. Discovering videos of music producer Ryan Leslie working in the studio sparked AP’s dream of music creation. He started DJing around 2014, which eventually led to producing. Some of his influences as a producer are Pharrell Williams of The Neptunes, Timbaland, A.R. Rahman, Kanye West, and Diplo.
Q: What’s one of your favorite childhood memories?
Rohan: Because I was an immigrant kid who didn’t really dive into making many friends, initially. In real life, I struggled to make a lot of friends. I sort of resorted to online communities, anime, books and that kind of stuff, you know. Like other universes, fictional universes.
I realize that’s like a core theme of what really defined me as a kid, realizing the power of stories and how stories can really affect you. Even if you are sort of alone and struggling internally, being brought into another world can help you cope with that, and really help expand your perspective. So you know, watching Dragon Ball Z as a kid, Yu-Gi-Oh!, reading Harry Potter … I think I really grew an appreciation for the arts, and overall just authors, writers, musicians, who are able to create a universe to bring you into.
Q: How did the decision to become a full-time artist come about? Being quite the risky move, was it tough?
AP: I was weighing out everything I wanted to do. I was like, “What seems like the riskiest thing to do?” Out of all my goals, this was the riskiest one to me. The reason I looked at it like that – “I’m in my twenties. Compared to the future, this is probably when I’m going to have the least amount of responsibilities.
I was like, “If I don’t do this now, it’s gonna be even harder, later on.” Sure, I could do it later on … But another part of me went, “If I can do this …” I have this mindset of, “it might not pay off in the short term, but I know it’s gonna pay off in the long term.”
For me it was that thought, “Okay. If I can do this now, that just proves to me my process again” [referring to trusting his music making process]. It comes down to me just trusting my process, my intuition, and trusting it to the point where I feel something is right. I’m gonna look at my other goals and be like; “If I could do the thing that I thought was the riskiest, scariest thing …” Then I’m gonna look at everything else and be like, “It’s not gonna be a piece of cake, but it’s gonna be easier to not let the fears take over. Cause I’ve done this thing, that I considered the riskiest thing at one point in my life.” Just that thought is kinda what led me down this path.
Q: Where do you see yourself at 70 years old?
Rohan: We’ll have like very reflective moments, where we’ll look at the things we’ve experienced. We don’t just think of it from a career standpoint. We think about it as we’re building a story of experiences, that are just really dope experiences. That genuinely make us fulfilled and happy as humans.
I don’t think about it from a perspective of like “career accomplishments”. It’s more so doing the thing that we love the most, has led to so many dope things. Like non-monetary, really dope experiences we’ve been able to experience, that only like X percent of the population will ever get to experience. Even just playing a show and having 250 people pay to see you, and just chant your lyrics. I’m so grateful for that, right. I know I’ll be reflecting on that when I’m 70. I already have memories that I know I’ll be reflecting on forever.
But on top of that, even small things, like, I flew out to India. On a whim, just on my Instagram stories I said “Hey, I know we’ve got some fans here, and if anyone wants to do a meet and greet, hit me up”. And I was like, “nobody’s gonna message me”, and then multiple fans were like “Hey, I wanna grab lunch!”. I ended up grabbing lunch with fans, and they were telling me about their high school experiences being affected by our music, and all this stuff.
I was like, “Holy shit, man!” Even though it could be considered “small” – that doesn’t matter to me. What matters is how we’re connecting to people and genuinely making connections with our fans. I’m so grateful for that, and I think those are the things that I’ll look back on. Even at 70, be like “I can’t believe that’s a real thing, like that happened, that’s crazy.”
Dare Package - Keralanka’s debut created during a 24-hour livestream
Title: Dare Package Release date: April 25th, 2020 Runtime: 7 minutes Streaming Services: Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube
Creating something in front of a live, interactive audience calls for a rather interesting equilibrium. For Keralanka, valuing their own integrity during the creation process is essential, as a too dominant external force could disrupt their original artistic vision.
Having plentiful experience with different live-streaming ventures, it’s not a stretch to say that they know what they’re doing. Primarily these ventures have focused on them creating music in front of their audience. While enjoying the fan interaction during this process, they’ve found a middle ground. An example could be, allowing their audience to vote between a handful of sounds or samples, approved by the duo.
Q: What were some of your favorite moments during the stream, or during the whole process?
AP: My favorite moment of this whole process was probably how everything started going wrong. Let me explain to you what happened. It was supposed to be a livestream, where I’m at my house and he’s at his, and we’re streaming together. But the software we were using stopped working during the test run that night. It just wasn’t letting us do anything.
We’re like “what do we do…what do we do?”. The only thing we can do is … we have to meet up. We’ve put so much effort into marketing this and everything, that we can’t just not. We need this to happen. We figured that out – we’ll meet up. I come over to Rohan’s house. Before the stream starts, his USB hub stops working. So, we can’t plug in my Push, my hard-drive and his audio interface, ‘cause he only has two usb’s.
“What do we do now?”. We were like, “Ok, we don’t need the Push, we can use the computer keyboard. We can swap things, it’s fine. We’ll adapt.” So then I plug in my hard-drive, and then my hard-drive is not working. The library of sounds I’m used to using are gone.
But then the cool thing I was reflecting on it this morning, the cool thing is, all of that chaos was very reflective of this whole time period right now [the COVID-19 pandemic]. It can feel like everything’s going wrong, but you can still just roll with the punches, and figure out how to make the best of it. I think it worked to our advantage, ‘cause it forced us to use different samples, different sounds. It created Dare Package, which I’m very happy with what we’ve created, as a full product, which is dope.
Rohan: Yeah, AP was so bummed out when everything was going wrong. I was just like, “Dude, let’s just embrace everything going wrong and use it to our advantage. Just think about it as another constraint, and that can reflect the EP in itself.”
AP: That’s why it was one of my favorite moments. Looking back on it especially, it’s funny it actually ties back to what I was talking about earlier in the interview. Where later on you look at things at different depths, and you start realizing things you didn’t in the moment.
We wanted the EP to kind of reflect what was going on in the moment. We didn’t want to call it Coronavirus. But we wanted it to reflect the feeling of that anxiousness, of “things are going wrong”. It was cool, because that’s actually what happened in the process, which kind of also made us anxious. Which I think actually helped us add to the feeling, and communicate that to the listener. So, from that perspective, those were … Looking back, those were some of my favorite moments, but not in the moment.
Since this interview
Since this interview, Keralanka have been keeping busy. They started 2021 off with yet another 24 hour livestream, resulting in their second EP: Mahal. Throughout the year they released multiple singles, while continuing to work on their very first album. At the moment they’re aiming to release their debut mixtape during the summer of 2022.
Curious to give Keralanka a listen, or watch the full interview? Just follow the links below:
The full interview in video format:
Keralanka’s latest release:
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Keralanka’s socials:
TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@keralanka
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/keralanka














