Natural extensions
by Anil Prasad
Copyright © 2000 Anil Prasad. All rights reserved.
Reflecting on one’s teen years can be a squeamish experience. Most of us will admit to traveling down at least a few dubious paths during those days. But when vocalist Sheila Chandra reflects on that era, she has a lot to be proud of. For her, those years represent a groundbreaking musical exploration that significantly influenced the development and acceptance of world music.
Chandra was only 16 when she hit the British top-10 with "Ever so Lonely," an effervescent single recorded with her group Monsoon. The tune combined Chandra’s already evolved east-meets-west vocal approach with an underpinning that equally featured tabla, drone elements and Western pop sensibilities. Despite its unorthodox approach, the prodigious effort received wide acclaim and acceptance. It also served as a catalyst for furthering Indian music’s modern possibilities.
Disillusioned with the machinery of the music business, Chandra left Monsoon shortly after its brief burst of success and forged a solo career. She went on to release five records through the Indipop label run by Steve Coe, a Monsoon co-conspirator. Those records, Out On My Own, Quiet, The Struggle, Nada Brahma and Roots and Wings, represent a journey of discovery. She literally found her voice over the course of the albums. As a whole, the releases took solo voice, vocal percussion, the intricacies of the drone and merged them with Western and Asian elements representated in both the acoustic and synthesized realms.
Following the Indipop albums, Chandra signed a series of one-off deals for three albums released through Peter Gabriel’s Real World label. Weaving My Ancestors Voices, The Zen Kiss and Abonecronedrone found her delving deeper into solo voice and drone than ever before. Their beautifully naked, minimalist pieces explore Indian, Irish, Scottish and Arabic influences. And rather than highlight the differences between the cultures, Chandra successfully depicts how similar and seamless they can be.
If the Real World trilogy was designed to extend and enhance people’s idea of the drone’s vast contribution to music, her latest releases EEP1 and EEP2 are designed to totally turn perceptions on their head. Both were created in collaboration with Steve Coe’s Ganges Orchestra and released on the resurrected Indipop label. The experimental discs feature a much more raw, energetic approach than Chandra has previously revealed. They draw connections and parallels between the drone and noise, embedded within turbulent, scratchy vocal mosaics.
Chandra spoke to Innerviews about her recently reissued Indipop recordings as well as the reemergence of her more experimental leanings.
Does it feel strange to promote albums that are more than a decade old?
Slightly, but I’m just so pleased that Narada is putting them out and that they’ll be available. The level of interest that’s come back from Narada has really been great. The first four of the five Indipop records came out sequentially—Out On My Own, Quiet, Struggle and Nada Brahma. Then Roots and Wings came out after the sabbatical I took. But with the first four, I was definitely aware of a warts-and-all philosophy at the time. It involved needing to serve a kind of apprenticeship and the need to evolve and change in the studio, as well as to grow as a writer. I made my writing debut with Quiet. They really are very accurate snapshots of where I was musically at the time and the kind of learning curve I was on. So, it’s strange in that sense. I’ve become more polished about my Real World work, but I’m still very proud of the Indipop records. I look back and think "God, Quiet—I made that when I was 19!" [laughs] That seems very young now. Then, I expected myself to be able to scale Everest. I didn’t think "I’m only 19 and I’ve got plenty of time to grow into achievement." I just expected to able to achieve whatever I set out to do.
Encapsulate the artistic and creative evolution that occurred over the Indipop records.
