MALAGASY BREATH

The idea for Malagasy Breath originated with Rajesh Mehta, who received recordings of Indri lemur calls from a scientist at the Max Planck Institute and brought them into the Sky Cage Quartet. These recordings became the starting point for a collective composition built around the voices of the Indri, a species native to Madagascar whose calls contain complex rhythmic structures.
 

Malagasy Breath was created in 2022, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. Since it was impossible for the members of the Sky Cage Quartet to meet and work together in a studio, we exchanged recordings and developed the composition remotely. Each musician contributed material from their own environment, which was then combined into the final work.

My main contribution was to edit, combine and layer some of these recordings, with a particular focus on the recorded calls of the Indri lemurs. I worked extensively with their glissandi and other vocal sounds, cutting and rearranging them and integrating them into the musical structure. Rather than treating the recordings as an external sound effect or simply placing them alongside the instruments, I wanted them to become part of the musical material itself.
 

One of the things that interested me was the gradual blurring of the different sound sources. The sounds of the trumpet, the violin and the Indri increasingly overlap and interact, sometimes making it difficult to distinguish which sound comes from which source. The animal voices become entangled with the sounds produced by the human musicians, while the instruments themselves begin to take on qualities that could almost suggest another kind of voice.
 

This process raised a question that became central to our composition: what actually distinguishes a human musical sound from a non-human sound, or from what we might call non-human music? We know that Indri use complex rhythmic structures in their calls, but we have no way of knowing whether their relationship to rhythm and sound corresponds to anything we would understand as music. We were interested in leaving this question open rather than trying to impose a human interpretation on their voices.
 

For me, this is also what makes the use of the Indri recordings different from simply making music about another species. By incorporating their voices directly into the musical structure, the composition creates a space in which human and non-human sounds can coexist without establishing a clear hierarchy between them. The resulting music moves between fragile, sparse passages and denser layers of sound, from recognizable instrumental gestures to moments in which the different sources become almost indistinguishable.

Malagasy Breath was released in 2023 by Bengaluru-based label Subcontinental Records and received significant attention from critics, particularly in the jazz world. The album was also featured in Rolling Stone.
 

The Sky Cage Quartet is a project initiated by Rajesh Mehta.
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