Shri – Seven Steps
October 17th, 2008 by sparky
Shri’s new album ‘Seven Steps’ comes straight from the gut and you can get a free taster with a free download of ‘Just For A Minute’, the first track released from the album, if you copy and paste this link to your browser:
http://del.interoute.com/?id=06b6c55d-2092-41e7-9463-0f16967e0a4e&delivery=download
Biography
It was over a decade ago that Shri made his own breakthrough. In 1993 a British producer by the name of Simon Dove was in Bombay, Shri’s hometown. Chancing upon the bassist’s debut Inspirational Satisfaction in the Indo-jazz section of a record shop, Dove was taken with the work of the then unknown quantity, Shrikanth Sriram.
Initially trained as a tabla player – he was a former student of the revered master Pandit Nikhil Ghosh – Shri took up the bass when he fell under the spell of western artists like British rock legends Led Zeppelin and German jazz bass icon Eberhard Weber.
Dove took Shri to England to play with an up and coming British-Asian tabla player, producer and future Mercury Music Prize winner by the name of Talvin Singh. As well as working with Singh, Shri collaborated with the Dutch choreographer Ellen Van Schuylenburch at the Place theatre and slowly but surely he began to get himself noticed.
Thereafter Shri became a key member of the small stable of artists on Outcaste records, the label that put the ‘Asian Underground’ on the map. Bollywood soundtracks, sitars and tablas were all the rage and a new generation of British-Asians asserted themselves with confidence right across the cultural spectrum, be the chosen artform music, dance, literature or television.
Nitin Sawhney emerged as a key new artist and Shri became a key member of his band. Soon after he would go on to make his 1997 UK debut Drum The Bass, a superb album whose title referred to the artist’s trademark percussive attack on his fretless, an instrument whose body had been customized to look like a giant lobster, pincers set in a flattened shell of wood.
Both intensely physical and delicately lyrical, the music captured and filtered the energy of the drum & bass and electronica scenes into intricate arrangements informed by both entrancing Indian ragas and cyclonic jazz improvisations.
Shri then struck up an excellent partnership with DJ/producer Badmarsh, exploring the confluence of programmed beats, electronic soundscapes and live playing on albums like Signs. When the collaboration reached its natural end, Shri continued to sharpen his focus as a solo artist, taking time to hone his song-writing craft as well as his skills as a producer.
Musically, Shri has sought to strike a balance between his ample ability on a range of instruments and a skilled songwriter’s self-discipline. There is a harmonic clarity to Seven Steps, a use of only the most essential chords and counterpoint so as not to overload the sound. Rhythmically, one hears great richness, which is not surprising given Shri’s training as a tabla player but the pieces are largely in 4/4. When appropriate he may opt for uneven time like a seven beat cycle but the more complex meter is only deployed to serve the emotional narrative.
Seven Steps thus marks a significant stage of development for an artist whose tremendous talent and wealth of ideas have always made him a noteworthy figure on the British music scene. Moreover this new work presents a more reflective, meditative side of Shri that stems from his desire to engage with the world as he sees it, in its basic, quotidian reality, to look into his own heart and mind and reveal what he sees with no concession to mainstream points of view.
Currently Shri is involved in a few collaborations – the most significant of them being a full score for the new age Indian feature film based in Bombay called Barah Anna…to be released around November 2008.