That’s not an easy task. [laughs] When I started the albums, the scenario was that I was just 18 and had just had a top-10 hit with "Ever So Lonely" through Phonogram. It was a radical fusion that had nevertheless been totally accepted on the dancefloor. In many ways, it set a standard in terms of what would become the world music genre because there was no such thing then in 1982. So, I had come off that and had creative differences with Phonogram. The band split up and I decided I wanted to be a solo artist. Well, there’s a vast difference between a band member who doesn’t write and doesn’t produce and setting out your own musical agenda as a solo artist. I felt that I wanted to take up some of the promise that Monsoon had shown, but explore that much further. So, I decided to find a very controlled setting where I could serve that kind of apprenticeship. So, what’s happening over those five albums is a very broad-based, lateral exploration of what was possible for me as an artist and learning some of the skills needed to develop as a solo artist on the writing, technical and studio sides of things. I was also developing various vocal techniques and learning to manage my own creative process, and take responsibility for the entire thing. That’s really what I had learned by the time I got to Nada Brahma and Roots and Wings.
Describe some of the vocal techniques that evolved over the course of the Indipop records.
What happened is I realized at the time of Quiet that I was running into a kind of psychological barrier. I had unconsciously grown up with an agenda of what teenage girls sounded like. Although I might mentally set myself an agenda of being much more experimental, when it came to making those records, I was more self-conscious than I realized I would be. So, there was a whole sense of me learning to go beyond my boundaries which I think was very healthy for me as a person. It got me to think about expressing what was really inside me—inside the blank page, rather than constantly working with the expressions within the box of "Asian teenage girl" and all the expectations that come with that. So, it kind of taught me to leap out of that box, both vocally and psychologically as a writer.
I found by listening to classical recordings lots and lots of things I wanted to play with—not necessarily to learn in a very orthodox and technical way, but that I wanted to be influenced by. In that way, I found a very organized way of involving all these techniques, but based on what I wanted to do. So, I picked up on vocal percussion very early from On My Own in 1983, then with Quiet which I started to write via the exploration of layering my voice, using my voice as an instrument and really thinking about what touches people in a vocal line. What makes the intensity and emotional power in the human voice? What makes it special? Do you need a lyric? What happens if you don’t have a lyric? That was the premise of Quiet. Can you still touch people with sound landscapes? How do people then relate to those if they have to put their own interpretations on them? So, really, vocal techniques are exciting in themselves, but they’re a bit like toys unless you find a kind of unique way of using them. I’ve always been concerned to make sure I don’t use them because they’re bright, shiny and new, but rather that I use them because they have a very specific purpose within the agenda for the album I’m writing.
You’ve said the Silk compilation didn’t properly represent your Indipop releases. What were its failings?
It was the particular choice of material for Silk that I didn’t like. The Indipop albums are snapshots of my musical development. As whole albums, I’m absolutely fine with them because each offers a breadth of what I was doing during that six month period of time. What Silk did was attempt to pick out certain elements of what I was doing within the two years when I made the first four records and position me as an artist by emphasizing certain creative tendencies at the expense of others. That’s what I wasn’t happy about with Silk. I just think it was a bad choice of tracks and the choice revealed a certain agenda about how Shanachie wanted to push me as an artist. I think they wanted to present me as more poppy and upbeat, and less lateral and experimental than I actually was. Silk came out in 1990, so perhaps they might have considered that apt for a 25-year-old artist who had a top-10 single in England and Europe. But given the range and output of my solo career, I don’t think it was properly representative. It made me feel as though they wanted me to be someone else.
Is that why you personally determined what went onto Moonsung, the recent Real World compilation?
I was originally going to let Real World have a stab at putting together their choice of tracks. Then I realized that—particularly for the voice and drone work—it’s a very specialist task to order tracks on a compilation. Because they’re drone-based and stay in the same key and tonality, if you put two that are a semitone different next to each other, then one sounds off key. There were all sorts of technical considerations to think about, as well as the running order. So, I made a suggestion and they were happy.
To me, Monsoon served as the pop equivalent of John McLaughlin’s Shakti as far as influence on its particular sphere went.
