I'm Dr David Lindsay, though most people know me as Genki. I'm a
multi-instrumentalist who researches music-making in prisons, a project lead for
post-release and advocacy work at Changing Tunes, founder of the Prison Music
Collective, and I assist in running a record label. This is where all of that lives.
Genki is a Japanese word meaning healthy, energetic and lively. It's a
nickname I picked up years ago and it stuck.
I started
drumming at ten and it's still where I'm most at home. Drumkit and percussion
come first, but I picked up guitar at seventeen, and I've played bass and sung
in bands since. Handpan, kas-kas, ukulele, keyboards and synths have all found
their way in along the way.
My undergraduate degree is a BA in Music Performance from Dartington College
of Arts, which I passed with first class honours. In 2023 I defended my PhD thesis at the
University of Exeter.
Much of the percussion side came from going and learning where the instruments
are from. I spent time in Ghana working with
Project Okurase, a charity in the village of
Okurase in the Eastern Region, learning to play African drums and to build
them. Building one teaches you as much about the instrument as playing it does.
In India I studied tabla, travelling across the country learning from different tutors.
These days most of my work is research and organisation rather than
performance. My doctoral research looked at music-making in prisons across
England and Wales. Alongside that I lead the post-release and advocacy work at
Changing Tunes, founded the
Prison Music Collective, and line manage the label
manager at Red Tangent Records.
I have a side interest in software engineering, particularly focused on web-based applications.
I created this site, the online music tools below, the prison music collective website. I love to see
what happens when programming and music practice meet.
Drumkit
Percussion
African drums
Tabla
Handpan
Kas-kas
Guitar
Bass
Vocals
Ukulele
Keys & synths
Making a djembé
Learning to build a drum, not just play one. Carving the shell, mounting the
skin, tuning it up. The process behind the instrument, filmed while I was
learning it.
My doctoral research asked what music-making does inside prisons in England and
Wales: how it is provided, whose ends it serves, and where it opens up room to
resist. Related work with colleagues at Exeter looks at how people who have been
incarcerated experience policing.
PhD Thesis · 2025
The Role of Music-Making in Carceral Environments in England and Wales
David Lindsay · University of Exeter
An investigation into where music-making happens in prisons across England and Wales, what is provided, and how it serves or resists carceral infrastructures. It argues that providers have adapted their aims towards medical and opportunity models in order to gain access, while the empirical work shows participants using group music-making as an "affective abolition" of the pains of imprisonment, driving a growing turn towards advocacy and lived-experience leadership.
‘Like chalk and cheese’: accounts of police use of force from formerly incarcerated people and implications for procedural justice theory
Abi Dymond, David Lindsay & Tom Rice · Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice
A qualitative study of how formerly incarcerated people describe their encounters with police use of force. These perspectives are largely missing from a literature that centres police accounts. Participants often extended empathy to officers, but expected procedural justice in return; perceived dishonesty proved more damaging than the force itself.
If you'd like to talk about research collaboration,
drop me a message.
Practice
Changing Tunes
Project Lead for Post-release and Advocacy
Changing Tunes is a charity that uses music to reduce reoffending. Musicians
work in prisons week in, week out. Crucially, they keep working with people
once they're released, through the gate and into resettlement.
I am Project Lead for Post-release and Advocacy. That means the part of the work that begins
at the gate: making sure the relationships built inside carry on outside, and
that the people who have lived through the system have a hand in shaping how
it changes.
It sits directly alongside my research. My thesis found a sector increasingly
turning towards advocacy and lived-experience leadership, not only creating
opportunities for people to change themselves but working to change the
structures that led to their incarceration in the first place. This role is
that argument put into practice.
Working towards music in every prison across England and Wales, by improving
communication and cooperation between prison-music providers.
I founded the Prison Music Collective out of my doctoral research. Mapping who
was providing music, and where, turned out to be a necessary first step, and
it revealed a field working largely in isolation from itself. Practitioners
inside individual prisons, the organisations running programmes, and the
researchers studying them often had no shared place to find one another.
The site is the answer to that: an information hub and support network for a
sector that has plenty of expertise and not enough ways to share it.
An interactive map
Where music-making is available across prisons in England and Wales, and just as importantly where it isn't.
Music & research
Work by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists, alongside current research on music in carceral settings.
A network
A directory of prison-music organisations and their aims, connecting people who can otherwise be very isolated in the work.
Red Tangent is an independent label based in Bristol, backing real artists from
release through to stage: records, publishing, merch, live events and
marketing, with artists keeping ownership and creative control. The premise is
that the barriers are structural rather than a matter of talent, and that
independent artists should get the same terms majors reserve for their pop acts.
I line manage the label manager. My role is support and direction rather than
A&R: making sure the label runs sustainably and holds to that ethos as it
grows.
An anti-capitalist rock band in the South West, and one of the things I'm
proudest of. It grew directly out of my post-release prison work.
Break III came out of the work that happens after the gate. It started with
people met through post-release music work and became a band in its own
right: loud, political rock from the South West, with songs that argue
rather than decorate.
That's the whole point of the argument I make in my research: music-making
after release isn't a rehabilitation exercise to be completed, it's a way
people build something of their own. Break III was that, in practice.
The band doesn't play any more since the passing of James, our lead guitarist.
However, the records and videos live on and are still available.
Generates random drum notation and plays it back, with difficulty levels and
custom rhythm options. Good for sight-reading, moving around the kit and
building a fill vocabulary.
Most of it is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the rest is knitting, cubing, a bicycle and a chessboard.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
I've trained since 2010 and I'm a first degree black belt.
I love to teach and compete but mostly I love to challenge myself. Many of my hobbies
take something I naturally struggle with and look to improve.
I specialise in teaching children . Coaching kids is a
different job from coaching adults and it has less to do with technique than
people assume. Most of it is attention, patience, and making the room safe
enough that a nervous seven-year-old will try something they might not manage.
That is not far off what I argue about music-making in my research: the value
is in the doing and in what people build for themselves, not in the outcome
someone else has written down for them.
I still compete, which keeps me honest about the difference between knowing
something and being able to do it. Competing has helped me grow confidence in
uncomfortable and difficult positions.
And the rest
I solve Rubik's cubes, averaging under twenty seconds on a 3x3, which turns out to work
much like a drum rudiment: a small set of patterns drilled until they stop
needing thought. I love cycle touring when I can get the time away, panniers
loaded and no particular hurry. I enjoy chess, love to relax with kitting.
Top of the podium at the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu British Open.
Teaching, and the software behind it
Business
Exeter After-school Jiu-Jitsu
I run EAS JJ, which puts jiu-jitsu classes into schools as an after-school
activity. Children get to train where they already are, and the families
who would never make it across town to an evening class get a way in.
Running the classes needed software that didn't exist, so I wrote it. It
handles the bookings for EAS JJ and is built for martial arts gyms
generally, not just my own.
