Ananda Shankar Experience and State of Bengal: Walking On

Invoking the tired cli-ché that certain music is like "the soundtrack to an imaginary film," I posit that Ananda Shankar's newest, and final, album, Walking On, recorded with the help of Anglo-Indian electronica musicians State of Bengal, is like the soundtrack to an unmade Atom Egoyan film. His music conjures up the same postmodern notions of transience and cultural miscegenation that occur so frequently in Egoyan's work, with his dense mixture of traditional Indian sitar jam leavened with b-boy breaks. More specifically, the album's rhythms convey a sweeping, epic sort of uncertainty that would be most appropriate in a film like The Sweet Hereafter or Felicia's Journey.

The music achieves a detached melancholy that could easily serve as a theme to Egoyan's heartbroken photographer in his best film, Calendar. The sitar never drones, contained within a musical landscape that serves as an appropriate backdrop to Shankar's filling sitar ability. Shankar's untimely death this past year only serves to highlight the ephemeral, unsettled nature of these songs.

State of Bengal's contributions to the mixture are positive as well, providing a state-of-the-moment, beat-science sheen to Shankar's sitar work. The key track is "Tanusree," in which the tense relationship between sampled strings and menacing bass gives way to a pastoral flute, until it too recedes before the awesome, electric washes of the sitar. He continues to repeat the same beautiful phrase, with occasional interruptions from the bass and flute, until the external world has completely crumbled, leaving nothing but this one majestic oratory. Perfect music for driving the creepily deserted L.A. streets at two in the morning. (Real World)

—Saul Austerlitz

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