by Robert Phoenix
Just when I thought I had heard everything, my good friend, Chris Van Buren sends me a stack of CDs from Kosmic Music. Before I get into what I heard when I listened, you have to understand that while I have an adventurous ear, I’m also slightly jaded. I spent the early part of the nineties wallowing in the murky realms of industrial music and dark, ethno ambience. From there, I moved onto the new ambient renaissance that was taking root in San Francisco at a weekly event called, “The Gardening Party” that was held once a week in a club that used to house the Doobie Brothers tour plane. With the advent of the 24-bit sampler it seemed as though anything was possible. That’s when fusion — not in the classic Bitches Brew sense, but the William Orbit, Deep Forest, Enigma and B-Tribe sense, fusing seductive global grooves and smoothed out house and hip hop beats — became the progeny of cultural collusion; east and west wet kissing together on the dance floor, wrapped in one great global hug. Pygmy tribes trilled ambient lullabies and Gregorian chant became top forty-fodder. It seemed like singularity and the crest of a new wave couldn’t be far behind.

But fifteen years later, the 24-bit sampler has given way to cheap and easy-to-use home studios and those early feats of musical miscegenation, enabled really for the first time with the help of digital technology, are long gone.

Always on the prowl for something musical that clues me in to where we’re heading as a species, I was surprisingly blown away when in that package I received (I told you I’d get there) was a disc called Varanasi by NAID. It reminded me of some of those luscious recordings of Deep Forest and William Orbit, but the sound and execution was more fluid, organic and moving.

As far as I can tell, the voices behind NAID are a trio of young women that go by the name of Dakshinamurthy. They possess divine voices that harmonize beautifully together and they’re backed by pulsating, driving, sophisticated and breathy beats. The great thing is that these women actually sing and aren’t sampled morsels for some gluttonous producer. The entire CD, from-start-to-finish is an ecstatic statement in wholeness. Beautifully conceived and executed.

My jaded self just got reality-checked. I can’t wait for the next batch.

Watch the NAID music video