SUSHEELA RAMAN

Susheela is an acclaimed British Indian musician. She has released five albums since 2001 and was nominated for the 2006 BBC World Music Awards. Raman’s debut album Salt Rain was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2001. Known for her energetic, vibrant, syncretic and uplifting live performances, Londoner Susheela has established her place as one of the most creative artists to emerge from the South Asian diaspora.

Blessed with a mesmeric voice and an arresting presence, Susheela has enraptured countless listeners with her own songs and with her interpretations of songs from her Indian roots. A South Indian sensibility radiates through her happily hybrid Euro-Afro-Asian musical landscape, just as an Indian voice is infused with a Londoner’s feeling for rock, blues and soul.

Raman and Mills’ album, Ghost Gamelan, works with gamelan players led by ‘kontemporer’ composer Gondrong Gunarto. It was recorded in Surakarta and London with a unique, mercurial sonority which somehow succeeds in aligning Susheela’s own melodic, harmonic and lyrical gifts with the delirious microtonality and virtuosity of the Javanese Gamelan. As Susheela says “people underestimate the importance of Gamelan in all contemporary music. It has informed all smart music-makers from Debussy and Satie to John Cage, Miles Davis, Steve Reich and Sonic Youth. Its slippery DNA is on everything from Modal Jazz to EDM, so playing with the gamelan is more about connectedness than any kind of exoticism. Bringing a South Indian perspective to it also uncovers another kind of resonance.”