Père shared discovery with fils, and Abhi’s ensuing Kanye fandom deepened and broadened, branching out first to West’s protégé, thematically substantive rapper (and fellow Chicagoan) Lupe Fiasco, and then to “conscious hip-hop, like, from back in the day: Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Black Thought the Roots - all that stuff.”Ībhi dipped a toe into hip-hop production himself starting “in late, late middle school, right before I moved to the Fiji Islands for high school. “Then I got into hip-hop” - with an assist from his dad, who’d stumbled upon the oeuvre of Chicago’s then-embryonic rap superstar, Kanye West, in a gym-workout song mix. That mega-selling West Coast alt-metal band of the early 2000s “had elements of hip-hop was, like, a gateway drug,” Abhi observed with a laugh. When I started being really into music was when I got into Linkin Park.”

When his father’s diplomatic posting later switched landmasses - the family relocated to Beijing - Abhi attended an American middle school there.ĭetailing his preteen preferences in music, Abhi described himself as “pretty much on the same path as a lot of American kids my age, listening to what was popular in school: the pop-punk phase of Green Day, Blink-182 and all that stuff. A vivid early memory of his childhood in the subcontinent, he related, was of being pedaled to kindergarten in the “creaky wooden” rear compartment of a cycle rickshaw. As the Nomad has shuttled between continents, initially with his family and eventually under his own steam, Abhi has resided in India, China, Hong Kong, France, the Fiji Islands and these United States.

Abhi the nomad