Melbourne, Australia · psychedelic rock · singer-songwriter

Tash Sultana

3 festivals played ↓

A one-person band who builds whole songs live from loops — guitar, beatbox, trumpet, all stacked in front of you.

Tash Sultana, born Taj Hendrix Sultana in 1995, grew up in Melbourne with Maltese ancestry on their father's side. They received a guitar from their grandfather at age three and by thirteen were playing open mic nights up to six times a week around Victoria, later busking on Melbourne's streets when they struggled to find steady work.

Before working alone, Sultana sang for the band Mindpilot from 2008 to 2012, which won several Melbourne battle-of-the-bands competitions before splitting up. Wider attention arrived in 2016, when a home video of the song 'Jungle' passed a million views within five days and has since been watched more than 40 million times.

Sultana's performances are built in real time using loop pedals, layering guitar, bass, drum machine, beatboxing, flute and trumpet into full arrangements while the audience watches the parts accumulate. Across recordings, Sultana plays as many as fifteen instruments, among them saxophone, pan flute and piano, and produces the music themself.

'Jungle' and the following single 'Notion' both placed in Triple J's Hottest 100 of 2016, and Sultana won the station's J Award for Unearthed Artist of the Year. The EP Notion, released independently that September through their own label, Lonely Lands Records, reached number eight on the ARIA chart and led to a sold-out world tour in early 2017.

In 2017, three more Sultana tracks, 'Mystik,' 'Murder to the Mind' and a cover of MGMT's 'Electric Feel,' were voted into that year's Hottest 100, though a bout of laryngitis forced the cancellation of several shows. The music draws on psychedelic rock, reggae and soul, with long instrumental passages and extended guitar work; Sultana released the album Flow State in 2018 and has continued to record and tour, generally performing alone.

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psychedelic rocksinger-songwriter