The duo use their instruments as conduit of the third culture experience: where colonial burden and cultural inheritance is translated into something anew.
Pavement is washed, rice flour is ground and dusted in repetitive lines, orbiting around a regular grid of points, with no two curved lines overlapping. This is Pulli Kolam: a complicated Tamil art form appearing at the threshold of houses and places of worship across South India. The act is in-part ancient daily ritual, complex mathematics, ephemeral storytelling and a practice of patience.
This precise drawing of sacred geometry makes the cover art and guides the sounds of Syncretic, the debut full-length from Australian duo of Carnatic violinist Bhairavi Raman, and mridangam player Nanthesh Sivarajah. Just as the lines of the kolam extends from memory to new decorative patterns, the duo transform the thousand-year discipline of Carnatic music into something fluid and of frayed possibility, all while honouring its technical rigour.
“Awakening” begins the album with a subtle sruti, a drone foundational to the Carnatic music form. Raman’s violin strokes loops of song over this hum, akin to the chanting of Vedic practices that shaped her early listening. The album becomes increasingly dense, and by “Unfolding” Sivarajah meets her with his measured and intricate thrums on the skin of the mridangam drum. His pulses keep us conscious while Raman expands her sound world with violin loops, delays, dissonant layers and spatialised audio. It’s experimental sound-making tethered to the heirlooms of deep time and their shared Tamil lineage.
The heart of the work is their interpretation of the Tamil poem “Thunbam Nergayil,” a piece of sorrow and reckoning with the grief of the world. As we exist in this contemporary moment of witnessing ongoing horrors and being called to action, Raman’s song allows us some salve as her bow laments and Sivarajah’s tala— rhythmic cycles— keep us steadfast, present. Syncretic is divinely informed but not assertive in its faith. Listening to Raman and Sivarajah traverse the thresholds of musical tradition without relying on words or dogma, makes a sonic ingress for the listener to find their own spiritual devotion.
Each day, the kolam is disturbed by wind, footfall, insects consuming the tiny grains of flour. It’s eventually washed away, and the process begins again. With that, Raman and Sivarajah close the album with the fervent and cyclical “kindling,” the stuff of beginnings. The repetition of musical phrases remind us that within us is ancestral memory and experimental query guiding us towards the possibility and sweetness of விடுதலை - freedom. Despite violent attempts of erasure, our songs are in our marrow, ready to be called upon and interpreted.
Words by Shareeka Helaluddin