That’s a compliment. Thank you. It is in the sense that it broke ground and did set a standard. It was something that people had never heard before and could never have imagined. And we have over the years heard some fantastic stories. Iain Scott who started the Triple Earth label told us that when he first heard "Ever so lonely," he was in a corner shop and he went ‘round buying cans of everything so he could hear the end of the record. [laughs] It was on the radio and he said he was transfixed. He had never heard anything like that before. And given the label he started up, it must have been inspiring in some way. So yeah, Monsoon, although it was short-lived, definitely set a standard. It wasn’t exactly a challenge, but it was about "If you do something in this field, look at what has gone before you and what you do should be better."
You were in your teens when you left the confines of Phonogram and Monsoon to sign a solo deal with Indipop in order to pursue complete artistic freedom. It was the sort of move you expect from someone who’s jaded by multiple bad record deals and business atrocities over a lengthy career span. How were you able to come to such a wise conclusion at such a young age?
What happened was I could see that there was a kind of battery hen mentality potentially rising to Monsoon and that was something I really didn’t want a part of because I was so inspired by what this genre had to offer. I felt I needed a much more controlled and spacious environment in which to evolve as an artist. It wasn’t really jadedness. It was just a sense that I couldn’t probably have that situation within a major label set-up at that time. It might be different now. It’s been so long since I’ve communicated with the majors on any serious level. It was also the reason why I decided not to release singles. That whole episode with Monsoon and Phonogram has really informed a lot of the journey I’ve taken, because business-wise, I’ve kept things within certain budgets. I’ve kept control and not released singles so I don’t get into that huge, escalated, expensive marketing game and so I can keep my creative agendas intact. That’s what I try to do in any scenario I put myself into. I realized that was my priority. I was trying to protect something special I had found in Monsoon that I didn’t want to let go of.
You often refer to yourself as both a creator and protector of your work.
It’s exciting for other people to support you because being a creator can be a very lonely existence. There are times when it feels very precarious. You’re going to live tomorrow on something you made today and there’s not necessarily anyone around to tell you whether it’s good, bad or indifferent. My feelings can vary greatly. One day, I’ll wake up and play a song I composed yesterday and think it’s great. The next day, I’ll play it and think it’s rubbish. That’s all to do with having the courage to face what’s inside you and say "This is my vision. You might like it. You might think it’s mad or bad or shouldn’t happen, but I’ve got to take that risk." There’s always this bravery that’s required and I think when you’re young and haven’t got the experience, you haven’t necessarily got a lot of perspective that this is a very, very hard thing to do. That’s why I was describing those psychological barriers I was facing as a vocalist at 19. But there were other barriers of other sorts to face as well and I’m lucky. I’m someone who likes working alone and likes crafting a song or album until it starts talking back to me and telling me what should happen next. I’m also lucky because I met Steve Coe with Monsoon. He produced and wrote a lot of the material and had 21 years of experience in the music business already. He was able to make the rollercoasters of emotional experience a little easier. At least he could offer some perspective and help me learn to be a writer and made sure my efforts were much more productive than perhaps they would have been had I been doing them on my own.
You’re married to Steve. I imagine that means Indipop is a partnership between the two of you.
I always think of Indipop as Steve’s and Moonsung [Chandra’s production and publishing company] as mine. He is very, very respectful and he revived the Indipop label so I could have complete control. My stuff on Indipop is very comfortable because I know all the business stuff will be taken care of and I don’t really have to worry about it. So, I don’t have to be quite so controlling because we know what the agenda is—we’re creating it together as writers. It’s a bit of a luxury working on Indipop. I’ve just done two EEPs for them—EEP1 and EEP2. I went back to Indipop to do those as experimental projects and it’s been great. I know all the work will be protected. Similarly, Steve knows that his work as a writer and producer on the albums I own that go through Real World will also be protected. We’re not going to get odd remixes cropping up that he doesn’t like and he knows the same kind of protection will occur on his side.
Given that Indipop represents a safe haven, I was surprised to learn that you took the very extreme measure of destroying your multitracks and masters from those early albums to prevent anyone from tampering with your vision. After all, they were in your possession and inaccessible to anyone else.
