Elder Ones - Vocals, Harmonium, Synthesizer, Compositions

Sometimes the eye of a storm can draw upon the chaos around it, taking on its energy and consolidating it for use. Something like that is going on in Elder Ones, the quartet led by the vocalist and harmonium player Amirtha Kidambi. She creates drones on the harmonium — an old, air-powered keyboard — and coaxes her bandmates into ripping them apart. Then her voice funnels that energy out in a scorching beam. In its best moments, it’s like a mix of a Cuban sonero’s citrusy cry and a riot grrrl yowl. - New York Times, Giovanni Russonello

As Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, “the aggressive and sublime first album by the band Elder Ones, Holy Science, is a kind of gauge for how strong and flexible the scene of young musicians in New York’s improvised and experimental music world can be.” Seth Colter Walls writes in Pitchfork, “This sound isn’t merely the product of well-chosen reference points; in its abstract way, it makes a unique argument for the virtue of cross-cultural curiosity. Appropriately, the nature of this music is constantly morphing. When a muted introduction gives way to a more celebratory aesthetic, the change is achieved gradually, through small changes in the arrangement. When a demonstration of rage reaches a peak that cannot be sustained, the musicians in Elder Ones are able to navigate back to a more stable feel, without losing the passion and awareness that has animated those foregoing blasts of harshness. The result is an astonishing debut for a composer, and her band.”

From Untruth (2019) built upon the bedrock foundation of Kidambi's previous compositional and conceptual work with Elder Ones, while forging uncharted territory. After a journey into wordless abstraction on Holy Science, Kidambi felt the urgency of the political moment required a direct and verbal call to action. The lyric fragments critique power structures of capitalism, racism, colonialism and fascism, distilling theory into visceral battle cries of protest. The instrumentation adds a layer of technology, with Kidambi on analog synthesizer and Max Jaffe's drumming talents extended to electronic Sensory Percussion. The frenzied improvising of Matt Nelson on soprano sax and gravity of Nick Dunston on bass, anchor the music in the tradition of free jazz, while it pushes into new futurist realms.

Elder Ones continues to conjure bold improvisations, pushing the boundaries of jazz and electronic forms. Percussion, soprano sax, synths, harmonium, bass, cello, and Kidambi’s astonishing vocals center these compositions on topics of anti-colonialism, the rise of global fascism, violence against Asian Americans, of continuing inequalities in the growing shadow of late stage capitalism. Not just a lament, but an explosive call to action, and ode to those struggling for racial and labor justice. Building on the incendiary spiritual and political free jazz compositions on their acclaimed albums Holy Science (2016) and From Untruth (2019) released on Northern Spy, the band’s third album will be released in Spring 2024 on We Jazz (EU).

Elder Ones features a wealth of talented NYC musicians with Jason Nazary on the drums, Alfredo Colon on tenor saxophone, Matt Nelson on soprano saxophone and Lester St. Louis on the bass, shared among some of the most innovative bands in creative music including Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, William Parker’s Sutras Ensemble, Battle Trance, GRID, Metropolis Ensemble, Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die, Anteloper, and more.

Mary Halvorson's Code Girl - Vocals, Improvisation

Code Girl is the latest project of guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson, and her first project for which she has composed both lyrics and music. The band has been described as “...a bold experiment in song form” by The New York Times. Deftly interpreted by Amirtha Kidambi (vocals), María Grand (saxophone, vocals), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Michael Formanek (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums), the music synthesizes influences of jazz, folk and improvisation to create an original take on songwriting. Code Girl’s debut album was a top ten record in the annual NPR Jazz Critic’s Poll of 2018.

Amirtha Kidambi + Luke Stewart

Zenith/Nadir (Tripticks Tapes, July 2022) is an improvised seance, conjuring the spirits of ancestors through urgent frequencies, to excavate the intergenerational trauma which haunts and guides our living present. Recorded in Brooklyn during the tumultuous Summer of 2020, the album reflects extreme contrasts of high and low, in a time where despair and possibility were inextricable.

In the underexplored combination of bass and voice, Luke Stewart and Amirtha Kidambi mine maximal possibilities, from pure acoustic intimate interactions, to harsh electronic walls of sound. In various configurations of upright bass, amplifier feedback, effects pedals and looping, the duo explores dichotomies, with a side of pristine acoustic duets and another of visceral noise, where the sonic boundaries between the instruments dissolve and obscure. Kidambi employs a distinct vocal effects pedal, meeting Stewart in his amplifier-centered sonic universe. Combining their unique improvised vocabularies which draw from free jazz, noise, rock, Indian music and Black music, their raw chemistry is apparent in their shape shifting improvisations. 

