Sarathy Korwar - There Is Beauty, There Already

Sarathy Korwar, genre-breaking drummer, producer and composer, announces the release of his seventh album, There Is Beauty, There Already, out on Otherland. Celebrating the melodic power of the drum ensemble, the album follows his 2022 Indofuturist manifesto KALAK with a deeply immersive longform suite of percussion-led compositions.

Playing as a 40-minute suite of hypnotic and transcendent drum improvisations, the album beats through a repetitive, circular structure that brings to mind Indian folk music, jazz drum ensembles like Max Roach’s M’Boom and the contemporary classical minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich. From the undulating bass tones of the table to the tonal varieties of South Indian clay pot ghatam, the snare drum snap of the drum kit, and shades of electronic texture through the Buchla Easel, Korwar’s ensemble bubbles and flows through a stream of steady rhythm, forever in motion like the ceaseless energy of a river.

“The album is me finding my voice as a composer again and going back to the thing I know best, which is the drums,” Korwar says. “It’s me falling back in love with percussion and expressing just how melodic and emotive it can be. Unlike my other albums that have often engaged with weighty themes like migration, identity and futurism, this is a raw act of placing myself front and centre – letting the drums speak instead.”