[laughs] It’s because they were just so heavy! Every time we moved, we had all these tapes and we knew we weren’t going to let them be remixed. Every time they’re remastered when reissued, usually the technology has moved on. That means the copies we’re remastering from are superior to the original mixes and what they get remastered into are superior to their original mixes. So, there didn’t seem to be any point to keeping all the tape. Tape deteriorates anyway, so it was just kind of a big clear out.
Did it represent a cathartic moment for you?
Yeah, it did. We kind of just left them out in the bins in the rain. [laughs] It was "We don’t ever have to do this again!" It was fantastic.
Given the eclectic nature of the EEPs, it’s obvious Indipop still lets you explore avenues you likely can’t elsewhere.
Yes, it does. It’s a nice, safe place to go home to. Doing the EEPs was a way of getting out of that voice and drone box I had been in for 10 years. It’s strange how the familiar becomes your territory, even if to other people it's strange territory. It becomes very difficult to step out of. I think most people would think that doing solo voice and drone albums with just a single vocal line is strange, adventurous and intimidating, but it becomes a safe haven given that I’ve done it for 10 years. So, I have to be brave to step out of it. Doing recordings with the Ganges Orchestra and having that other kind of anarchic input in a way means having less control because it’s collaboration, but it forces me into new territory and kind of breaks those barriers again. Recording for Indipop is a big luxury. It’s a great thing to be able to do.
Who is in the Ganges Orchestra?
The Ganges Orchestra is Steve Coe plus other musicians that he pulls in. In terms of its creative overview, it’s Steve Coe. It involves ideas I wouldn’t put on my albums because they don’t fit within the main concept or they’re a bit too wacky. It’s the sort of stuff that gets put in another file and if Steve really wants to do them, he has to wait for the next Ganges Orchestra project to come along. [laughs]
From a musical perspective, what were you trying to accomplish on the EEPs?
To make a series of sound experiments around an expanded concept of voice and drone. I think the Real World trilogy is very, very beautiful and very glossy. It certainly carries voice plus acoustic environment and treatment of voice in certain acoustic environments, the way that affects vocal techniques carries that capsule, not to its limit, but it’s a great way into that territory. It outlines what can be done in that field. But it is a fairly glossy sound and we haven't explored as much what would happen if we made the drones move a bit more. We started with AboneCroneDrone, but there was a little more raw energy to be discovered. A friend of ours introduced us to Japanese noise. I tend to lock myself away and concentrate on what I’m creating and not listen to a wide variety of sounds. But at that point, after not having listened to anything at all, I decided I was going to listen to anything and everything. I got into very crunchy, grungy, aggressive sounds because I saw that as a big antidote to what I’d been creating for the past 10 years. So, I wanted a bit more of that rawness and energy, but some of the structures where it’s the same in that it’s still exploration of voice. It’s still exploration of drone-based soundscapes. It was also an opportunity to get more familiar with hard disk recording which we haven’t really done until now. We’ve kind of been fans of two-inch and half-inch analog sounds for a long tine. It served that purpose as well.
Many perceive you as a serious, moody artist. But there’s a huge sense of humor at work on the EEPs.
[laughs] Yes, that’s partly me, but mostly Steve. I think my sense of humor comes out with the Ganges Orchestra. I tend to get too serious on my work. I guess that’s because it’s my name that carries them and no-one else. It gives me the freedom to share the blame a bit with the Ganges Orchestra. [laughs] And there’s no "You’re not allowed to say that" or "You can’t do that" within our writing sessions. Rather, it’s "If you can say you can’t do that, it’s on! We’re doing it." [laughs] Steve has an incredible sense of humor—and it’s a musical sense of humor. He really likes to poke fun at conventions by taking arrangements and turning them on their heads. He was the one in music college who got hauled up to show everybody why a composition worked even though it broke the rules. That’s just the way he’s been. It’s very, very inspiring and he has this approach to everything. Nothing is ever square.