Neti Neti: Amirtha Kidambi + Matt Evans

Neti-Neti translated as “It is not this, it is not that” from Sanskrit, is a contemplation on the nature of reality, life, death, birth and rebirth extracted from the Hindu text of rituals The Upanishads. The duo of Matt Evans (drums/percussion) and Amirtha Kidambi (vocals/electronics) was formed amidst their shared experiences of grief surrounding the death of loved ones; experiences that guided their creation of a mutual ritual music to act as a cathartic vessel for processing this loss. Their relationship emerged from the viscera of a year and a half of exchanging thoughts on the nonlinear nature of grief and its chaotic emotional trajectory, the abstraction of a person without physical form, and the trauma of one’s foundations being shattered, necessitating a total spiritual rebirth. In tandem with these personal experiences was the macro-mourning of the loss of touch and social connection during the pandemic, life before it began, and the ravages of death in its path. Having never played together, the two met up once and recorded their first improvisations, inevitably expressive of their ongoing conversations, which became the source material for their new collaboration and release Impermanence.

Impermanence is a crumpled, lo-fi collection of collaged improvisations for feedback drumkit and pedal manipulated vocals that follow the unpredictable and nonlinear process of grief like an abstracted improvisational “score”. They perform this music as a “mourning ritual” that extends beyond themselves to the audience, creating a space to hold and be present with loss in all its forms, personal and universal. The language of Evans’ and Kidambi’s improvisations steps back from the tropes of traditional free improv, resulting in a primal, noisey, rhythmic, and melodic music that resonates in the ancient combination of voice and percussion. Their debut record, Impermanence will be released in September 2022 on Dinzu Artefacts.

Angels & Demons: Amirtha Kidambi + Darius Jones

Longtime collaborators Amirtha Kidambi (voice) and Darius Jones (alto sax) join sonic and compositional forces to materialize "Angels and Demons", musical adaptations of cosmological writings by iconic composer and bandleader Sun Ra. The duo formed to honor the intellectual, literary, and spiritual contribution of Sun Ra, as a philosopher and teacher. Dancing between Ra's prophetic poetic verse, abstract phonemes and syllables, sound, noise, tone, melody and rhythmic interplay, Jones and Kidambi use their unique compositional and improvisatory voices to amplify Ra's poetry to contemporary audiences.

Amirtha Kidambi + Matteo Liberatore

Amirtha Kidambi and Matteo Liberatore’s duo of voice and guitar creates improvised aural landscapes that are glacial and highly evocative, unfurling through dynamic gestures that are at once spacious and restrained. Juxtaposed against the frenetic pace characteristic of the New York improv scene, the pair applies the compositional aesthetics of Feldman or Oliveros to a free environment. The project is set apart from Kidambi’s work with Lea Bertucci, Mary Halvorson or Elder Ones and Liberatore’s collaborations with musicians including Elliott Sharp, Mark Kelley and Catherine Sikora. Each piece explores the unique possibility space created by the union of voice and guitar, delving deep into specific permutations including registral extremes, detuning and quiet mouth sounds, all without the use of processing. After a prolonged period of isolation, the duo emerged to record and play together for the first time since the start of the pandemic. The music is nuanced, patiently developing as the subtleties of gradual seasonal change or the awareness of sound in meditation. Like shifting color gradients and patterns on a canvas of Agnes Martin, timbral shading and repetition form large-scale impressions. Neutral Love investigates an emotional inner world, taking its name from The Passion of G.H. by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, a narrative monologue of a woman’s existential spiral. While Kidambi and Liberatore come from radically different backgrounds, they draw from universal sonic signifiers, like the ringing of the bell at a Hindu temple threshold or the echo of church bells across the piazza of a small Italian town, invocations to prayer and reflection. The duo’s interactions simmer beneath an anti-climax, begging the listener to observe one’s surroundings, turn inward, and confront the self.

Lines of Light - Compositions, Vocals

Lines of Light is the vocal quartet of composer-vocalist Amirtha Kidambi and is inspired by the title of the late Muhal Richard Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light and medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen’s reference to her vision of God as “The Shade of the Living Light”. The group brings together, female vocal powerhouses, featuring Jean Carla Rodea, Anaïs Maviel and Emilie Lesbros, the composition is a structured improvisation, intended to allow each vocalist to exercise maximum creativity within the larger framework of the piece. Following the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Kidambi assembled the group to freely improvise in order to form community with female musicians from diverse backgrounds in a time of extreme vulnerability and uncertainty. Developed out of Kidambi’s long-term vision to elevate vocalists within experimental music, as they have been historically marginalized due, in part, to the gendered nature of jazz and the avant-garde, Lines of Light showcases the increasingly high caliber of vocalists currently working in New York. The piece was premiered for Kidambi’s Artist Residency at Roulette in 2018.

Robert Ashley’s CRASH Band

Robert Ashley’s CRASH band comprises of vocalist/composer Gelsey Bell, vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Aliza Simons, vocalist/composer/multi-instrumentalist Paul Pinto, vocalist/composer/multi-instrumentalist Brian McCorkle and vocalist/composer/multi-instrumentalist Dave Ruder. The group was lovingly referred to by Robert Ashley as “The New Band”. The group formed to premiere and perform Bob Ashley’s final opera Crash under the guidance of Mimi Johnson, Tom Hamilton, Dave Moodey and Alex Waterman for the Whitney Biennial in 2014. The band will continue to perform Crash from now until they can no longer speak. The passing of Robert Ashley from the earthly realm into the ether occurred during rehearsals for the piece in March of 2014. The band misses him terribly and owes him a tremendous debt of gratitude for all of his creative energy and passion.