The Dosti Music Project is a month-long experiment in border-bridging collaborative creation that brings together ten musicians from Pakistan, India, and the US for a collaborative residency program based at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, an historic New Orleans neighborhood, and the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. Much like its sister project, OneBeat, Dosti (which means friendship in Urdu and Hindi) transcends political barriers through cross-cultural musical collaboration. Produced by Bang on a Can’s Found Sound Nation in Partnership with the US Embassy in Pakistan, Dosti will invite four Pakistanis, four Indians, and two U.S. musicians from a wide variety of traditions — from Sufi singing to electronic beat-making to Appalachian fiddling — to collaboratively write, record, and perform original music, re-invent traditional music, and develop new projects that will make a positive impact on our communities locally and globally.

By providing musicians from India and Pakistan the infrastructure for collaboration and integration, we have a unique opportunity to reconnect musical traditions and re-link the politically fractured South Asian subcontinent. By facilitating the project in the US and participating in it through our own American musicians, we have the added opportunity to take part as both capacity-builders and as equal partners, establishing a model of cultural interaction that can positively impact diplomatic and political discourse.