You experiment with noise on the EEPs. Is it accurate to say you characterize noise as a twist on the definition of a drone?
Yeah, absolutely. I think I’ve broadened my sense of what a drone is. I used to think of it very much as a musical form and that it was a constant note. But then you get into the notion of a drone as a constant sound that creates interesting harmonic dances. Any interesting sound, apart from a square tone, just does. Any from an organic source does. We are surrounded by drones in that sense all the time. We’ve lost touch with our own sense of drone within early music such as Gregorian Chant and folk music from 500 years and backwards. Now, we seem to be creating it again by surrounding ourselves by electronic drones in all the machines we use. So, I think of it as a remarkably contemporary form given how old its roots are. In a way, I think it’s just coming back to biology. We are drones. We drone. The middle ear emits a drone all the time. The blood singing in your ears is a kind of drone. You can ignore that and get all symphonic and atonal for 500 years or so and then you have to come back to the drone.
How do you interpret the ubiquitous nature of these artificial, electronic drones we’re surrounded with today?
Reaction to anything depends on what’s between your ears, how imaginative you are and how responsive you are to what’s actually there. Often what’s there, although it’s artificial, is exciting. I have this experience as a musician of hearing melodies within those harmonic dances, so I’m not a purist. I’m not for organic sounds only. I think it’s an interesting aural space in which we’ve put ourselves and I’m interested to play with it and stretch it and make people aware of it, rather than try to ignore it and say that it’s bad. I think things like that are affecting the music we make into the next century. You get the Impressionists at the beginning of the 20th century who broke people’s sense of what form is. There were all sorts of consequences for the visual arts and our thinking as well. I think if we absorb different sorts of images and learn to make connections like that, then we think in a more creative way. I think the same is true for sound. If we get more creative in the way that we view apparently random sounds, it affects the way we think and enhances the strength of our minds.
When you released AboneCroneDrone, you said that one of the goals of the album was to help listeners understand the meaning of the drone. Do you see yourself as part educator and musician?
I just see it as sharing. I don’t see it as educating because I think a lot of people know this already. I also think that what I’m sharing is what almost comes out of my biology. It’s almost as though these musical realizations exist at a cellular level and they kind of occur to me as I’m playing around with the music. That means the knowledge that I’m sharing is universal. I’m not absorbing some very clever theory and attempting to prove it musically. It's less intellectual than that. What I’m doing is sharing and making connections to things that arrive naturally for anyone that plays around with these forms long enough. So, I think it would be a bit conceited of me to say that I’m an educator.
Many perceive a deep, spiritual element in your work. Is there a particular path you follow when creating your music?
I think singing is an action that goes very deep into people psychologically. The thing about your singing voice is that you can’t lie with it. I think that’s why singers can feel so vulnerable on stage. If you’re crying, laughing or having an off day, it will show in the tone of your voice and people can’t be as easily confused as they can be with just plain words. Therefore, I think there’s something very concretely special and truthful about singing. What happens with most singing is that it tends to get covered and obscured by the fact that there are so many other performers on the record or onstage. There are other musicians and maybe a veneer of "who wrote this song?" and "at what period in history?" and "Actually, we’re listening to this very interesting theme in the third movement that broke all the rules." When you say there is nothing here but a singer onstage, along with a drone that does nothing—a single note or single note and its fifth that does nothing—who sings alone over that and fills the space, what happens is that truthfulness becomes revealed again. Therefore, the connotation of a single voice and single voice with drone is more spiritual in the sense that it’s about the human condition.
It’s about truth because it’s an arena in which it is very hard to lie. I think it’s a connotation of voice and drone whether I had any spiritual content in my songs or not. Having said that, to engage in such an activity for 10 years has challenged me spiritually. It’s challenged me to say "Am I enough? What happens when I don’t feel I’m enough? What happens if I fail? What happens if I fail and can’t be honest about it?" There are all sorts of challenges that come back at me, not just as an artist, but also as a person. How truthful am I really willing to be and how truthful is it acceptable to be in a professional situation? And yet, if I’m not truthful, doesn’t that let people down on a personal level because it doesn’t allow them to be truthful? There are all sorts of issues there to grapple with. I’m delighted with that. That’s the kind of thing I became an artist for. To me, it’s a vocation. It’s about being challenged on all those levels, not just the intellectual and creative level.
