From the hypnotic pulse of “This Hunt” to the cinematic scope of her forthcoming album, VANDANA stands as one of the visionary voices in right now’s avant-pop panorama. Born in India and now primarily based in Brooklyn, she has constructed a sonic world the place opposites collide, the place the traditional meets the futuristic, the intimate blends with the economic, and the sacred intertwines with the mechanical.
Along with her idea of historical futurism, VANDANA explores how want, ego, and fragility intersect in a tradition obsessive about publicity. Her newest single, impressed by the night-blooming cereus—a flower that blooms yearly, solely at night time—turns this fleeting magnificence right into a metaphor for artwork, survival, and resistance. On this dialog, she displays on her artistic roots, her course of, and the seek for which means in an age of overexposure.
Pictures / Elisabet Davidsdottir
Your music blends art-pop, different electronica, krautrock, and even classical, making a sound that’s arduous to categorize. How did you develop such a various and distinctive model?
I’ve by no means been eager on creating music round style; it seems like a small body for one thing that begins as intuition. I often start with a sense or a visible, after which hopefully it leads me someplace sudden. The instruments I attain for—analog synths, piano, drum machines, and my voice—are extensions of that impulse.
Rising up in India, my ears had been steeped in Hindustani classical and Bollywood music, each so rooted in emotion and improvisation. There was little cultural crossover for me personally, so after I later found Western experimental music like Miles Davis, Kraftwerk, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass, it was like somebody had handed me the keys to a different planet. London in these years was a collision of rave tradition, art-school chaos, and unusual avant-garde magnificence in all places, and it undoubtedly rewired how I thought of sound and artwork.
So my sound isn’t curated a lot as absorbed. It’s me gathering fragments from the worlds I’ve lived in and those I nonetheless think about. Perhaps that hybridity comes from being between cultures for many of my life, by no means absolutely belonging to at least one sonic or geographic dwelling. It’s disorienting and difficult at occasions, however that’s the enjoyable half. Disorientation tastes higher than certainty anyway.
Let’s discuss your new single, “This Hunt,” which is impressed by the night-blooming cereus flower. What did you discover in that metaphor that resonated along with your inventive imaginative and prescient?
I feel quite a bit about what it means to create in a tradition obsessive about overexposure and output. The Cereus exists on the alternative finish of that spectrum. It’s an act of quiet riot. The ready, the devotion, the inconceivable full bloom that refuses the rhythm of consumption. Artwork, like nature, has its personal mysterious timing.
This previous yr, that metaphor turned visceral. My accomplice and I’ve stared down mortality extra occasions than anybody ought to need to; every encounter reshaping our sense of objective and tenderness. Final September, he nearly didn’t make it. After which, to maintain issues fascinating, simply as I used to be gathering myself again once more, a steel stand fell on my face at a shoot a couple of months later. Alan Chadwick mentioned that “the entire miracle of the backyard is made up of secrets and techniques.” I feel he was talking to that quiet type of religion, to be open to the thriller of life.
This Hunt grew out of that area. A reminder that fragility and power usually put on the identical face, just below completely different gentle, and that pleasure, regardless of when she arrives, deserves to take over utterly. The night-blooming cereus was a guiding metaphor—each a warning and a eager for the return of slowness, thriller, and the braveness to exist exterior the algorithm.
The lyrics “This Hunt” are stuffed with wealthy metaphors. What messages or concepts had been you aiming to convey by them?
This Hunt got here from observing how our appetites for achievement, validation, and even magnificence flip predatory. The lyrics transfer between the non-public and the collective – ego, delight, want, the necessity to devour and be consumed. Traces like “This merciless hunt / You by no means ask for it” and “This insatiable hunt / This Faustian discount” communicate to that unusual human contradiction, the place we chase what finally has the capability to bruise us. The tune asks what this countless hunt prices us and, by extension, what it prices the pure world that mirrors our restlessness.
