Nitin Sawhney
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Nitin Sawhney

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“When I perform live with the band it’s pretty much focusing on the album material,” Sawhney explains. “I’ve written nine albums now so I have a pretty big back catalogue from which to get my favourite material. Also I’m coming out there to DJ which will be a lot of fun. I’m a resident DJ at Fabric in the UK and do a fair bit of it through Europe so that is something I really love to do.”

Taking on so many different styles of music, presented in such varying formats bears wondering how he’s able to shift creative gears with such ease. “When I’m making music I always have to draw on my own feelings as a cathartic experience,” he explains. “But I guess if I’m working on a music score then I am working within the vision of the director and I’m trying to find their motive. When I was scoring The Alfred Hitchcock Project I had to make assumptions about his intentions for the film and the psychological motives of the characters. Whereas if you’re working on an album it’s very much an expression and a dynamic approach to your own history and during that process something comes out that resembles a body of work that you wish to share with the world.

“I think as a musician and a composer you are always searching for the perfect soundtrack to your life and along the way you are evolving that with the people you collaborate with and the people that you just meet on your journey. All of it is interesting and relevant and music is the perfect language within which to explore that.”

When asked what his current projects are he muses on his enthusiasm for the upcoming production of a play he has been writing, Einstein Tagore. Sawhney is using the medium of theatre to contemplate the connections between the scientific and the spiritual – namely quantum physics, Hinduism and spirituality as a whole.

“When you look at people like Galileo and Copernicus, they were at odds with the orthodox, religious views of the time,” he says, while discussing the void that exists between modern spirituality and science. “There has always been opposition within scientific discovery and religious assumption. Assumption is based on faith and scientific discovery is based on evidence. But that doesn’t mean that science is always right either, because there are still a lot of assumptions within science about how the universe works. As we discovered from what we know about dark matter or about the Higgs Boson is new information and this new information can overturn the discoveries that came before. Today’s quantum physics is yesterday’s science fiction.

“Think of the notion of quantum entanglement. The idea is that you have two particles that behave in exactly the same way regardless of how far apart they are and I haven’t met a physicist who can explain how this can be. Time and space are irrelevant because they have a system of instant communication between them. You have these things that suggest there is a true fabric to the universe, but then you have someone like Richard Dawkins who claims that science proves that there can be no religious elements. I think we would be very arrogant indeed to think that our limited brains and minimal senses can possibly fathom the intricacies of the universe as though it is some easy-to-solve puzzle.”

Sawnhey is unstoppable on this topic and it’s easy to want to hear more about his spiritual views in light of scientific fascination. Returning, after a long period of hypothesis, to music, he manages to unite these seemingly diverse ideas.

“Music for me is about following intuition,” he says. “I mean, you have Keppler who talks about the music of the spheres so you kind of have this notion that the universe is more than what we can see. We only understand what is within our dimension to understand. Music is a way of manifesting or having a connection with divine intentions. As a musician you are a medium through which the universe manifests itself. You have Michelangelo who said that the sculpture was already hidden in the stone or John Coltrane who said that improvisation was like a bird he wanted to catch so there is this notion that something is already in the air. This myth that we are creating is just that, we are merely uncovering the soul of emotion that exists in everything and we are just an extension of that.”

BY KRISS WEISS

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