Susheela Raman

With full project or UK based band ask for details ... An amazing artist and Mercury music award nominee and her scope is wide indeed, a consummate artist and at Frusion we are very happy to represent her in all territories.

Tamil Londoner Susheela Raman has established her place as one of the most creative artists to emerge from the South Asian diaspora. Blessed with a mesmeric voice and arresting presence, Susheela has enraptured countless listeners with her own songs and with her interpretations of songs from her Indian roots.

Now a new ambitious collaboration with Indonesian musicians is bearing fruit. Raman has delivered an extraordinary album 'Ghost Gamelan', the body of which was which was recorded in Solo, Indonesia in 2016. The album is a collaboration with Javanese contemporary gamelan composer Gondrong Guanarto and his team of virtuoso gamelan players. Gamelan, for non-initiates, is the music of Bali and Java, played mostly on tuned gongs, which has long inspired smart western music makers from Debussy, Messiaen, Philip Glass and Steve Reich to Sonic Youth. Traces of its shimmering, loopy DNA are over everything from modal jazz to electronic dance music.

'Ghost Gamelan' The music is haunted. Javanese music evokes the invisible; ancestral presences, old religions, volcanic rumblings, and court intrigues. A sensuality of appearances, decorum, ritual and procession runs to trance and possession. Meanwhile, Raman's songs here are meditations on change, transformation and mortality. Lyrics reflect on uncertainties cast by memory, desire and the ephemeral.  In this album, tonality and rhythm are questioned and de-centred, just as much as they are asserted. Some records achieve a fixed quality but this record is very 'alive', or volatile, both in the performances but also in the way it shifts as you hear it. The vitality of the interactions, of the musical cultures misbehaving with each other, result in a sound more 'unearthly' than 'world'. Susheela's voice, whether solo or in unearthly harmonies, performs its unique magic drawing musical world together. With its bold meddling with tune and tempo, this fresh set of songs threatens not to work but achieves a compelling integrity. Susheela Raman's 'Ghost Gamelan' is a rich new landscape unlike any of her previous work and quite unlike anything else.

'Ghost Gamelan' Live Reviews 

"Utterly Convincing" 5***** FINANCIAL TIMES
"Passionately life affirming...The result of this surprising experiment is quite thrilling."  ADELAIDE NOW
"A beguiling cross cultural experiment...a genuinely alluring synthesis of east and west, mystery and illumination, earthly concerns and ethereal enchantment"  THE AGE, MELBOURNE
  "A cross cultural work of haunting intensity" GLOBALMEDIAPOST.COM