“Kalak,” Sarathy Korwar‘s third studio album, is an Indo-futurist manifesto that follows through a distinct rhythm of the past and the present, at the same time posing itself as a starting point toward a road yet to be traveled. A celebration of South Asian musical and literary culture intertwined with spirituality and a sense of community in anticipation of a better future that can originate from that very foundation.
The album’s production was entrusted to DJ and producer Photay , who managed to translate these rhythms and practices into a timeless, cutting-edge electronic record. The work Korwar did together with Photay was to layer various improvisations into a well-defined set of multi-colored arrangements, exactly as they appear on the album. A recording of innumerable nuances that can bring out new energies from the darkness in such a way as to offer a new point of view of imagining things.
“The discourse around futurism has deep roots rooted in the imagination of the world proposed from a Eurocentric point of view. Exactly like Afro-futurism, Indo-futurism is shifting its focus toward the Global South. In South Asia, culturally speaking, we imagine the relationship with the past and the future through an idea of cyclicality; among these we find the concept of Karma. Time does not only have to flow linearly, but can also flow as a circle. The more I thought about this idea of circularity and the symbolism attached to it, the more I began to realize that this would be the focus of the recording,” explains Sarathy Korwar.