BA Podcast #81: Arushi Jain!

Modular synths, Indian classical music, and more

Before we begin, a question: If I put together an anthology of interviews from the Burning Ambulance podcast, would you buy it? It would include transcripts of my conversations with (in alphabetical order) Tim Berne, Anthony Braxton, Peter Brötzmann, Regina Carter, Muriel Grossmann, Nduduzo Makhathini, Branford Marsalis, Myra Melford, Allison Miller, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, David Murray, Linda May Han Oh, Tomeka Reid, and Wadada Leo Smith. I’d probably charge $10 for an ebook version, and $20 for a paperback. If that sounds interesting and valuable to you, let me know either with a comment or an email, and if I think demand is sufficient, I’ll work on it. (I use Trint for transcription, but that only gets me about 60-75% of the way; there’s still significant cleanup to be done before the files are ready to be read.) Who knows? If it really takes off, there might be a second or even a third volume. I’ve done 80 episodes so far…

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As I’ve mentioned in the last two posts about it, I put the podcast on pause at the end of 2022, for a variety of reasons (among other things, I moved across the country, I started a new job, and I wrote a book — In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor, coming to a bookstore near you this summer). But now that I’m settled in here in Montana, it’s back! The first episode of this current “season” featured a conversation with pianist Ethan Iverson, and the second was an encounter with bassist Rufus Reid. On this episode, my guest is modular synth composer Arushi Jain. Click here to listen.

I first learned about Arushi Jain three years ago, when most people who are aware of her work did. Her 2021 album Under The Lilac Sky was extremely beautiful, six tracks of droning, pulsing synth music with her vocals kind of floating in the middle like she was singing from the middle of an isolation tank. It was entirely created with a modular synth rig that she constructed and programmed, but the compositions were based on ragas from the Indian classical tradition, and like many ragas, the album was meant to be heard at a particular time of day, in this case while the sun was setting. 

Under The Lilac Sky was described as her first full-length album, but she had also put out a four-song EP, Just A Feeling, in 2018, documenting the earliest stages of developing her sound, and another four-track release, With & Without, in 2019, where each track was inspired by a specific raga, although with that one, she says on the album’s Bandcamp page, “I didn’t always follow the rules of the ragas, I’m sure those who know this art can hear that, and maybe purists won’t approve.”

There’s also a companion release, With & Without (Golem Version), which features two remixes of tracks from the original album for some kind of virtual reality dance piece, and then a 46-minute soundtrack to the piece.

Her music is still evolving. At the end of this month, she’s putting out a new album, Delight, on which she’s not working just with the modular synth. She’s also gotten people to play flute, saxophone, classical guitar, cello and marimba and sampled those parts and incorporated them into the tracks, which are also much more conventionally song-like than her previous work. And the vocals and lyrics are much more up front as well. Delight isn’t a pop album, but it’s absolutely more directly communicative than her previous work.

We had a really interesting conversation. We talked about her background singing Indian classical music with her family, how she came to electronic music when she arrived in America to go to college, how modular synths actually work, which I’m still not 100 percent sure I understand, how her live performances have evolved, and even a little bit about her visual presentation and how the music she makes relates to her Indian identity – or doesn’t. So click here to listen to my conversation with Arushi Jain.

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation, edited for clarity. It’s only one question and its answer, because her answers tend to be long and informative.

So when you're setting up for a performance, do you kind of say, okay, I’m going to — I’m only going to bring these five modules with me, and that will determine the character of tonight’s show, you know, or something like that? Like, how does that work?

