Tamil Londoner Susheela Raman has established her place as one of the most creative artists to emerge from the South Asian diaspora. Blessed with a mesmeric voice and and arresting presence, Susheela has enraptured countless listeners with her own songs and with her interpretations of songs from her Indian roots.
She makes the lines on the map dissolve; a South Indian sensibility radiates through her happily hybrid Euro-Afro-Asian musical landscape, just as an Indian voice is infused with a Londoner’s feeling for rock, blues, soul.
Susheela’s ability to sing her way between musical worlds and thereby to create her own, has few parallels. She is moving with the tide of the times: India is now a centre of gravity within the Anglophone world, and is increasingly in the global spotlight. Finding sophisticated and adventurous pathways between Indian and global culture is the real challenge; one which she boldly and instinctively meets.
“In the last few years I have been playing in India a lot and discovering new sounds. I’ve also started a club in London called OUTERINDIA to make a platform for visionary work connected to the Subcontinent; our dream is that OUTERINDIA will become a label and web resource as well as a moveable musical feast. We are starting in London but there is no reason we can’t take it around the world.”
With a justified reputation as an incandescent live performer, Susheela has also made four classic albums, ‘Salt Rain” (2001), ‘Love Trap’ (2003) ‘Music for Crocodiles’(2005) and ‘33 1/3’ (2007), each charting a personal relationship with musical history and her own role as a conduit where musical oceans meet. Each Susheela album is a big vision that retains its freshness and uniqueness for years to come.
Her new offering ‘VEL’, which means ‘spear’ in Tamil, will be released in early 2011. Meanwhile, one of its lead tracks, ‘Raise Up”, is offered as a Digital Download EP along with three remixes that takes Susheela’s powerful anthem into exciting new terrain.
Susheela:
“The new album I have just made is half English, Half Tamil. ‘VEL’ as a record documents my own journey, as a European with South Indian ancestry, into the heartland of Tamil music. This is music which is less about refinement than about the intensity of feeling. It’s a world where you have to make the shared feeling in the music real and manifest.”
This suits Susheela who has always made music a vehicle of emotion with the same intensity of purpose that she offers herself and her music and to her audience. Who else can deliver a Tamil devotional poem from the thirteenth century and a Captain Beefheart song from 1978 and capture the heart with both? The key is that she makes them her own and then shares them, fashioning both into spears that penetrate the soul.
“I don’t want to respect these artificial barriers between music, I want to channel everything into the experience. . The music of the subcontinent is hugely varied and is always changing. It always has new dimensions to explore. Talk of ‘fusion’ sound like a compromise between unmoving cultural blocs. But music is not like that here, or anywhere. Music is like a Goddess that is always changing its mind, never straightforward. To earn her blessings and stay close to her, musicians have to try new things.”
“From a personal viewpoint there is always a journey of discovery. As you go deeper into the culture, away from the mainstream, you find whole areas of music that are less known and which command you to bring them into the light. A few years ago I started to spend a lot more time in South India. I was drawn very much to the music world of Tamil devotionalism (‘bhakti’), to the ecstatic music of the popular religion. As a performer, its open-hearted emotion and its ecstatic trance dimension made a connection with me that was very natural. This music is really at the heart of Tamil culture. I sang in temples and at festivals and people were happy. The first time we played these songs in Europe I could see that the intensity of feeling translated very powerfully. I had two amazing teachers in Chennai. Once they realised that I was serious and could sing the music with both the musicality and the huge energy it demands, they taught me without circumspection. It was a great privilege for me.
“ ‘Raise Up’ is an English song that is inspired by the experience of singing this Tamil devotional music. “Raise up your Hands” means to embrace life, to reach out for something beyond yourself, because of the life force that is in you. We recorded the song last summer in New York. What happened was we were there for a big outdoor concert and were onstage with two amazing Rajasthani musicians, Nathoo Solanki, on drums and Kutle Khan who sings on the track. This was a new song for us and when we performed, it was so powerful that we booked a studio the next day to record it and capture that energy. It’s very live, it rocks very hard and is so immediate.”
It’s a storming track and you can hear the energy and urgency that she inspires in her musical collaborators.
About the remixers: Susheela says
“Dr. Das was formerly the bass player of the Asian Dub Foundation and has an amazing feeling for Dub and Bass. He recreates the song his own way and then takes it into deep dub territory. Dr Das played at the opening night of the club we have started in London called Outerindia and was brilliant. I look forward to doing more work with him. Hit By A Rock is a London producer who worked extensively on our new album and makes his own Dubstep mixes. His remix of ‘Raise Up” is really powerful, very elemental. I love the way both these guys have embraced the assymeteric 7/8 rhythm of the song and made something totally original that really grooves.”
‘Raise Up’ is a hors d’oeuvre for an amazing record and a bold new step in Susheela Raman’s musical journey.