Original CD front cover. Image: Sugar Free Designs/Christopher Best
In December 2000 I was approached by the choreographer Indra Thiagarajah of Bimba Dance Theatre to collaborate on a project bringing western contemporary, South Indian classical and traditional Caribbean dance languages together. It was to be an exploration of the rituals that have emerged in response to that most inevitable but uncharted of territories - death.
Over a period of two years we worked with dancers from the Jamaican National Dance Company, under the guiding eye of their principal director Barry Moncrieffe. Indra hatched a scenario that seamlessly interwove myths from the Mahabharata, (in particular the story of Savitri and Satyavan) with Jamaican folklore. I helped shape the structure into a dramatically satisfying form and began to consider what music I could possibly create for this project. I knew I should avoid pastiche Indian or Jamaican music, as these lay wholly outside my own tradition. At the same time, I felt strongly that my musical language would need a powerful shot of something new and strange
I began to experiment with non-tempered scales and by embracing a diverse range of non-western instruments, each with its own distinctive scale; such as the Gyile (or Ghanaian xylophone) with its stretched octaves, and the Balinese Gamelan with its unusually tuned 5-note scale. The result was an unearthly, at times disturbing, sound that at the same time remained faithful to my techniques and language.