Did the title Nada Brahma ["Sound is God"] represent a particular viewpoint on spirituality for you?
No, I just liked the idea that someone would have regarded sound as divine. I think it is divine in terms of the human voice for all the reasons we’ve been talking about. I also think there is something special about the fact that vibration can move something and change it without apparently destroying the form. I think sound does that to us on a very, very subtle molecular level. We’ve all experienced that change of mood when we hear a particular sound. In that sense, it’s a very special substance and is kind of magical and divine.
You recently faced some severe vocal problems. What did you go through and what was the process of recovery?
I did my first season of live concerts ever in ’92 because I finally wanted to tackle the live domain. I had a bunch of theories of what made a special performance. My first concert was me completely alone on stage. And I didn’t know it because I had never done live work, but really it kind of constituted running a marathon—to be onstage for an hour and a half with a break. If I wasn’t singing, nothing was happening. I didn’t talk at all between numbers, so it was me singing solidly and using some very challenging vocal techniques because I wanted to show the range of what I could do. And what happened was that my sinuses didn’t cooperate. At the end of ’92, I started to experience small problems like a small change in tone on my upper notes and a slight contraction of my range. I was feeling less comfortable with my throat and it got worse and worse and worse over a period of a couple of years. By the time I came to do AboneCroneDrone, it really, really hurt to sing. It really hurt.
All I could manage was an hour a day with very little warm-up. So, I would go into the studio for an hour and rush back home or rush ‘round the corner to a hotel and sleep and stay warm for the next 23 hours so I could do the next hour of the next day. I didn’t know what was wrong. I didn’t know why it was playing up. I went to see lots and lots of specialists and they couldn’t see what was wrong either. Eventually, I was diagnosed with chronic rhinitis and excess bone tissue that had grown up as my face was forming—that wasn’t helping either. So, I had surgery to remove excess tissue in my sinuses and also that extra bone. By that time, my muscles had fallen into bad habits and to some degree had atrophied because I hadn’t been doing much singing. So, after the surgery, my voice was only back 50 percent. It’s nearly back now. I still have a few stamina problems to overcome, but my range and tone are back and I’m pleased.
What did the experience teach you about your voice and yourself?
It taught me to value my voice. I had not exactly run it down, but I had taken it for granted. I hadn’t realized how many areas in my life I’ve come to completely depend on it. You talked about music being potentially spiritual and for me, nothing concentrates my mind like singing—even singing scales and just floating away on a single note is like meditation for me. So, suddenly, all that time, tremendous enjoyment and sense of home had gone. I think my identity as a person has become completely bound up in my sense of self as a singer which isn’t actually a very good thing, but I’ve been singing from the point my voice broke at the age of 12. I had grown up with it as being the thing that marked me out and made me special. It’s very easy to become identified with something like that. I never had another job. I have been a singer all my life professionally.
I had to relearn how to rely on other strengths and learn other things about myself. I had to identify other things about myself that were acceptable and make me worthwhile. I had to find other ways of meditating and calming myself down to come back to a sense of home. There were lots of others things I had to deal with. I also had to notice how heavily I was leaning on my voice and expecting myself to perform. This is a syndrome faced by a lot of singers who get into performing that can be very emotionally wearing and physically draining. But once you’re into touring or making a record, a lot of people depend on you being able to do it. There’s a sense that because they don’t understand it, you can pull it out of a hat anytime and you just love it. When it’s working well, you do just love it and it’s very exhilarating and no strain at all. But if things aren’t working well, it’s not like that. I started noticing when I was comfortable with things and when I wasn’t, and how to take actions to remedy those strains much, much quicker, rather than just expecting myself to do it.
