Behind Closed Doors with Rini
Rini is a New York based, Chennai born singer, composer and violinist who is creating her own version of Indian electronica. She will be performing at our upcoming show, Linguistics. Tickets are on sale now! In this interview, Rini chats with Jasmine about being inspired by A.R. Rahman at a young age, collaborating with her band, and the intention behind writing songs without lyrics.
In this blog series, we post in-depth interviews that take you behind closed doors (or #BCD) with independent artists, many of whom have performed or will perform in a Keepsake show.
Jasmine:
How did you get into writing and performing music? Did you grow up singing and playing violin? Who and what were some of your earliest creative inspirations?
Rini:
I started learning music when I was four years old from my grandmother. She taught me how to sing and play the violin. I started off with Indian classical lessons from her and then moved on to a formal teacher. It was so much fun when I was a kid because my cousins and my brother and everyone were learning Indian classical, so it was sort of this fun group lesson thing that we all went to.
As I grew up, I took it more seriously, and I was really into performing music. I moved on from Indian Classical to Bollywood, which is a fusion of Indian classical but with other styles. My earliest inspiration was definitely A.R. Rahman, who is an amazing Grammy-winning composer from India. He blended Electronic music with all of the traditional Indian Folk and Indian Classical music. The way he brought those ideas into Bollywood music was really fresh. I grew up in ‘90s India, and he started writing music for this film, Roja, in ‘92. He was just a hit from then on. I grew up listening to his music, and it was very inspiring to actually record for him in 2011 in India. That kind of made me get into music full time.
I did Computer Science Engineering first after I finished school, but was kind of doing music on the side all the time. At that point, I decided I wanted to quit my job and study music full time so I could start writing and have my own projects. That brought me to Berklee School of Music in Boston in 2012, and I did my major in Electronic Production and Design. I had such a wonderful time there. I met musicians from all around the world. It was a whole sea of music and anything I could do in music. I graduated in 2015 and started my project, Rini, which brings together music from around the world. Its core is my identity, which is Indian music. Since 2015, it’s been an amazing journey living in New York City, which is such a global city and so diverse. It’s been great just meeting all these musicians I can collaborate with, doing all these different projects, touring across the U.S. We did an Indian tour as well. I took musicians from here to India, and it was amazing to show my hometown and all these different cities to them. I got to compose for an Indian Netflix Show, called The Fame Game, and my co-composer was South African (Andrew Orkin). It was amazing trying to blend Indian music into contemporary American music.
Jasmine:
You describe your music as “Indian Electronica and Art Rock.” I’d love to hear about how you arrived at that. What does that sound mean to you? What drives your music right now and how do you see yourself and your music evolving?
Rini:
I majored in Electronic Production and Design at Berklee, and my main reason for that was I was really fascinated by timbres and sounds and textures. A.R. Rahman used all these synths in his music when he brought out that fresh sound in Indian film music. I was also listening to artists like Karsh Kale and Nitin Sawhney and I felt like there was this amazing sound to bring together Indian classical with all of these electronic textures. I wanted to explore that more. I was also always into Rock and Alt Rock, and I learned a lot of jazz at Berklee, so I wanted to put together all of these sounds that really inspired me and all of these sounds that made it exciting for me to write new music in. So my music ends up being this textural thing with a lot of Indian influences, but it has a Rock feel to it and a lot of improvisational jazz feel to it as well. That’s how I kind of arrived at Indian Electronica and Rock as my genre. It’s very hard to put all of these labels to my music, and sometimes I do go outside of it. Some of my music is more Rock, and some of it is less Rock and more ambient and electronic.
“For me, what drives my music is really the possibilities of blending all the different kinds of global music with Indian music and creating a new sound every time I write a composition. ”
For me, what drives my music is really the possibilities of blending all the different kinds of global music with Indian music and creating a new sound every time I write a composition. There are so many possibilities for fusion. Fusion is such a blanket cover of so many different things you can do. Electronic music also brings in another dimension to it—the way you can do textures along with the idioms of global music. Right now, my main inspiration is the collaboration that I’m doing with different artists as a part of my Blue Carpet Sessions.
Jasmine:
We both love Blue Carpet Sessions—both Vol. I and Vol. II, which you released recently, along with performance videos. Can you tell us about the catalyst behind that project?
Rini:
Thanks so much for the love for Blue Carpet Sessions! The whole idea started out as just a way for me to create content from my living room, just jamming with my band and creating experimental content with different styles and Indian music. As the audience for the sessions grew and the kind of songs that I was doing, it really brought in all these different artists. It became more collaborative. I started bringing in more guest artists, and I also made the production a little better. We actually took it out of the living room and it’s now more of a studio production and we got better video quality. You’ll see it throughout the albums. This recent batch of videos have all been collaborations with other guest artists of different global music styles and it’s been very interesting because it’s a way for me to explore new ways of blending all these different kinds of music together.
