Musician, poet, and activist Diljeet Kaur Bhachu released her stunning debut album, Double Lives, earlier this year as a ‘vinyl-less record’ through Doughnut Music Labs. We talked about how that finally came to fruition after nearly ten years of work.
You wear quite a lot of creative hats, metaphorically: what was the process of getting to recording the album?
Gosh. I actually started working on what became Double Lives around 2015. I used to commute to Edinburgh while I was working on my PhD, so I started writing bits of poetry on the train; it had been a few years after my grandad had passed away and I was just starting to scratch the surface on questions about family, migration, history. Also, doing a PhD, and particularly meeting other black and brown students, we were talking about race and gender and that was the first time in my life I’d really talked about that stuff in an explicit way.
I was also at that point starting to work out who I was as a musician. I started getting asked to do solo gigs and it was like, right, I’ve got to find music by women. I’ve got to find music by global majority composers.
I don’t want to play the canon – I felt disconnected from it. Learning about colonial history – the Romantic era is also the colonial period. And so I had all that going on and had to reinvent what I wanted to play. That led me to writing, because I realised that I didn’t have the money to spend on lots of new scores. And then Matt Brennan [Zoey Van Goey] came to me last year and said “look, I’m planning Doughnut Music Lab, a cool sustainable model for releases, would you be interested?”
It was perfect timing because I think I developed enough to actually make something cohesive of all the little ideas. Also a deadline really just helped. The poetry that’s on there is bits that I have written over the past ten years. It was just a thing I just did. For me, it wasn’t ever something I necessarily thought would be a very public thing, but again, I think I was ready for it to be more of a public thing at this point.
So I think it was the right timing of being able to take all these things and go, okay, actually I think I’ve got the right people around me to make it happen.
With it being such a personal thing, was there a bit of not wanting to let it go?
I mean, less so about letting it go and more just being absolutely terrified about putting it out, if I’m honest. Even though I’ve written about personal experiences through academic life it still felt more soul-exposing in some ways – also with it being about other people’s experiences and stories as well, it carries a different responsibility to do that. And so I think I was, yeah, terrified, a bit apprehensive. I also just knew it would change me. Once it was done, there was no going back.
What’s the balance between improvising and composed music?
The only times we really did much editing was when I’d taken a massive, big gap while I needed a breather. I didn’t want to be fixing notes unless it was something really significant. But if it was just me as a human playing as a human, then I didn’t want to get into editing that. Obviously I play a wind instrument and I’m not the quietest-breathing flute player, when it comes to that. But I actually wanted to lean into that and go yeah, there’s a human making this. I didn’t want it to sound too perfect. I wanted to sound real.
You worked with classical musician Ranjana Ghatak. How did that inform your process?
She’s changed my life, frankly. I had a relationship with singing from early childhood through the gurdwara, but learning in a very community-based way. So I didn’t have a lot of theoretical knowledge and then Western musical education took over.
I met Ranjana at a time when I really had wanted to reconnect, build a better relationship with my voice. Learning raga-based music was a way of reconnecting with essentially the first music I learned. And so it was really interesting to me that there was a lot of stuff that I just didn’t know the names for, didn’t have the theoretical framework, but it was in me. And part of it again goes hand in hand with being comfortable with the imperfections; something I struggled with in Western singing was you’re always trying to sound like someone else. Whereas with Indian ways of singing, you use the speaking voice. It’s an extension of your speaking voice and therefore you’re not trying to sound like someone else.
We’ve talked about how you only make your first album once, but what’s next?
I have been thinking lately about new words. Something for me on Double Lives that really opened doors was writing lyrics in the Punjabi language, which is my mother tongue, but I’m not fluent. So it’s a way of trying to reconnect with language, as well. I think for me, making music in these ways has very much been about self exploration and self development, My creativity comes in little bursts. I can’t predict it; it’s very much at the whim of the universe. So I’m just revelling right now in having little flurries of ideas.
Double Lives is out now via Doughnut Music Lab. Available here
Diljeet Kaur Bhachu plays A Day at the Courtyard on Sunday 10th August at The Cooperage Courtyard, Glasgow Southside. Part of Govanhill International Festival. Free.
Main image credit Seth Monchev
