GANAVYA - Nilam

Co-produced by Nils Frahm at the Leiter Studio in Berlin's Funkhaus, “Nilam” is one of two “gifts” Ganavya released in 2025. The other is a two-track EP made with Sam Amidon titled “Madi”. The singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, born in New York and raised in Tamil Nadu, brings to life seven new songs on “Nilam” in which she immerses all her strange folklore, dense with ancestral evocations, laments, joys, and runs toward the wild infinity of the soul. In short, without straying too far from a convenient comparison, one could call her a kind of Enya on loan to Indian-rooted world music. But she's also (and above all) a brazen wanderer whose purpose is to recover stories and songs passed down through generations by her “tribe”. Having grown up on pilgrimage paths with the soundtracks of harikathā playing in the background, Ganavya Doraiswamy had a decidedly sui generis childhood that led her to master a number of partly extinct instruments, some of which appear on “Nilam”, such as the yaazh, the ancient Tamil harp.

Across the seven songs of “Nilam”, a powerful attachment to her own community resurfaces time and again: Ganavya's parents sing on “Nine Jeweled Prayer”, while “Sees Fire” is an unmistakable hymn to universal peace, centered on a planet Earth in need of saving from practically every possible evil.

The album was composed between Ganavya's sold-out 2024 concert in Berlin and the one she held at London's Union Chapel. What strikes the ear immediately is a strong and constant sense of gratitude for the graces bestowed by nature, which runs through Ganavya's voice as she wrestles throughout with a meditation on life and its sometimes unfathomable currents.

If the previous album, “Daughter Of A Temple”, recorded in 2022 at the Moores Opera House with more than forty musicians including Esperanza Spalding, Wayne Shorter and Shabaka Hutchings, tended to widen Ganavya's narrative scope, “Nilam” is a return to private origins, composed and arranged without calling on anyone beyond the aforementioned family members. Amid chants built around just a few notes on the yaazh, the prayer “Pasayadan” stands out, a track former US President Barack Obama even included among his favorite songs of 2025. Ganavya's naive vocation nevertheless emerges both in the album's more concise moments, like the lullaby “Sinathavar Mudikkum”, and amid the angelic tears of “Song For Sad Times”, while the so-called pursuit of happiness ranges across the suspended chords of “Not A Burdem”.

Setting aside an excessive popularity that risks muddying perceptions of the spiritual worth of Ganavya's music, “Nilam” confirms the depth of a songwriter anchored both in the careful preservation of her homeland's vocal and instrumental traditions and in an academic approach aimed at further expanding those boundaries. It's a personal inclination that probably stems entirely from Ganavya's university studies: she holds a degree in ethnomusicology from UCLA and a PhD in creative practice and critical inquiry from Harvard, where she also directed the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an experimental research lab conceived by Esperanza Spalding. Not bad for a young “wanderer” in constant search of songs that evoke the ancient spirit of Tamil women singers.

The meaning of “Nilam” comes from “nil”, the Tamil word for “earth”, and, as the musician herself explains, “it can be a command both to move and to stay still”. And further: “For those who are senselessly silent, it's a command to stand up for what's right. For those who are senselessly loud, it's a command to stay still. For me, it's balance, the heart of the true rhythm of life, of change, of the earth, of landing”. Words that perfectly capture the soul of an album crafted down to the smallest detail, one in which the danger of cheap, off-the-shelf spirituality is always kept at bay. Which, especially these days, is a true godsend.

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09/01/2026