Sonic Kinship by Keshav Batish

Excerpt from liner notes—

"I began writing Sonic Kinship with the sense
that every musical note carries a character
shaped through its relationships with others. I
was interested in how closer attention to
differences in the timing and tuning of notes
could deepen their character, evoke more
profound feelings, and, as a result, better
facilitate a healing experience. I would like to
share with you, in brief, what thoughts fueled
this work.

I am deeply influenced by the time-feels of
alaap-the unbound melodic expansion of raga
in Hindustani music-and "melody-rhythms," a
neologism pianist Andrew Hil coined to
describe a mode of playing that treats melody
and rhythm as two facets of a related action...

Intonationally, I expanded beyond the twelve
equal-tempered notes found on a modern piano
by drawing from the Indic concept of shruti,
meaning "discernible diference." I retuned the
acoustic and synthesized instruments used on
these recordings to emulate shrutis of certain
ragas, the melodic forms of Hindustani music.
Some songs, like Deep Sea and Melow Yelow,
are explicitly raga-based, while others, like
Gaan Melan and Teevra Komal, explore how
shrutis can be abstracted from their context.

music-maker

keshavbatish.com