Thomas Burkhalter, PhD, is an anthropologist, multidisciplinary artist, and writer from Bern, Switzerland. He is the founder and director of Norient and the Norient Festival. Burkhalter has co-directed documentary films, including Contradict (Berner Filmpreis 2020, Al-Jazeera Witness), and created AV/theatre performances. He is the author and co-editor of several books, such as Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut (Routledge) and The Arab Avant Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East (Wesleyan University Press). His experimental radio feature, Gqom Edits – A Durban Visit, was nominated for the Prix Europa in 2017. Burkhalter teaches regularly at universities, leads workshops for arts institutions, and, since 2022, has produced the Norient Mixtape for Swiss National Radio SRF3. Currently, Burkhalter's focus lies on his new music/AV duo, Melodies In My Head, and the podcast Long Take: Life as an Artist. Burkhalter’s work combines personal and global perspectives, often in close collaboration with artists and thinkers from across the world. Follow him on Instagram, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Bandcamp, Spotify, or Meta.

Abhishek Mathur is a musician and sound designer based in New Delhi, India. He is a guitar player and founding member of Advaita, one of India’s most acclaimed bands. Abhishek has been composing, arranging, and producing music for media such as films, TV, theater, art installations, and podcasts for the past two decades. He is also the facilitator and course designer of a short term program in music production at the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communications, New Delhi. Follow him on Instagram and Facebook.

Suvani Suri is an artist and researcher based in New Delhi. She works with sound, text, and intermedia assemblages and has been exploring various modes of transmission such as podcasts, auditory texts, sonic environments, objects, installations, fictions, experimental workshops, and live interventions. Her research interests lie in the relational and speculative capacities of listening, voice, aural/oral histories, and the spectral dispositions of sound that can activate critical imaginations. Actively engaged in thinking through the techno-politics that listening is embedded in, her practice is informed by the processes of production, mediation, perception, and distribution of sound. Alongside, she composes sound for video and performance works and teaches at several universities and educational spaces where her pedagogical interests conflate with a sustained inquiry into the digital and sonic sensorium. Follow her on her website, Instagram, or SoundCloud.