Can you create music that can find a home on both sides of the Indian Ocean beyond the cliché of fusion? Are Indian forms compatible with their African Counterparts? Can song and the spoken word in a variety of languages make sense? Is there a soundscape lodged in the tonalities of string instruments that can find a new resonance? Insurrections, a collection of twelve compositions, is the product of a poetry-music collaboration that addressed these questions, that was about the relationship between word, voice, expression and sound around shared social and political concerns between India and South Africa. For the poets, it was slightly easier.
There is a sense of disquiet and rebellion in the air as nature fights back at humanitys betrayal. The more this was sensed the more obvious were the new forms of disquiet about the kind of societies we have created- those who work with nature and its angers, the miners, the farmers , the women out there in the fields and crags are in rebellion too. The lines came, the poems flowed. But could they become songs? This is always easier said than done- any good musician can improvise around a given scale and without difficulty provide hours on end of guitar, sarod or string-related solos. Could such spontaneity be disciplined into composition and song?
The project, which began in 2010 as a conversation between South African poet Ari Sitas and Indian singer Sumangala Damodaran, first involved the creation of an interactive, collective poetry text between Ari Sitas and Pitika Ntuli from South Africa and Sabitha T.P and Vivek Narayanan from India. The music happened in three remarkable sessions: an encounter in Delhi by Sumangala Damodaran, Neo Muyanga, Sazi Dlamini and Susmit Sen, provided the first soundscapes in Susmits studio in the beginning of 2011. This was followed up in Durban, between Jürgen Bräuninger and Sazi Dlamini, in Delhi by Sumangala Damodaran, Tapan Mullick and Pritam Ghosal and in Cape Town by Malika Ndlovu, Tina Scouw, Brydon Bolton and Ari Sitas. There was also, by the end of the year a Durban encounter which involved all the South African participants and Sumangala Damodaran. Malika Ndlovu and Tina Schouw took over the management of the project from Durban onwards.
The Insurrections ensemble re-gathered in October 2012 for two remarkable performances at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town directed by Neo Muyanga and Sumangala Damodaran and a subsequent consolidating session at the Electro-acoustic studio of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban where Jürgen Bräuninger started the magic of producing this CD. Intense and spontaneous musical improvisation have characterised the creative process and produced the compositions in this album. It happened because a range of creative people were called together, some who can sing and play music , others who craft words, most importantly all who had faith and believed in the madness that the experiment entailed. The process involved some singing and playing, lots of listening, followed by more singing and playing around and outside words. Unbridled conversations became possible as the fretless sarod, cello, bows and the double bass interacted with each other, with guitars and drums and with Indian and African voicings, even as resonances as well as contrasts emerged in melodic and rhythmic principles.
The compositional styles range from the traditional to the avant-garde, from the raga-based and Zulu scale based explorations to electronica.
CD Digipak with 28-page booklet
SAHO, 2012
Country: South Africa
Good condition
C08
(X)
