The immigrant experience is universal, but ask Arushi Jain about moving from India to the United States and she zooms in on a specific incident. Freshly enrolled at Stanford University, in California, she auditioned for a college a cappella group. When she sang in Hindi – the world’s third or fourth most widely spoken language – the other students flashed her a look: could she please stick to English?
“That was huge. They didn’t understand the language,” says Jain. “I was taken aback – a little confused what to sing. I felt not a part of this system. That is generally a very normal experience for people who come from other parts of the world to the US. Especially for college: you’re going to have to fit yourself into that world. That’s the core of any identity question that often arises for immigrants: how do I be who I have always been in this new space?”
Music is the producer and composer’s way of exploring that eternal conundrum of immigrant identity and the journey that has taken her from studying vocal training at the Ravi Shankar Institute for Music and Performing Arts in New Delhi, the city where she was born, to graduating in software engineering from Stanford.
The results of that inquiry are stunning. On her album Under the Lilac Sky, Jain contemplates what it means to leave your home and put down roots elsewhere. She does so through heartbreakingly beautiful synthesiser instrumentals that, interwoven with wraith-like vocals, trace the progress of an evening from dusk to darkness. Along with the beauty there is a yearning for her old life. Under the Lilac Sky is partly in dialogue with Indian classical music and the semi-improvised classical form known as raga, which Jain, who is performing at the National Concert Hall in Dublin this week, studied in India.
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That isn’t the entire story. The record, like her, is many things at once. After more than a decade in the US, she has had the stereotypical experience of not fitting in either in California or in India. “There’s a lot of conflicting identity and experiential stuff that comes up,” says Jain. “So many of the behaviours, mannerisms, norms that I learned in the US when I went to college there and working in San Francisco, surrounded by a specific kind of person, are really hard to communicate back to home,” she says.
“When it comes with working with Indian classical and synthesisers and all of the stuff I learned as an adult in California, it’s just a tool for me to probe into the identity shift and challenges that I’ve experienced in my life: relocating, moving so much, having access to a few different worlds. It’s a magnifying-glass look at that: how does it make me feel? Working with sound is a tool for me to do that. At the end of day all art is a tool or some way to look more closely into a personal experience.”
I have the horror of my synth getting left behind in an airport. I’m proud of myself for figuring out how to carry all my equipment on me – because basically if something gets lost, you’re screwed
Jain is a devotee of analogue electronica, pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s by composers such as Terry Riley and Suzanne Ciani, with whom she has toured. She celebrates electronic music’s analogue origins by performing with a vintage modular synth – the one she holds on the sleeve of Under the Lilac Sky – and a laptop. Speaking from Budapest, where she will give a concert later in the day, she acknowledges that hauling her gear from airport to airport can be a slog. Still, she is nothing if not resourceful.
“So I have three bags. Two are for equipment. One is normal life. I had a backpack made by a street vendor in India. A special bag just for my synth. Otherwise I’d have to check it in, which I’d get really freaked out about ... I have the horror of my synth getting left behind in an airport. I’m proud of myself for figuring out how to carry all my equipment on me – because basically if something gets lost, you’re screwed.”
She appreciates the praise Under the Lilac Sky has received but is less enthusiastic about the suggestion that it is in the Indian classical style. She is not trying to synthesise “East and West” or introduce American and European audiences to Indian classical composition. Her music is about her, not about India or the US. “I’m definitely escaping people wanting to put it in a box. We naturally want to do that, because the way memory works is that we put things in clusters – we want to associate something with something else, so that we can place it.”
In fact, she says, to call what she creates Indian classical music “is straight up disrespectful to Indian classical music. I understand there’s a whole angle of talking about music as ‘global music’ – whatever. I would like my music be good regardless of it being in that genre or any other genre.”
Arushi Jain is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Wednesday, August 16th, as part of the Foggy Notions Flotations series
