HAPTICWOUND

Poetry. 
Prose. 
Music.
Life.

BIO: 
Ignatius earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University where he teaches. He is the author of the novel Fishhead. Republic of Want (Tortoise Books) and Salt Pruning (Hummingbird Poetry Press), a collaborative collection. Two additional collections are due in mid 2026, namely Bone Dust Mother (Glass Lyre Press) and Everything I Touch Is—& Isn't—You (Roadside Press), which is a 2nd collaboration with David Allen Sullivan, recent poet laureate of Santa Cruz, California. Ignatius is co-editor of The Overturning Anthology (Erratics Press) and the host and curator of the popular reading series Sunday Salon Chicago. His prose and poetry appear in several venues, including Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, Porter Gulch Review, & Red Wheelbarrow, among others. Ignatius serves as Chair of the Curatorial Council at Ragdale Foundation, an artists residency in Lake Forest, IL where he is also a Board of Trustees member, and he is the curator and director of the 1st South Asian American Literary Festival (SAALF) 2026, a one-day event that takes place at South Asia Institute on August 22nd. He is a naturalized US citizen from India and lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his Métis wife, a visual artist from the State of Michigan.

ignatiusaloysius.com
https://linktr.ee/ignatius.valentine.aloysius 
Find his other musical projects on Soundcloud:
soundcloud.com/iggy-valentine
and on Bandcamp at:
hapticwound.bandcamp.com
 

OBJECTIVE:
Hapticwound is a recent project that grew out of the current social and political climate, starting out as quiet phases of creative concealement at a time when the current administration chose to go to war against its own population around the country. With a full album in sight, the songs emerged one by one as ‘forms of resistance’ taking shelter behind artifacts of poetry—and ecstatic poetry in particular—as it reflects our challenging dystopian atmosphere. 

One key aspect of Hapticwound's formation is the abandonment of the electric guitar for now (as a mainstay frontman instrument) in favor of an amplified 5-string clawhammer gourd banjo with a short, fretless scale. Ignatius is a multi-instrumentalist who records, arranges, and produces each track in a small in-formal home studio. A lead guitarist in the rock/alternative/prog genres, he had to first learn how to play the banjo (seen in the image on the left) and understand the instrument's history and cultural influence on the American music scene, eventually finding himself in a comfortable position that resulted in an amalgam of his Asian and American roots, and a tuning which gave rise to inspiring chord patterns and the tagline, “Poems in an age for minor keys.”

INSTRUMENTS:
5-string fretless, short-scale clawhammer gourd banjo (made by Ben Greco, CA) with nylgut strings
Amplification with Myers and KNA piezo pickups
Nitro Pro electronic drum kit
Electric Bass

The track stems are recorded, mixed, and mastered on a 16-inch Mac M4 in Logic Pro with SSL 4000 G console channel strips, and plugins from Waves, Plugin Alliance, Safari Pedals, Tokyo Dawn Labs, and Klanghelm. 

EXPERIENCE & HISTORY:
Ignatius has made music under his own name, as Woond, and now, Hapticwound, having performed around the country, and also in Chicago, and regionally with other musicians. He returns to music after taking a long break to pursue a career in creative writing. Of note is his previous experience as a volunteer stage monitor engineer at Chicago's Metro nightclub (home of Poi Dog Pondering, Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins. Chance, and others), an electric opportunity that found him mixing live for artists like Jewel, Smithereens, Silverchair, Skatalites, Oasis, Red Red Meat, Shonen Knife, Tragically Hip, Liz Phair, and others, and which soon inspired him to record his own first album of alternative songs as Ignatius (himself and a drummer, with his DI split to guitar and bass amps/cabs) in a few hours from the stage at the Metro, going straight to 2-track DAT with the help of a fellow engineer and mentor, followed by regional gigs and a partial US tour supported by college radio promotion and airplay (landing a pair of songs in the top 30 college radio circuit). 

Growing up in Mumbai, India, Ignatius spent countless hours hanging around the only record store in the city back then called Rhythm House, where he was introduced to a host of artists from the West, including Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Dylan, Motown, Joni Mitchell, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Carole King, CSNY, Neil Young, Patti Smith, and so many others still in the public eye and some not. There was Voice of America, BBC, Radio Seychelles, and All India Radio, of course, early influencers playing broadcast music from around the world through the family's palm-sized Shortwave Philips transistor radio. Ignatius has always been involved in the music scene in one form or the other, and tells a story that was passed down in his family that his father used to take classical violin lessons with Zubin Mehta as a boy. There is no way to verify this story, however.

Hapticwound has no current travel plans (because of ICE activity and concerns for personal safety) and is focusing on getting its music out on streaming platforms regularly, employing the assitance of Distrokid, Hypeddit, SubmitHub, Bandzoogle, Bandcamp, and Meta ads. In preparation for a good outcome, Ignatius has trained and consulted with publicist/author Ariel Hyatt and CyberPR, and also Chris Greenwood (Manafest), and taken a master class online in mixing and mastering with sound engineer, Streaky. Starting out, Hapticwound's musical collaborations are few, but impactful, with the global release of ‘Doorway’, an acoustic single accompanied on saxophone by Steve Hult, a Jazz performer also from Chicago.