He was visiting his father in Jordan when the accident happened

The international deep house community was in shock today following the news that San Francisco-based DJ/producer Rishi K has been killed in a car accident in his native Jordan.

Local newspaper The Jordan Times reports that Rishi was in a car with his father Nadim Gargour (66), who is a Mercedes-Benz dealer, and a 40-year-old US national on Thursday. Both Rishi and his father died when the car collided with a lorry on the Suweimeh-Dead Sea Road; the other passenger is said to be in a critical condition.

Rishi Karim was born Karim Nadim Gargour in Jordan but spent part of his childhood living in London. He played clarinet from a young age and moved on to guitar in his early teens, playing in a series of rock bands at school in Jordan and at university in Montreal, before moving to San Francisco and being bitten by the electronic music bug. He would go on to carve out a distinct sound of his own that blended the soulful deep house native to the Bay Area with influences from the trance and progressive house that had been his first electronic love.

"I love challenging people's perception of music by creating music that blends deep with progressive," he told iDJ in 2015, and it was certainly a hybrid that proved popular, with Rishi's work appearing on many of the world's most respected underground deep house labels including Nite Grooves, UM Records, Deep Clicks, Spring Tube, Ready Mix Records, Incepto Deep, Savoir Faire, Deep Site, Haute Musique and Endemic Digital.

On a personal level, he was a gentle, spiritual soul who will be sorely missed. As iDJ's Harold Heath put it in a Facebook post today: "He was always positive, completely free from any artifice, and overflowing with joy and enthusiasm for the music he so loved."

Tags: Rishi K, car crash, Jordan, Karim Gargour