Rini performing “Where is Home” with Juana Luna, as part of Blue Carpet Sessions Vol. II.
Jasmine:
You often perform with a band. Tell us a bit more about your approach to collaboration—how do you bring your vision of a song to life? What’s your favorite part about working with other creatives?
Rini:
I love working with my band. The members of the band have always been amazing in that we all think the same way about how we put all of these styles together. Usually, the way I work with them is I’ll write the whole composition and I have charts for them throughout it. I’ll also have a demo, which I create in Logic Pro, and I share with them about how specific I am with certain sounds and certain lines. Everything’s sort of written out.
But there are songs where I have left it up to some of my bandmates. For example, my drummer Maxime Cholley—we work on certain grooves together but he’ll want to add his own ideas. There have also been times where I leave certain sections open so we can bring in their creative ideas, so it is a blend of all of our styles in a more organic way. I treat each song differently. If the intention of a song is very clear for me beforehand, then I put in everything and they follow my lead and bring in their creative ideas just to blend with my lead. And if there is space for them to go beyond that, then they completely come in and say, let’s do this or add that. Let’s repeat some things. If some sections work really well, they really go for it and dynamically make it even better. It’s amazing to work with these musicians, and we really enjoy performing together.
Rini will be performing in the upcoming show, Linguistics, at Rockwood Music Hall Stage 3 on Thursday, September 15. Tickets are available now!
Jasmine:
You’re performing at our upcoming show, Linguistics. You have songs in Tamil, and some in both Tamil and English as well, and we also read that a lot of your songs don’t have lyrics, as human emotion and cultural expression comes across without them. I love that—what a beautiful concept that music and words (however few) can tell a story that can be relatable to many (a theme we definitely hope to capture at Linguistics). Can you tell us more about your relationship with language and music? How does writing in Tamil versus English versus without lyrics differ in terms of expression and conveying certain messages and experiences?
Rini:
Thank you. I started off with writing in Tamil and English because I grew up in Chennai, which is a city in South India and is very urban. I grew up in a school where everything was taught in English. We speak a mix of Tamil and English in Chennai. There are some words that I don’t even know what it is in Tamil because we use English more or less everyday in the way we speak there. It felt natural to start my whole songwriting journey with these two languages. What I really like about lyrics in a song is of course the intention and meaning of what you’re trying to convey, but also the phonetics of just the way certain syllables are. They kind of add something and make you go into the song so much more.
But on the other hand, I also started experimenting with songs that did not have any lyrics but had more [just] emotion and themes. So you have these basic emotions that you feel as you move into certain parts of the song, and it moves along with it. I felt like these songs helped me transcend language barriers and reach a lot more people who connect with the music and feel a journey through the composition.
Jasmine:
What do you have coming up for you? Any upcoming shows or songs?
Rini:
Coming up next for me, I’m working on a couple of Blue Carpet Sessions that we recorded last month. Super excited about releasing both of them very soon.
“I felt like these songs helped me transcend language barriers and reach a lot more people who connect with the music and feel a journey through the composition.”
We have a show that’s coming up in November in Philadelphia, as a part of the South Asian Music & Dance Festival ‘Philadolphia.'‘ We are also going to probably tour India next year. I’m working on all of those things right now, and booking more shows for us next year.
I’m also a guest artist on a Salsa Masala show on September 23 at The Center for West Park (tickets). That’s an amazing Queens-based band that blends Salsa with Indian music and is led by this musician, Neil Padukone. I’m excited for that. Other than that, collaborations with other artists that will be released soon as well.
Jasmine:
At Keepsake House, we talk a lot about the magic in live shows and the communities they help create, almost like every live performance is itself a keepsake that you cherish from a whole house of life experiences. Tell us about your most memorable or fulfilling live performance, the one you would grab first in a fire.
Rini:
Yeah, there is so much magic in live shows. It’s amazing to just feel the energy of everyone around in all this synchronized, energetic pulse. You’re all kind of moving with it. It’s amazing, and it’s such an important medium to connect with other people in respect to their background and culture and who they are. I love playing live. Every show has left me really emotional actually, with just shared moments with everyone in the audience and everyone on stage. After every show I get emotional, and I think about everything that has brought me so far here. It’s made me very grateful to the universe and everything that has happened to me in my life.
My favorite memory would be… recently, we opened for the band called Red Baraat. We had a show in Boston. It was amazing because there was this one song, which is Indian Classical and Rock, and it was the first time when we were performing this really cool section with fast Indian Classical sargam (which is like solfège) over a Rock groove, the audience were all head-banging to it. It was so cool. It was such a blend of everything that I wanted it to be, and the audience enjoyed it exactly the way I intended to be. It was really, really cool. I have a video clip of it and I frequently watch it to inspire myself to create things that really bring across their intention.
Follow Rini: