Arushi Jain
★★★★
Under The Lilac Sky LEAVING. DL/LP/MC
Brooklyn-based composer blends Hindustani classical with modular synth patterns. Arushi Jain spent her first 18 years in India. For the past decade she’s lived on America’s East and West coasts. “I feel like I’m in both [countries] at the same time but in neither,” she said in a recent interview. “[Thinking] where do I exist?” Blending centuries-old Hindustani evening ragas – intended to be performed between sunset and midnight – with West Coast new age synth modulations, Jain has created what she calls her “music of inbetweenness”. Coloured by her hypnotic, indistinct vocals, pointillistic keyboard patterns and deep bass pulses, the feel is simultaneously
unmoored and melancholy, impressionistic and contemplative, freedom as a kind of rootless uncertainty. It also has a strange effect on the listener’s concept of time, 40-plus minutes of ethereal half-light patterns seemingly gone in a few blissful moments.