Anupam Shobhakar's Liquid Reality is an album in more than just the practical sense of the word; it is a philosophical journey through space and time, pushing boundaries of musical styles, while confidently synthesizing traditions of Indian classical music approaches with jazz-rock, Sufi, and world-based textures. The New York-based artist, who previously made waves with his 2023 fretless guitar adaptation of Raga Jhinjhoti, continues to venture into out-of-the-ordinary sonic territories with this seven-track collection, which is intellectually stimulating and wholly emotional.
Shobhakar exercises a unique craft on his custom-designed double-neck guitar, incorporating fretted and fretless interactions, extracting a tonal depth seldom heard in the space of modern fusion. In this regard, songs such as “La Danse de Bonheur” acknowledge the established Shakti-era precursors with interesting complexity, changing the narrative through an acculturating vivid eloquence; “Anjaneya” physically realizes the mythical energy of Hanuman through grunge-y electric riffs and rich underlying rhythmic structures; countries away from the core compositional framework of typical modernity.
"Formless" intentionally creates spaces of haunting, toying with the unpredictable but rather pliable interplay between guitar and kanjeera, part meditation, part evocative, nothing less than raw energy.
Liquid Reality showcases elite collaborators including Swami Selva Ganesh, Utsav Lal, and singers Ona Kirei and Ben Parag. This album is a triumph of ensemble collaboration and compositional audacity. This music is not only world music for world music listeners; this is for anyone searching for soul-inspiring, technically inventive, cross-genre music. Shobhakar's latest is evidence that fusion, as it should be defined, is not merely merging sound, but rather transforming it altogether.
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