‘Many Moons’ by Bindhumalini inhabited the liminal spaces between sound and music, cognitive understanding and intuitive knowing. The layered musical experience offered at Courtyard Koota, Bengaluru, during their sixth anniversary celebrations, invited audiences to travel softly through shape-shifting soundscapes, revisiting assumptions about what makes music. Beginning with a meditative immersion into a sound sculpture or musical installation, the programme led the audience towards a new space of listening to and thinking about music in its second part, which was somewhat like a concert but not quite.
Moving from silence, sounds and musical question marks to lyric-free melodies, tune tributes and formal compositions, ‘Many Moons’ treated audiences to a heart to heart between disparate entities in music making, without a trace of dissonance. Does sound have to be arranged for music to emerge? How does the heart instinctively hear oneness in harmony that actually has notes from different registers as its building blocks? These were just some of the questions that came up. The first few offerings of the concert were happily unrestricted by words and carried their foundations in ancient knowledge structures ever so lightly.
The singers Bindhumalini and Gurupriya Atreya effectively employed body rhythms and humming, serving up music with generous helpings of ta-ra-ra-ras and la-la-la-las to the vibrant strumming (sometimes singing, sometimes sound-making) by classical gui.