Musically, “This Hunt” has an industrial model and a ceremonial environment. What sonic references or influences guided you to reach at this sound?
This Hunt started as an 18-minute drone I created on the Sub37, extra ceremony than composition. It got here from a spot of desirous to step exterior aware thought, to create with out vacation spot. After all, I couldn’t let that be as is; I needed to collide that stillness with one thing extra bodily and industrial – the sound of equipment respiratory inside a sanctuary.
I used to be occupied with the type of pressure you discover in movie scores by Jonny Greenwood or Mica Levi- music that’s each human and alien, uncooked and meticulous. There’s additionally a hint of the mechanical propulsion of Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s work for Ex Machina or Annihilation, the place magnificence and menace share the identical frequency. Additionally, Bowie, Bowie, Bowie. I hear to at least one Bowie tune day-after-day.
For me, This Hunt exists in an analogous cinematic limbo, a world each sacred and mechanical. It’s about immersion, about surrendering to a sonic ritual that feels alive, unstable, and surprisingly human.
You come from India, lived in London, and now dwell in Brooklyn. How does this life journey affect the identification of your music?
My motion between three very completely different worlds wired me to like paradox. I’m drawn to extremes: the seductive and the menacing, magnificence and distortion. There’s hardly ever a center floor, and that retains me trustworthy. I don’t prefer to water issues down, emotionally or sonically. I’d fairly make one thing uncooked and polarizing than well mannered. Contradiction seems like dwelling.
“This Hunt” is only a prelude to your subsequent album. What can we anticipate from that full-length work, and the way does it join with this primary preview?
I’ve been ready my complete life to make this report. It seems like probably the most full expression of who I’m, each as a human and as an artist. The songs started of their easiest type: voice, phrases, and a Wurlitzer, recorded as voice notes. These sketches grew to become the emotional core of the album.
I’ll depart some thriller intact. This Hunt is the gateway drug – the album goes deeper. It’s uncooked, uncovered, and slightly shameless. But it surely’s stuffed with coronary heart and maximal depth.
You labored intently with producer Marius de Vries on this album. What was that collaboration like, and the way did his artistic strategy affect the ultimate sound?
Working with Marius has been an exhilarating trade. He arrives with a long time of expertise, from movie scores to genre-defining information, but within the studio with me, he handled every concept as recent, gloriously audacious, and unafraid of the darkish or the bizarre. His openness to experiment meant we invited one another into our wild sonic zones fairly than considered one of us following the opposite. He’s an intuitive, curious scientist.
Alongside him, working with musicians who’re singular of their crafts—gamers who convey not simply ability however spirit—jogged my memory that good songs occur while you let the pure pleasure of music transfer you. That type of play doesn’t polish; it displays you again.
Lastly, what do you hope the listener will expertise when immersed in “This Hunt”? Is it extra of a ritual, a warning, or a celebration?
We’re residing by an age of overexposure and collapse. Every thing is spectacle, every little thing is extractive. Energy hunts consideration, and a spotlight hunts us again. This Hunt lives inside that loop. It’s concerning the human urge for food for domination, the best way ego and want metastasize into methods—political, technological, and private.
I wrote it whereas watching the world convulse, personally and collectively. Democracy rotting in actual time, fact auctioned off to the best bidder. We discuss collapse as if it’s taking place to us, however we’ve constructed the scaffolding for it. We handed over the facility, and now we’re shocked to see the wreckage.
So sure, the tune is all three: ritual, warning, and celebration. Ritual, as a result of it’s about remembering what’s sacred inside. Warning, as a result of that sacredness is underneath siege. And celebration, as a result of regardless of every little thing, we’re nonetheless able to awe. We’re nonetheless able to magnificence that refuses to serve energy.
So, between equipment and mysticism, VANDANA crafts a world the place fragility and power coexist. As she prepares to unveil her upcoming album, her imaginative and prescient of historical futurism feels not solely related however essential. A reminder that even within the digital storm, magnificence nonetheless blooms, even when just for an evening.
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