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This Sunday, June 7, ‘FRICTION’ at Method Kala Ghoda hosts the first FREE/PLAY session, an open jam featuring five decades of Roland electronic instruments. Inspired by Kenneth Burke’s concept of humans as ‘symbol-making entities’, the event transforms music from performance into a shared act of communication, creativity, and connection.
What happens when you remove the pressure of performance from music and leave only the joy of making sound together?
This Sunday, June 7, Abhi Meer’s ‘FRICTION’ at Method Kala Ghoda will become a sonic landscape for ‘FREE/PLAY’, a play-oriented jam session built around five decades of Roland electronic music instruments. The premise is profoundly simple: show up and play — no formal training required.
The event is a natural extension of the ‘FRICTION’ exhibition curated by musician, ethnomusicologist, and cultural curator Abhi Meer. The space functions as a counter-institution. It is, at once, a record store, a listening room, a library, a gallery, an archive, and a gathering space built around active participation instead of passive consumption.
The same philosophy is at the heart of ‘FREE/PLAY’. According to Meer, the idea comes, in part, from literary theorist and philosopher Kenneth Burke’s idea that human beings are fundamentally “symbol-making entities”. For Burke, language and symbols are not only tools of communication; they are also the means by which we create meaning and relationships with one another. ‘FREE/PLAY’ extends this idea into the realm of sound. The moment someone creates a sound that represents something and another person responds to it, communication begins.
With ‘FREE/PLAY’, Meer is more concerned with participation than music skills. The Roland instruments on display are meant to be touched, played, and experimented with. Visitors are encouraged to explore unfamiliar sounds, respond to each other’s improvisations, and discover what happens when technology becomes a catalyst for human interaction.
As algorithms optimise every facet of human interaction online, and increasingly in the real world, for speed and convenience, Meer has built a space that embraces slowness and encourages the awkwardness, the friction, of being human. He frames friction as resistance — as the force that generates movement, heat, transformation — as something to wrestle with, question, and experiment with.
‘FREE/PLAY’ extends that idea by positioning sound as a shared language between people. As creativity and culture become increasingly frictionless, mediated by screens, engagement metrics, and content economics, there is, after all, something radical about gathering in a room simply to make noise together.
The first ‘FREE/PLAY’ jam session takes place this Sunday, June 7, at 5 PM at ‘FRICTION’, Method Kala Ghoda.
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