An artiste’s life experiences across India and the US have shaped her new EP
Vasundhara Gupta, whose artiste moniker is Vasu. Pic/Olga Kisseleva
Vasundhara Gupta aka Vasu makes an interesting point when we talk to the musician about her new five-track EP, Parwaaz. It’s a project that fuses the traditional and modern, where Gupta marries Hindustani classical vocals with minimal electronic beats. But she tells us that this amalgamation of the East and West doesn’t reflect on the diverse geographical territories that she has inhabited, as much it does on the experiences that have shaped her as a person. She grew up in Kolkata where she trained in Indian classical music. She then flew off to the US where she dabbled in all sorts of audio work, including user-experience sound design for apps and audio editing. Then, when the pandemic hit, she came back to the homeland and spent some time in Benaras, where the sounds of the ghats made an indelible mark on her psyche.
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“All of these experiences have shaped this album; it’s come out of this person that I am today, and not from the areas I have lived in. Learning Indian classical in Kolkata is a part of me. Then, being a free bird in New York City, that’s also me, as is meditating on the ghats of Benaras. It’s because of my history, roots, the past and the present that I can come up with a sound that’s unique, because my experiences are unique to me,” she explains.
That’s interesting because the point she is making is that at the end of the day, a musician’s location doesn’t define their sound as much as the situations they face in life at that place do. The EP itself has a sonic structure that’s stripped down to the basics, and Gupta tells us that some of the tracks were written in the middle of the night in NYC when the dark, gloomy wintry weather would bring her down, and the Indian classical tracks she experimented with gave her the sort of succour she needed. They are thus a product of the twists and turns that the 26-year-old’s life has taken and highlight how, when you think about it, music has no borders really.
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