Bio:
Susheela Raman as singer, composer and curator moves between genres, across frontiers into new spaces with uncanny ease. Born to South Indian parents in London and raised in Australia, she is about release her seventh studio album (‘Ghost Gamelan') and is known for her beguiling and her incandescent and otherworldly stage presence . As the Guardian said Susheela is “wildly original, passionate and dangerous” . A song-driven artist, she has the rare ability to shape-shift from a Sanskrit Mantra to a Throbbing Gristle cover and to one her own borderless compositions, which vary from roots-infused melodic to twelve-tone and experimental. Though her music has sometimes been described as ‘World’, categorisation does sit easily with her and prefers to call it ‘unearthly’, which captures more of its magical and enigmatic character.
Susheela’s musical accomplice throughout her journey has been Sam Mills, a founder member of 80’s cult post-punk experimentalists 23 Skidoo. Perhaps the most ‘post-punk’ aspect of her music is its denial of restrictions and the emphasis on continuous change and evolution in her sound. Whilst driven to experiment, Susheela also never neglects her gift for delivering a melody straight to the heart. Susheela and Sam met in London in 1997 and have since created a string of ambitious cross-cultural works; albums and live projects often exploring different dimensions of South Asian music, whether classical, folk or contemporary. Musicians from South and South East Asia, West and East Africa, Russia, Greece, Turkey, and North Africa have all featured in their collaborations, including their own recent multi-artist creation, ‘Sacred Imaginations’ at the Barbican in 2017. Serious ongoing collaborations include Russian polyphonic singers, Byzantine chant, Indian folk and classical virtuosos, Contemporary string players, and Pakistan’s very finest Sufi Qawali singers.
Susheela’s iconoclastic take on her Indian roots bypassed the ingrained hierarchies of the classical music field as she forged her own approach to the tradition in which she was schooled when young. When she first performed in Chennai (Madras), The Hindu newspaper took half a page to denounce her for corrupting the classics; ‘dancing like a woman possessed by the devil’ and ‘misleading our youth into an alien hybrid culture’, despite their admiration for her voice! Nevertheless she has also earned huge popularity as well as notoriety in South India for her re- interpretation of songs from the ecstatic Bhakti tradition of South India, particular for her fission and fusion of these works with Sufi Qawali: A particularly Dionysiac performance in 2012 at the South Bank in London spawned 5-star reviews in the Guardian and the Financial Times as well as, more interestingly, viral videos on whatsapp shared numberless times amongst the South Indian diaspora. Bringing different audiences into juxtaposition, playing on multiple levels, is exactly how her music works.
Raman and Mills are now focussing strongly on their ‘Ghost Gamelan’ album, a work with gamelan players led by ‘kontemporer’ composer Gondrong Gunarto to be released globally in June on all formats by Naive Records /Believe Digital. Recorded in Surakarta and London with a unique, mercurial sonority which somehow succeeds in aligning Susheela’s own melodic, harmonic and lyrical gifts with the delirious microtonality and virtuosity of the Javanese Gamelan. As Susheela says “people underestimate the importance of Gamelan in all contemporary music; it has informed all smart music-makers from Debussy and Satie to John Cage, Miles Davis, Steve Reich and Sonic Youth. Its slippery DNA is on everything from Modal Jazz to EDM, so playing with the gamelan is more about connectedness than any kind of exoticism. Bringing a South Indian perspective to it also uncovers another kind of resonance.” The record also graced by one of her musical heroes, the fearlessly inventive This Heat drummer and singer Charles Hayward, a pathbreaker for many in the the avantgarde and experimental music world. Susheela has performed live with her ‘Ghost Gamelan Orchestra’ at Roundhouse, London and had performances scheduled later in 2018 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and at Peter Brooks Bouffes du Nord Theatre in Paris. She will meanwhile be performing the songs from the album live with a string quartet from the London-based Phaedra Ensemble in Paris in June.
Raman and Mills both feel this is a game-changing album for them. Says Raman “we have been getting incredible reaction for its sound and also for the songs themselves which the best we have ever written” With the new album coming out Susheela is looking forward to performing it around the world and to continuing her adventures in South East Asia, Europe, Australia and beyond. It is a thrilling new chapter in a unique musical journey.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).