MUMBAI: Sanoli Chowdhury’s new EP for United Sound Records, A Distant Meadow is a soul-stirring and moody mix of elegy, renunciation and aspiration set to ambient soundscapes, slow trip-hop beats and a gathering sense of survival from the last vestiges of surrender.
There is a touch of Beth Gibbons to this Indian singer’s voice that perfectly suits the smooth ‘trans-Portishead’ sound world she has created. A Distant Meadow consists of four self-written and majorly self-performed tracks and one seminal cover and releases exclusively on Spotify on June 25. You can listen to it here.
The title track sets the scene perfectly, poignantly capturing the themes, style and sensibility that course through each song, while ‘Mediocre Movements’ and ‘’Sculpted Failures’ make brittle art from the throes of resignation. Sanoli’s voice calls on you for sympathy throughout as you listen, and extends through the keyboards, and various atmospherics she creates within which to house it. With occassional embrace like touches of acoustic guitar from Leslie Charles and impressive drum cameos from Prabhu Muraleedharan, these stealthily composed free-form pieces attain and define new shapes for experience.
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Bangalore-based musician Gautam David adds texture, colour and flavour with genteel saxophone on two of the pieces, but it is naturally Sanoli’s own perspective that focuses our attention. At times she seems world weary, and close to broken, while at others, hers is the sound of the youthful and quest-ridden suddenly attaining wisdom.
Her cover of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is a thing of wonder and gentle revelation, as she emphasises the warped lullaby within the song and honours the sense of affirmation contained within. Her decisive ‘yep’ at the end of the song is another delight and surprise, and the sudden near chirpiness of its tone allows for closing track ‘Halfway Home’ to seductively raise anyone’s submerged or fallen spirits, as drums co-ordinate around spiralling electronica and the EP gains a new shape and structure, having reached a point of continuance, or possible beginning.
Produced by Sanoli Chowdhury and co-produced by Oskar Vizan, A Distant Meadow is a place of peace where the sparse and tasteful music provided becomes its own language, its own way of communicating. This five-spell incantatory release from Vinod Gadher’s United Sound Records is one of the most exciting for an Indian talent in 2021.