No, that’s like — that’s definitely not [laughs]. Okay. So my performance philosophy, I think — I have performed, like, a lot in the past couple of years, I think, but I’m still formulating it. I’m not fully there. And, like, I need, I want it to be more. But anyways, I’ll describe what it is right now. A lot of my performance philosophy right now is tied to my studio philosophy. So — and this is perhaps the issue with it, because I’m trying to recreate what I did in the studio in the performance. Because I write songs. I write, like, precise compositions that are painstakingly written out with a pen and paper. You know, there’s melodic integrity to the stuff I’m doing. It’s not random. A lot of Eurorack music is random. People use random chord generators. I don’t know, like, whatever. It’s just — it’s machine-made. The melodies are made by the machine, and that’s the fun of it. I mean, there’s some programming for sure, people putting notes into the sequencer, like if you think about, for example, Suzanne Ciani, she composed that music and then put it into her sequencer, and then her sequencer is playing that and feeding pitch into her oscillator. So people are composing, for sure, but like, there’s so many limitations to the sequencer that I just struggle with, which is the timing, the in-between. How do I say that? The rhythm is often hard to make super-complex or the length of it is limited depending on the sequencer you have. I just think it’s extremely tedious to put in like a five-minute song, sometimes seven-minute song into the sequencer. So I wrote Under The Lilac Sky by playing the keys and by writing on paper and singing. And same with Delight, it’s written more from like a “I’m a composer” kind of perspective. And I do kind of go from one stage to the other where I write out all of this stuff and it’s like, perfectly arranged — arranged perfectly according to me. And then I take that, and then I get to the next phase where I’m putting on a different hat altogether, and I’m like, okay, now we’re going to build a system that’s going to play this, and we’re going to design this out. And it’s like, these are two separate stages for me. And a lot of people don’t work like this. I’ve spoken to other friends who use modular and they just don’t work like that. They’re like, Oh, interesting. Like, I do sound design as I’m writing the melodies and... I don’t know why it is that I break it up like this, but for me, it is like because when I’m writing the melodies, I’m super in the music. Like, I’m listening to the raga a lot and I’m listening to recordings of artists I admire, maestros in Indian classical music. I’m going back to compositions I’ve learned for like vocal compositions. I’m, like, immersed and my goal is to immerse myself in it so I can, like, be it in whatever capacity I can. You know? So I think I treat that as a separate stage of the writing process. So when I come to — I’m just describing my studio process because then I’ll take it back to the performance. So and then I do the sound design and like, to be honest, that sound design piece, it’s really hard to create that again in the performance space because it happens super slowly. It happens over a period of many months sometimes, and it happens through a series of many patches, like a lot of different experimentation on, what if I take this module and connect it to that one, or introduction a lot of times of modules that are important to the sound of what eventually becomes the record. So once I’ve written the record, I have these modules that are my important modules for the record. And then I’m like, I have all of this compositional data that I’m like, okay, this is what I need to play. Because I’m playing a song. I’m not...the improvisation comes more on the sound design. Like, live loop this certain section, you know what I mean? I’m going to take this initial compositional data and I’m going to live loop it to something. It’s always different, but it’s never, ever going to be the same with this instrument because there is, at the end of the day, a certain amount of chance and randomness that the human brain is just not capable of fully understanding. Like, I might start an envelope slightly late in a cycle and it’s going to change the entire end output because that envelope could be modulating, like, five different things. I don’t know — I’m just saying that there’s chance and it’s never exactly the same. And how my performance feels different or is improvised is more like, live looping. Definitely on the singing stuff, like, that’s all improvisational, but the live looping modules have a loop. Incoming data or like, more granulated or I’m performing it live. And by that I mean oftentimes I have envelopes on the filters and the amplitude stuff. But I also play that live. So by that I mean I’m often turning the knobs according to what I want to hear. Like, if I really like the way one of the melodies are sounding, one of the melody voices are sounding, I’ll just increase the sustain on it. I don’t know, it’s just like — you’re listening, you know? A lot of performance for me is just really listening to what is going on and then trying to figure out how to highlight the parts that sound the most beautiful for the moment that we’re in. And it’s actually quite exhausting. Like, after an hour of doing that, I’m tired because it is like, it’s funny because I’m not moving that much when I’m onstage, but I get to focus so much because you’re just in your ear. And that’s my biggest — that’s a concern I have with the way I perform, because I just think that people probably think it’s boring because I’m just standing there and looking at this instrument and doing something that they can’t understand, like, what’s going on? So that’s my current philosophy on performance is, I basically redo what I’m doing in the studio because I play songs and I don’t know what else to do about that. And like, there’s certain things that from a sound design perspective that is in my albums that I can’t really recreate onstage, so they don’t make it to stage, and I’m trying to figure out what to do with that right now because I’m like, how do I bring this to stage?

That’s it for now. See you next week!