Arushi Jain puts it to me bluntly: “Please don’t call me an Indian classical musician.” This characterisation has come out of the attention she has been getting for her debut album, Under the Lilac Sky. “A lot of the press that has come out on me has been talking about how I’m an Indian classical musician who’s converting Indian classical music to the synthesizer and that’s not true,” she agonises. As I find out, the album is a way of combining her two musical loves, modular synths and Indian classical music, but doing so with both of these forms on an equal footing.

Jain fell in love with singing at an early age, studying and performing classical vocal music in Delhi until she was 18, at which point she went to the US to study computer science, and the singing ground to a halt. “I stopped music altogether when I got there,” she says. “So much of it was based on Indian folk, Indian classical, Indian film, ghazals. That’s what I sang, and I didn’t know how to sing that in the US.” This remained the case until she took a class in sound synthesis. “It enabled me to approach music from a completely different perspective, which made more sense given where I was in life.” She instinctively started manipulating her voice using synthesizers but soon found herself captivated by the instrument itself. “Once I got my modular synth I became more interested in how to write music and then supplement that with my voice, rather than the other way round.”

Jain’s first releases were a number of experimental EPs recorded under the name of ओस (pronounced ‘os’, and a synonym of Arushi, both meaning ‘dewdrop’) in which she strived for a musical identity. Under the Lilac Sky resolves that identity, which is why it’s the first release credited to her birth name. It’s a concept album, recorded and to be played at sunset. It was inspired by four evening ragas, those she confides have a “certain energy” that make them perfect for dusk. Throughout the six songs of the album Jain sings alaps or sargams of these ragas, as well as manipulating her voice to create calming soundscapes; sometimes her voice works alongside her synths, but at other times she allows her synths to take all the limelight, creating bright evocative melodies sitting upon electronic drones that seem to imitate a similar effect in Indian ragas. In the music there is a clear love of Indian classical music, but also of electronic music pioneers like Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Suzanne Ciani, with Jain finding a harmony between these forms, where they feel in constant dialogue. But more than anything, you can sense pure joy on this album, and music’s important function as communication. 

As a student in the US, Jain felt she couldn’t perform Indian classical music as people wouldn’t have understood its forms, its phrasing, its words if you like. The discovery of modular synthesis gave her a vocabulary that could be understood in her new home, and allowed her to create a form of music that both signals her Indian heritage and her status as a US resident. This discovery, of a means to communicate her dual identity, and do it through music, provides a sense of wonderment that permeates through this record, and has allowed her to move away from her previous alias and record simply, honestly as Arushi Jain. “The music feels more like me, I want my name to be on there,” she concludes.   

Read the review of Under the Lilac Sky in the Songlines Reviews Database 

This article originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today