The new music you’re working on is more singles-based. What brought you back to that path?
I never lost my enthusiasm for the mainstream format. I never lost my enthusiasm for the idea of three minute pop songs. It’s an incredible, rigorous form to express depth and breadth in such a tight, brief space of time. Some people do it exceptionally well. I’ve never lost my sense of excitement about that, so it’s taking all the depth I’ve been exploring these 18 years and going back to have another go at it.
Can you describe the sort of material you’re writing?
Noooooo. [laughs] I’m not letting anything go. I’m still writing and it wouldn’t be fair. It’s in change. But it’s too early for me to say.
You recently performed with the Afro Celt Sound System. What do you make of their approach?
They were very gracious and let me join in on a song. It’s wonderful what they do. Release is a real grower. It took me a little while to tune into all the levels of what they do. It’s extremely well-constructed and very exciting indeed. I love what they’re doing.
Recent years have seen acts such as Asian Dub Foundation, State of Bengal and Talvin Singh create some serious waves in Europe. Do you see their work as extensions of what you initiated with Monsoon?
I think inevitably that scene would have grown up whether or not Monsoon had come along. In a sense, they’re part of a social movement, but I’m not very familiar with it actually. A lot of what I’m doing is removed from the environment they’re creating in. For instance, Talvin’s stuff is very urban and club-orientated. Here I am out in the country, 100 miles away from London with absolute silence and green trees around me all the time. I think it shows in the music. I’ve really lost touch with what’s happening in the Asian scene.
I don’t have a great deal to say to the Asian media. Their approach to me has been very facile. They’re very interested in whether I have a big house and big car. They’re not interested in talking about the music. They’re more interested in that Bollywood-type gossip. For a long period of time, I refused to talk to them or give any Asian interviews at all. Then other times, I’d go back and say "Okay, it’s been 10 years. Maybe they’ve changed." And usually they haven’t. In the last round, they haven’t particularly. Because I’m so far removed from London and what I do is so far removed from that scene and social agenda, I’m an exception to the rule that no-one can quite explain. So, I just include myself out really. I don’t pay much attention to it and musically, I think it’s coming from a completely difference space.
You included "Sailor’s life" on Zen Kiss, a song associated with Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny. What led you to it?
I had been listening to a lot of folk recordings because some of them were drone based. And the first series of concerts I did, I only really had Weaving as my material. I’d written Weaving specifically to provide myself with material to do on stage, because if you look at the first five Indipop albums, obviously, they’re not possible or practical to do on stage. For instance, "One" on Roots and Wings has 22 tracks of vocals going. So, without a tape machine, I can’t do that on stage. As I started to expand out of the festival situation and into longer and longer performances, I was listening to a lot of folk stuff and found that "Sailor’s life" was written on roughly the same scale as "Ever so lonely/Eyes/Ocean." So, I started singing "Sailor’s life" after performing "Ever so lonely/Eyes/Ocean" on stage and making a kind of medley out of it. That's kind of how it got included on Zen Kiss. I liked the song and the way Sandy Denny did it.
Describe some of the commonalties between British Isles folk and Indian classical traditions.
If we include Ireland in that, there is an incredibly well-preserved sense of the solo performer plus drone or solo performer plus implied, unsounded drone. What that means is that the Irish still have a brilliant melodic sense. They just know a great melody when they hear it and that keeps them going forward in the their folk traditions. They tend to write very strongly from a melodic perspective. Whenever I performed in Ireland, I got an immediate response back from the audience. They understand the basic principle of listening to voice and drone in that you listen to the relationship between the voice note and the drone note and the harmonies between them—that play of intervals, the moving melodic line and the drone note. So, they’re kind of a pre-educated audience. It’s the only place outside India where I think that really exists. That’s why Irish singing is still so important, charismatic and such a powerful presence. When you set up a structure like a drone, you give the singer the ultimate power. The onus is completely on them to provide the interest and emotional color in the melody. Once the singer is up to that challenge, they can’t be beaten. They are very, very powerful. That structural similarity still exists in the musical cultures of Ireland and folk music of England. In the Indian tradition, the voice is, of course, the ultimate instrument. I think that’s the major linking factor between the two. That’s why I got so interested in folk. It had been a natural extension of the Indian vocal techniques I had fastened onto in the ‘80s.
