REINHERITANCE by Varun Rangaswamy

The album REINHERITANCE deals with the idea that one of the ways tradition is simultaneously reproduced and radically transformed is through repeated acts of inheritance. It is a process through which I look for ways to engage with ancestral tradition that invite alterity.

In this album, I respond to three musical ancestors: Ornette Coleman, M.S. Subbulakshmi, and Aretha Franklin. Each of these responses is not only a piece of music, but also an act of inheritance in real time. I do this not by trying to recreate their work, but by offering my presence to theirs, creating a musical space that fuses past, present, and future. They are a part of my past, and I am a part of their future.

In REINHERITANCE, an entirely solo multi-tracked album, I play bassoon, mridanga, tenor sax, and electronics, and I sing. I also do noise improv on instruments I have no training on, like clarinet, guitar, and pots and pans. By responding to musicians from such disparate contexts with multiple recordings of myself playing multiple different instruments, I hybridize myself. I exponentiate my own voice, not to make it louder, but to make it varied, to make it different from itself.

By making this album, I want to show how I inherit, as all of us do, forms of music and ways of being multiple times through multiple different iterations of myself. Those ways of being are always changing how they come to me, and I am always changing how and what I inherit through the act of inheritance itself.

In my responses to Ornette, M.S., and Aretha, their spirits are present, but no attempt to respond to the past can be pure and whole; the past can never be fully recreated, nor should it be. The weight of time leaves gaps, generational movements create open space, and it is in this space that alterity finds its expression. REINHERITANCE gives voice to the alterity I am able to discover in the gift of space my ancestors have given me.



A portion of all proceeds will be donated to The New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, the church where Aretha Franklin recorded her live album, "Amazing Grace."

I am an improviser-composer and scholar. My work, which has been performed across North America and Europe, focuses on fragmentary identities within a single body. My self-reflexive debut album REINHERITANCE has been praised for “creating a mesmerizing circular dialect” (I Care If You Listen).

varunrangaswamy.com