Artist Spotlight: Yaatri
Blessed with imperial musicianship and startling ingenuity, Yaatri are one of the most progressive and compelling new wave jazz bands to emerge in recent years.
The group recently released their distinguished new album Lucid, which sees the band at their eminently experimental best. Fronted by the celestial vocality of Pit favourite B-ahwe, the band combine elements of art rock, electronica, jazz and Indian music to create a challenging, intricate world of consuming soundscapes and gorgeous cadence.
I sat down with Yaatri to chat about the new album, their creative process, and their sui generis sound.
Who is influencing you?
Most of our primary influences have remained constant for the past few years. I would say our writing is primary inspired by musicians the sounds of their respective cultures into their takes on contemporary jazz, like Tigran Hamasyan, Avishai Cohen, and Dhafer Yousef. Other big ones include Maria Chiara Argiro, House of Waters, and Richard Spaven.
How did you form as a group?
I met everyone while studying at the Leeds College of Music through playing in various other projects together, and I assembled the group in autumn of 2018 as part of an ensemble studies module of our course. We’ve had a couple of line-up changes over the past six months but remain an LCoM crew!
How does the creative process work?
So far, myself or Felix will bring in an idea to the band, and we spend a lot of time playing it over and over and getting comfortable with it. My ideas have always come from a conscious effort to explore a musical concept like a scale or rhythm, or to try to capture to feeling and energy behind a piece of music I’m loving at the time. These ideas are rarely “finished”, but often contain several sections we know belong together but don’t quite understand how yet. Once each person figures out what the idea needs from them and establishes a musical role for themselves, we can start to focus on the details, intricacies, and stitching ideas together.
We’ve also identified the recording process to be a big part of shaping our compositions; the type of music we write needs time to subconsciously figure itself out in our heads. A lot of the time, the details that go on to become our favourite bits of our tunes fall into place a year or so after the song was originally written.
Do you tend to create musically before focusing on lyrical themes and vocals?
Yes, so far I think the music has always come first. Once the music has a strong identity, feeling, and shape behind it, B-ahwe was able to form her melodies and lyrics that weave through and float over the top of the composition.
Your sound spans so many genres and styles, how do you maintain coherency when you have such a wide range of influence?
Yaatri was very lucky to figure out our place in music and our identity very early on in our development, and I’m sure most people who check us out agree that we sit somewhere very unique. I think the reason we’re able to weave between such contrasting sounds and influences within a tune is because everything we write feels true to our identity. The sheer amount of time spent shaping every little piece of our songs to make sure everything feels natural also certainly has something to do with it.
The Indian music is particularly interesting. Where does that stem from and why did you highlight it on the album?
The original concept behind Yaatri was to explore my international upbringing and Indian heritage, and to incorporate characteristics associated with music from the subcontinent into our own compositions. A couple of the tunes from the album stemmed directly from rhythmic and melodic ideas from Indian Classical music, like Gold for example which was born through playing around with a rhythm taught to me by Yaatri’s tabla player Zuheb Ahmed Khan.
You seem to be keen to push the boundaries of writing and song structure, why do you choose to break conventions in such a striking way?
I don’t know if it’s that conscious of a choice, I think it’s just a result of the combination of our influences. All of us come from pop/rock/soul backgrounds, and find that working in that pop songwriting sensibility into our more abstract and left-of-field influences to be where the magic happens.
Do you feel that there is a big market for this within the industry?
I think especially today and in the UK, audiences are quite open minded and open to hearing something new. I think we sit in between many different styles, and for that reason have the potential to appeal to relatively wide audiences. I think we’ve all been blown away at the widespread support Lucid has had so far from so many different types of people, ranging from our live audiences on our tour to DJ’s on Radio 1. I like to think that there’s something in it for everyone.
Really love the new album! How does it feel to finally release it into the world?
For me personally, releasing music has always been a little bit hard, as I find it slightly uncomfortable to let something that’s been my whole world for a period of 2-3 years go. That being said, it does feel great to have it out there, and I think being able to tour this music, play it to new audiences all over the country and hear people’s responses to it has played a big part in making it feel good.
What are the main themes and motifs in the project?
The album abstractly outlines a story of a character being born into the world, and dealing with the existential struggles of their journey. The whole second side is about acknowledging conflict, and looking inside yourself for understanding and peace.
There is a strong sense of a journey throughout the project. Was the album a personal journey for you? How did it enlighten you musically and personally?
The making of this album definitely was a journey for us, and the year we spent on it really opened our eyes to the possibilities of our music and our own creative potential. I think we owe a lot of that to our producer Sam Hobbs of Rebel Elements studios, who in a way understood what our music was supposed to sound like more than we did. We’re really looking forward to taking everything we learned throughout the process to the next level with our next album. For me personally, making Lucid has been so important in helping me figure out my place in music. It’s given me purpose, confidence and joy, which I’m so grateful for.
What’s the meaning behind the album title Lucid?
The word Lucid has a few meanings. It can refer to clarity and understanding, something bright and luminous, and a type of dreaming where the dreamer feels awake and has control. The name is a tribute to the narrative of internal conflict and self-discovery contained within the album, a reflection of the state of the world and our lives who making the album, and the sense of purpose we felt while putting it together.
If you were introducing yourself to a new listener, what track would you play them?
I think maybe Gold is the way to go - it’s perhaps the most pop-minded of the tunes on Lucid and has a groove that anyone could get behind. It’s the perfect way to ease someone in to our sound-world and influences.
What’s to come from you?
We’ve gone through some significant changes over the past year, and now find ourselves with a fresh line-up and another album’s worth of tunes written and ready to go! We plan to get back into the studio this summer, and hopefully have a lot more music coming out next year. There’s still more Lucid related goodies to share with the world though, so people should keep their eyes on our socials for some insights into our process, the albums narrative, live videos, and more.