Contrast the traditionalist and modern Indian perceptions of your work.
The ancient history response—as in the early ‘80s—was particularly from the older generation. There was this "Oh, you can’t do that and you’re watering down our culture" and all that kind of horror story stuff. And I said "Look, this is not museum piece stuff. It’s got to be living. It’s got to be relevant to us as a second generation, otherwise it’s just going to die a death. You’ve transplanted it to another environment and it’s got to adapt and survive in that environment." Of course, they weren’t convinced. But there were remarkably few voices like that. Most people were genuinely excited by the thought of people playing around with these old forms and finding new kinds of emotional contexts for them. Now, nobody says to me "You can’t do that." I think it’s partly the rise of world music as an accepted genre. We kind of accept the premise we are going to be putting these old sounds in a contemporary setting and that can be done in a myriad of ways structurally, musically, in terms of the instruments and so on. But it’s also that people expect me to be lateral. It’s just "That’s Sheila Chandra, what do you expect?" So, if you do it long enough, people stop bothering you.
One of your techniques I find particularly fascinating is the use of konnokol as a form of solo expression, rather than something used to guide or mirror other instruments.
Yeah, but every mridangam player is going to go mad at "Speaking in Tongues I, II or III," aren’t they? [laughs] That’s because there’s no set time cycle. They deliberately break the time cycle. Percussionists find those pieces really, really annoying. I’ve deliberately done that all the way through—not picked up on what the rules are and broken them to suit.
How have your records been received in India?
I don’t think the Indipop records are available there, but it’s being talked about. It has been suggested that this should be the case. I have the feeling that at the time of release, India wouldn’t have known what to make of them. Post-MTV, possibly they would. Now, there are so many avant-garde dance companies coming out of India, that possibly there is enough of an alternative arts community for my work to be taken in on the same level. I think what I do has been informed by the fact that I was born and brought up in Britain. My sense of what is artistic and what is tasteful and what is exciting has been very much informed by that British eccentric kind of archetype. In terms of humor, the easy example would be The Pythons—Monty Python. There’s a kind of attitude here of championing the underdog and also being interested in things that are different. In India, traditionally, you are a link in the chain of a family and the individual is subservient to the line of the family. I think that my artistic agenda is so different that it hasn’t been possible for my recordings to go back to India and really be taken in on the level they should be. That might change. I think it probably will.
Your music has influenced many second-generation Indians, myself included. It’s served as a path back to discovering traditional Indian musics and other cultural institutions rebelled against in one’s youth. For lack of a better term, you’ve helped make Indian culture "cool." What’s your take on that?
I think there’s a difference between rebelling and being rootless. It’s fine to say "Look guys, this doesn’t work in this context at all and I’m not going to conform to it because it’s a rule you brought over from somewhere else." But that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water and that we shouldn’t know where we come from or what the rules are so we can break them. I’m delighted if people find something relevant or find a way back to Indian classical music if they’ve been listening to my music, because I love Indian classical music. I think for me, Indian music stands as an entity on its own that can be transferred into this century or the next, or this country or another. It is a beautiful form that will always touch people. It’s more than interesting. It’s something for us to learn from. It’s a complete system in itself. Personally, I never rebelled against that. What I rebelled against as a teenager was the injunction not to think against the rules we have set in place here. I think there’s a difference between being able to take in a musical culture and play with it and being put in a culture where with music, or otherwise, one is not being allowed to step outside of boundaries. That for me, is the difference.
