The man they call Khanvict is aiming to take his music to the next level with a debut live show at a Vancouver club.
Raised in Surrey, Asad Khan is booked to perform at The Imperial on Friday, Jan. 17, after a couple of years of bringing his genre-fusing music to festivals across North America, including Bumbershoot, Rifflandia and Shambhala.
Khanvict made a name for himself as a DJ on the local South Asian wedding scene before he turned his attention to making original music, influenced by Bollywood and Punjabi sounds and blended with West Coast bass.
“It’ll be my first headlining show in Vancouver with my own original music and production,” Khanvict said of the gig planned at The Imperial, to include an opening set by Raaginder, a San Francisco-area violinist and music producer. Bios and ticket details are posted to imperialvancouver.com.
“This show will be different than what a lot of people know me for in the Vancouver area, which is DJing. It’s exciting to bring it to those people,” Khanvict added. “It’s a big step in that journey, for sure. It’s been almost two years since I started writing my own music, so it’s been building up since then.”
• RELATED STORY, from 2018: Surrey’s Khanvict wants to steal the show at Fusion Festival.
The Now-Leader last caught up with Khanvict in the summer of 2018 as he prepared to perform an evening set at Surrey Fusion Festival. A Newton-area resident at the time, he has since moved to North Delta with his family.
Born in Pakistan, Khanvict came to Canada at age 13, in 2001. The folk music of his birth country was an early influence on him, mostly because of his mother’s love of those sounds.
In recent months, Khanvict has rehearsed his new live show in a local warehouse, set up with custom hardware and software rig. The performance at The Imperial will include live and electronic instruments along with lights and visuals.
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As a platform for streaming, Khanvict recently co-founded the record label Snakes x Ladders (snakesxladders.bandcamp.com), which showcases tracks including “Come With Me,” “Desert Dream” and “Searching For You,” among other originals and remixes.
His first EP on the label, Kahani, led to an opportunity to release two official remixes of AR Rahman’s classic Bollywood hits, “Jiya Jale” and “Ramta Jogi,” through Venus Records in India.
Elsewhere online, Khanvict can be found at khanvict.life, instagram.com/khanvictlife and also YouTube.
Over the course of his music career, Khanvict says he’s taken some heat for his stage name.
“It’s funny,” he said in 2018, “because when I first started out in the wedding industry in Toronto, where I lived for a year, in 2011, and I was just starting out, getting gigs, one of the main guys in the industry there said they didn’t hire me because my name wasn’t appropriate for the wedding industry. I was like, ‘Well, what does that have to do with anything, what I call myself, as long as I’m playing good music, not swearing at anybody, it’s just a name.'”
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