Listen to previews of my upcoming album, REINHERITANCE

REINHERITANCE

To Aretha - alterity in reverence

To Aretha Preview

To M.S. - raga kalyani

To M.S. Preview

To Ornette Preview

The album REINHERITANCE deals with the idea that one of the ways ancestral tradition is simultaneously reproduced and radically transformed is through repeated acts of inheritance. In this album, I respond to three of my musical ancestors: Ornette Coleman, M.S.
Subbulakshmi, and Aretha Franklin. Each of these responses is not only a piece of music, but also an act of inheritance in real time. I do this not by trying to recreate their work, but by offering my presence to theirs, creating a musical space that fuses past, present, and future. They are a part of my past, and I am a part of their future.

In this entirely solo multi-tracked album, I play bassoon, mridanga, tenor sax, and electronics, and I sing. I also do noise improv on instruments I have no training on, like clarinet, guitar, and pots and pans. By responding to musicians from such disparate contexts with multiple recordings of myself playing multiple different instruments, I hybridize myself. I exponentiate my own voice, not to make it louder, but to make it varied, to make it different from itself. 

By making this album, I want to show how I inherit, as all of us do, forms of music and ways of being multiple times through multiple different iterations of myself. Those ways of being are always changing how they come to me and I am always changing how and what I inherit through the act of inheritance itself.

Varun R Bassoonist

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