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In the last two decades, electronic producer and multi-instrumentalist Karsh Kale’s career graph has seen a steady rise. He has now acquired the status of a consummate musician, turning every project he touches, into gold and more. His tours — a performance for Barack Obama, associations with musicians such as Alicia Keys, Herbie Hancock and Norah Jones — and sporadic but mostly adventurous and prolific albums have cemented his position in the world music circuit as someone who can straddle a variety of genres with equal ease. No one merges Hindustani classical music with ambient electronic rock like Kale does.
His latest project, however, is more personal. Coming after a five-year gap (his last album was Cinema in 2011), it is titled Up and is a result of his travels between Brooklyn and Mumbai, and finding moments of solitude only when he was “up in the air”. “After Cinema, things kind of changed. I was coming to India 12-13 times a year, compared to once a year prior to that. Each commute became a roller coaster. There were various ups and downs, metaphorically and otherwise. And it was in this space that the album was conceived — between being with my daughter in New York and travelling to India. That was the catalyst which resulted in this album,” says Kale, about the music for which he has made a conscious effort to stay close to his own roots.
“Now more than ever, I am honest about where I come from rather than projecting an ideal scenario or aesthetic which maybe the projection of the reality. My roots are the only real grounding I have. So when it comes to creating my own music, there is an element to rooting it all back to where I am come from. If I do that I am able to go as far as I want to,” says Kale, who will perform at The Lost Party, Lonavala on February 25.
The songs were created in a variety of head spaces, ignoring trends around him, while he just followed his instinct. “It was a place more honest than the others,” says Kale, who has collaborated with a variety of musicians for the album.
The result is heady and includes 10 songs. Play, Kale’s collaboration with Chinese pop sensation Sa Dingding, who sings in Mandarin and creates her own language along the way in a song that uses a lot of ambient sounds. Warren Mendonsa’s delicious riffs with Benny Dayal’s voice follows a Carnatic classical route in Shiva. Line of blue is brilliant orchestration and has Kale pounding on the tabla. There’s a collaboration with sarod player Alam Khan titled Wake, a delicate Shyam with Monali Thakur and a sultry Snowflake with Papon and Ranjit Arapurakal, and Ajay Prasanna’s flute.
Almost throughout, the album sounds absolutely on the money. “All of the collaborators were personal relationships first. When I create music I create it in the context of how I want to hear it and not the music that should be out there,” says Kale.
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