Music
Sandunes on returning to the piano with ‘Hand of Thought’
Sanaya Ardeshir explains how she developed a delicate instrumental composition for her show titled Hand of Thought.
Sandunes departed from her previous electronic works towards the end of 2019 with a show titled Hand of Thought.
Returning to her mother instrument – the piano – Sanaya Ardeshir will draw from minimalist compositions of Steve Reich and Carl Stone to rediscover the intimacy of the piano and experiment with instrumental orchestrations.
In this interview, she discusses how the project was two years in the making and how her music co-exists within a realm of electronic and acoustic instruments.
7 min
Sandunes' full performance of 'Barefootsteps'
Music video of Sandunes (Sanaya Ardeshir) performing her song Barefootsteps.
You’ve mentioned that this project started with the Border Movement residency in 2017. Was it your first time in Berlin?
It was my second, no, third time in Berlin. The first time was also with Border Movement for Fusion Festival. The second was to attend and chat on a panel at Loop in 2016 (for Red Bull’s Searching for Sound documentary). I did get quite lucky with my time there in 2017. I spent some time writing music at Funkhaus, recording at the Red Bull Music Studios. I found the residency quite unstructured compared to what I was used to. And Berlin was on holiday mode (it was August and summer culture in Europe was new to me), so I had a lot of time on my hands, which I used to build sample banks, and write music. The biggest pivot points were that I spent a lot more time at an instrument than at my laptop. That, and the anti-hustle, easy pace of the city being really appealing was a big take away.
You’ve spoken about how a workflow on a laptop and composing on a piano are two very different feelings.
I guess when you're using a computer to, for example, write a speech, you’re putting things down in words on your screen, and you don’t need to host them in memory. You don’t need to create points or be mindful of a sense of flow because you're always able to refer to the visual of your talking points.
I suppose with writing, for me, somewhere there’s a heightened awareness when you remove that safety net, and if you stumble across a cool idea, you have to remember to build on it and recreate it. Of course, it makes sense to record it, so you don’t forget it, but in the actual process of developing, building more layers, parts, sections, movement – that awareness helps me tap into the world of feeling and emotion, which is all I'm currently seeking to convey now through any music.
You’ve mentioned that the challenge with developing this body of music has been not having a piano of your own to mic, rig, treat and practice on. It’s quite incredible to think that not having access to a musical instrument can be so challenging and how much we take everything going electronic for granted perhaps.
Technology is amazing, and then taking space from it to go back to an acoustic, un-supported, naked world of sonics is also amazing. Not playing a piano at a gig basically means you're playing plastic – something I've only recently been feeling a bit uninspired by. There's no real magic to the feel – even if it has the most amazing weighted-keys and with great Rhodes-like patches, it's just not the real thing. There's a point at which you just need to strike strings on a giant harp with hammers and feel the sound coming out of a hollow wooden shell rather than an amplifier. I think that if I had a piano, owned one; I would have been spending a lot less practice/development time on it. Somewhere, I just had to turn not having one into a good thing. It meant my time in piano spaces was limited and precious. I needed to be a little judicious with my space-out-and-jam headspace, and more constructive with things like practice and development.
With this new performance, you’ve been in a situation where your mind is creatively in two different places at the same time because you had a series of other gigs to finish and releases to put out. How hard was that final run of gigs and what’s that process been like for you?
Aw man, these last few months have been so challenging on this front. Picture this: there’s a really important thing – project, show, shoot, something important to you because you’re excited to have the opportunity to engage amazing collaborators or resources to bring this thing to life. And here it is, three weeks away and you’ve got some exciting ideas for it, but it’s tugging at your sleeve in desperate need of your attention in order for you to nurture it into life (read: tweak fiddly automations, work out arrangements, tweak mixes, shape timbres and set up projects). Basically, it’s far from ready.
But you can’t get to it just yet, because, in the three weeks leading up to the actual thing, there’s another project, another gig, and then some other project; and they all require the same detailed attention and nurturing. It’s been such a new (and difficult) experience for me, where the only way to navigate and not get stressed out is to chew on one piece at a time; to focus only on the immediate next thing that’s in front of you, and trust that you’ll have enough time, stamina and tools to get to the next thing once it’s imminent.
It feels in some ways, to use a writing analogy, that you’ve finally finished a novel – all the while also writing other short stories. What learnings and advice would you share with others who are possibly in various stages of developing their own pieces of music with no “end” in sight?
I think two distinct phases have revealed themselves to me in various pockets of this whole process. Phase One is the limitless phase: explore, create, add, go deep, go broad, don't think about logistics, remove a timeline, and do the things for the sake of play. A lot, no, all the seeds for this batch of sounds were sown with this mindset: “What if I did this, but in this time signature?” or, “What if I played this as if it was drum-rudiments?” (Or what if I divided these notes by this sandwich and added a dosa). You get the gist.
Phase Two is the limitations phase: limited time, limited resources, limited hands. And you might as well do the thing of creating your own pressure cooker situation by committing to a gig, performance, or best friend that you'll deliver this beautiful piece you made them by midnight day after tomorrow. I never thought I'd be working on the same bunch of music over a couple of years, but this just took the time it did for so many reasons. I'm just making my way to the end of the limitations phase, as I get show-ready with this.
When were you introduced to Kosho Uchiyama’s [a Sōtō priest, origami master and author of more than twenty books on Zen Buddhism and origami] work? How did you end up naming this piece ‘Hand of Thought’?
It was the timing of my reading it and a bunch of personal epiphanies from it that moved me. ‘Opening the hand of thought’ [a classic piece of literature on Zen Buddhism and meditation] is a beautiful and simple technique that had plenty of timely application (no pun intended) within the world of these numerically devised, generative piano motifs that I was composing. Somewhere between muscle memory and flow state was where my ability to play these passes actually existed. But my point of access to them was only in a very present state of mind: latch on to one thought, and I couldn't play them anymore. I'd mess up the co-ordination and make mistakes or even forget what note came next. It felt like these seed ideas were sort of ensconced in some version of my hand of thought, and to play them, I had to do the work of opening the hand.
Sanaya's grandmother with an Upright Hamilton piano
© Sanaya Ardeshir
This is also a very personal project for you with your grandmum as a source of inspiration. What are your memories of her and the piano? How did she get to be a professional pianist?
She taught at the Calcutta School of Music and was a director (and music director) for several plays and musicals. She was gifted a grand piano as a wedding present from her father-in-law. It was a Bluthner Baby Grand. She began by developing a curriculum to teach music and piano, giving private lessons as well.
One of my memories is her reprimanding the rest of the family with ‘Let her play!’ when my uncles and parents would tell me to shush and stop repeatedly tinkering while they were trying to have proper adult conversations over the din.
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Was there any expectation or a sense of “Yeah, the legacy lives on” kind-of thing, when you decided to take up recitals as well? Is your family going to be at the show?
Yes, they are! My parents are always pleased when I do gigs at a venue where there's seating (‘Is it a parent-friendly gig?’). They've always been really supportive of my shows. I can recall one memorable show, years ago at the Humming Tree in Bangalore where my parents were the only ones there other than Jash [Reen] (from Wolves) who did my visuals.
They'd always try and make it for school choir concerts and piano recitals while we were growing up, and I'm probably getting to a place where it's really nice to have them there – the opportunities where they can actually make it are super rare.