Soft Circle

Slideshow soft circle 2Slideshow soft circle 1

Location

  • Brooklyn, NY

Artist Biography

Soft Circle has recently become a duo with Hisham Akira Bharoocha and Ben Vida (Town and Country/Singer/Bird Show). This music project came about after Hisham left his former band, Black Dice, in search of a new way to create music by himself. Through modern music technology he has been able to create a way to perform on his own, where he records and loops sounds live and then adds drums and singing. Bharoocha started out making tribal/electronic/ambient anthems that forged paths between the spirit world and the human tribes of past and present. His new sound is still based on his fascination with repetition, cyclical rhythms and trance inducing sounds, but has gone further into the direction of heavy beats and more solidified song structures, even using lyrics as a new means to communicate.

Soft Circle's first album Full Bloom was released in 2007 on Eastern Developments; the most current release is a split 12 inch with High Places on the label PPM that is out now. Currently Hisham is working on his next full length album with Ben Vida which is scheduled to be released in the Spring of 2010. Bharoocha has toured with such bands as Boredoms, No Age, and High Places. Bharoocha was the musical director for the now legendary 77 BOADRUM performance, a musical composition composed by Boredoms, which involved 77 drummers playing 77 drum kits in a spiral formation at Empire Fulton Ferry State Park on July 7th, 2007. In addition he was also the musical director for this year's 88 Boadrum performance which happened on August 8th, 2008 with 88 drummers playing with Boredoms in Los Angeles, as well as 88 drummers playing with Gang Gang Dance in New York City on the same day.

Selected Press

Hisham Bharoocha, the peacenik behind Soft Circle, used to drum in Brooklyn's Black Dice, a neo-tribal powerhouse ... "Sundazed" saves face by taking the same impulse as the crashing-drums crowd--rhythmic, hypnotic--and dissolving it into a tangle of synth marimbas, tricky off-rhythms, and reverberant shades. Turns out new age is something like the Cretaceous, just with hairier lizards shimmying around.

Village Voice

If I had a million dollars I would comission Hisham Bharoocha (aka Soft Circle) to come work magic on my house, and like some post-postmodern Michaelangelo, he would transform the place into an acid-tripping Sistine Chapel of bright, kinetic shapes... Aside from being a vital visual artist (with skills honed at the Rhode Island Institute of Design), Hisham can count himself as a founding member of Lightning Bolt and Black Dice. Those are lofty creative heights to say the least and Full Bloom is a strong indicator that we are seeing an artist in the warm light of spring... Full Bloom is a triumphant solo debut; shining and incorporeal, its one for your mind, body, and soul.

Audiversity Online

Bharoocha played so many different things at one point, triggering sounds with a kaos-pad type apparatus and what I think were some mini-synths. He veered the long, trance-like songs through various tempo and mood changes, never stopping for more than a few seconds... it was beautiful to listen to... He was feeling a musical vibration, in a big way, and translating that to everyone in the room.

SeattleWeekly.com