Headline : Let Amirtha Kidambi’s New Monuments be your call to action

Read more from the original article on here at www.thefader.com.

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For most of her career, Amirtha Kidambi didn’t refer to herself as an activist, in the same way she didn’t consider herself a Carnatic singer despite studying the form for years. Both of these practices, she explained in a 2017 interview, are lifelong callings. And Kidambi, while channeling both a revolutionary spirit and elements of Carnatic music — a form of classical Indian songcraft rooted in ancient Hindu traditions — in her explosive strain of free jazz, has tended to follow her own, separate vision. In her earliest works, she sang strictly in phonemes, avoiding not only English words but also the symbolically significant syllables associated with Carnatic ragas and the tropes of jazz scatting (e.g. “daba-dooby”). “I wanna be a horn!” she said in the same interview. “I want to have the freedom to be liberated from text when I’m into a solo or improvising.”

In recent years, however, she’s stepped into the role of activist with fervor. During 2020’s George Floyd protests, she organized musicians to preempt potential violence from cops in riot gear with the force of their instruments. An active member of New York City’s DIY scene since her arrival in 2009, she now undeniably occupies a leadership position.

New Monuments, Kidambi’s third album at the helm of her rotating collective Elder Ones, is both an artistic tour de force and the most incisive clarion call in her catalog. A four-part ode to “all those who tirelessly organize and resist against insurmountable headwinds,” it finds Kidambi incorporating more text into her music than ever before, stirring strands of traditional singing into a stew of extended technique, using repeated phrases to articulate messages too urgent to transmit via abstract sound.

About a third of the way through the project’s opener, “Third Space,” for instance, her squeaks and moans fade out along with a theremin-like synth and Lester St. Louis’s frantic cello bowing, making way for a steady groove in the bass-and-drum rhythm section (Eva Lawitz and Jason Nazary, respectively) that’s mirrored by Matt Nelson’s soprano sax and a morphing mantra from Kidambi: “You/They/We don’t belong here.”

Read more from the original article on here at www.thefader.com.

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