Honiunhoni - Answers by Daniyal Ahmed, Founder/Producer

Bio of your label

Honiunhoni is an independent Pakistani record label founded by Karachi-born musician and researcher Daniyal Ahmed. The label's name is a bit of wordplay in Urdu that loosely translates as "impossible possibilities" — unexpected musical encounters that open new worlds of listening.

What began as a small archive of field recordings has grown into a platform dedicated to recording and representing musicians from across Pakistan. Honiunhoni fosters intimate relationships with artistic communities, bringing a fellow musician's ear to the recording process, an intimacy that breathes new life into performances. It also brings a distinct sensibility for how the music should sound. This is taken care of by one of Daniyal's teachers, veteran and storied Pakistani music producer Nizar Lalani. The visual identity of the label looks towards local and contextual design vocabularies, shaped by designer and typographic researcher Abeera Kamran, who also happens to be Daniyal’s sister.

Hingol Recording

A recent achievement or highlight

The label was recently featured in an indepth article in The Wire Magazine.opens in a new tab

After extensive successful tours of Ustad Noor Bakhsh, a newer artist from the label, Muslim Shaggan, has also now completed a very successful 17 show tour of Europe including notable festivals like Rudolstadt, Clandestino, Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and others.

What are the biggest challenges you face for your label?

The biggest challenges for our label are making it sustainable in an economic sense. In order to really grow the label, I need to be doing it like a full time job, but the earnings from it are barely enough to do that so far and it seems that would be still difficult to do. We have no local state funding available in Pakistan and we are a bit hesitant to seek out corporate funding because we don't want to compromise on our values or help in selling products we don't want to sell just to make the label sustainable, and this puts us a in a tight spot. Finding the right resources to work with, without having adequate funding to hire them is also a problem. Lastly, physical distribution of records is another problem. Finding the right distributors is something we need to make progress on to sell more physical records in various markets. Another challenge is to see where our records would land up in record stores, as it seems many record stores, barely have a dedicated section that would be adequate for our records to be placed in.

What was the gap in your local scene that made you start the label?

What made me initially start the label was the response that I got to the recordings I made of Ustad Noor Bakhsh in 2022. I realised that there was both a local and global audience that was yearning for this kind of music and it had to be shared with them in a way that would ethically and equitably also give back to the artistic communities. I chose to initially focus on traditional artists who had no way of representing themselves on the internet and no way of managing and marketing their music. In the absence of any labels that were interested in doing this, and with zero government support in this arena, I decided to take this on as a personal project and it slowly grew from there. Our local scene has been dominated by corporate sponsors but they are only interested in what is currently trending or would reap instant market benefits depending on the product they are trying to sell, rather than caring about the music and the artistic communities in a holistic sense. The kind of music that I was focusing on, mostly artists that were expanding the boundaries of what so called 'traditional' music could be, was something that very few people were interested in, until it was produced and presented in a the way that it was, then the interest kind of skyrocketed. Despite a rich musical heritage, after Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, there has been a massive gap in Pakistani artists in the World Music Scene. I saw that there were so many artists who would be highly admired in this scene but there was no one doing the necessary work for their music to be produced and represented in a way that it made their work legible and accessible to global audiences, and this is the work I have set out to do.

How would you describe your sound or identity to someone who's never heard the label?

The sound can be described as an edgy expansion of the notion of what 'traditional' Pakistani music can be. The sound is raw, intimate, mostly captured live in various acoustic environments [note from the editor: Honiunhoni’s albums are recorded in places such as parks, courtyards and building rooftops], and the processing is minimal, allowing the dynamic musics to breathe the way they are meant to.

Our identity is one that represents rooted Pakistani music, and presents their sound and their stories in a way that doesn't exoticise, but humanises them for a broader global audience. We bring an ethnographic sensibility to their stories and try our best to present their music in a way that makes them comfortable and happy. So far we have focused mostly on traditional, both 'classical' as well as 'folk' artists, but the idea is to challenge these labels by showing exactly how these artists too our experimental and expanding the idea of what these musics can be conceived as.

What does the wider music scene look like where you operate, and where does the label sit within it?

It’s difficult to describe a very complex network of music scenes, but one way to describe it as that we have pop acts, who are supported by corporate sponsors and streaming platforms and then a small underground electronic and indie scene which is very much self organised and independent. Honiunhoni kind of sits in the middle of this, although our first artist, Ustad Noor Bakhsh, has now crossed over from previously being completely unknown to now becoming almost a house hold or popular name in Pakistani society, and is similarly getting booked in those kinds of places. What's peculiar in Pakistan is that not only are there almost no active record labels currently, there are also no dedicated music venues, and all clubs were closed down eventually after alcohol was banned in the country in the late 70's. So the way the music scenes sustain themselves is very complicated to decipher. Many of the musicians we work with, have almost no representation, and our surviving in very difficult circumstances, but what we have learned through the response to our own work is that if these artist are produced and represented in a certain way, their is much bigger audience for their music.

Where do you want the label to be in five years?

In five years, I would want the label to have a more consistent release schedule, with lots of new artists on boarded and more regular releases. I would also want to expand the markets that our artists tour in as well as expand the physical distribution of records more thoroughly in Europe as well as to other markets beyond Europe and North America.