amirtha kidambi's elder ones: new monuments

red vinyl edition. Amirtha Kidambi has long affirmed that the role of music in the act of protest is pivotal. For an artist and activist who once cultivated community at defunct Brooklyn spaces such as Death By Audio and the Silent Barn, the 2020 protests became a place to publicly amplify the underground. That subversive spirit of collective dismantlement and reassemblage serves as the catalyst for the longform cuts that comprise New Monuments, Kidambi's third full-length recording with her band Elder Ones. As their leader writes in its accompanying liner notes, the title summons the "tearing down of old colonial and racist monuments and vestiges of power, in order to build new ones to the martyrs of struggle." Tracked at Figure 8 Studios above Prospect Park, the album is the work of an artist concerned with numerous interconnected sites of global conflict: among them, the farmers' protests over agricultural reforms in India, the evolution of the Iranian women's rights movement following the death of Mahsa Amini, and the continuous crescendoing call for Palestinian liberation. This time, the Elder Ones collective consists of saxophonist Matt Nelson, cellist Lester St. Louis, bassist Eva Lawitts, and drummer Jason Nazary -- all four of whom contribute their share of electronic textures and electroacoustic treatments. As a document of dissent, these four compositions give proof that improvisation is instrumental in the realm of resistance. Kidambi's voice hovers over a scorched sonic landscape equally informed by Black American liberation music, the devotional fervor of Indian Carnatic, and the unleashing of an inner scream listeners might associate with hardcore punk and harsh noise. The quintet then locks into a polyrhythmic pulse that conjures up the ghosts of free jazz past and present; throughout its runtime, there are flashes of Albert Ayler's love cry, Don Cherry's eternal rhythms, Alice Coltrane's ecstatic spirituality, and the fortissimo fearlessness of Kidambi's late friend and collaborator Jaimie Branch, to whom the album is partly dedicated. Above all, New Monuments is a call to action with nothing left unsaid: it demands that the drive towards change should not only be seen, but heard.