GIG REVIEWS

Nitin Sawnhey
@ The Corn Exchange, Cambridge
12th October 2001
www.vanguard-online.co.uk

 It is October 12th Friday night, in Cambridge's Corn Exchange. 9pm. Approximately five days ago Britain and her Allies started their air-borne defensive against Afghanistan, instigating, with bombs, packets of peanut butter and a lot of media-frenzied moral outrage, the now infamous War Against Terrorism. The world is Officially Post-September 11. And it will never be the same, hurtling as it is towards a New World Order explicitly defined by cultural segregation, fear and more paranoia than the average dope-smoker might suffer in a lifetime. Right now, the world, to many people, feels a little fucked-up.

Globalism's fucked up, capitalism's fucked up. And the West's ultimate sedative, its materialist intoxicant – the glorious soma found in consumerist culture simply doesn't feel enough anymore. Not enough to alleviate the inexplicable feeling that if we continue our passive acceptance of our leader's boys-with-toys reaction to any threat to Western imperialism it is ultimately us who have fucked up, too. And Nitin Sawnhey is hardly about to let us forget this.

If a simmering anxiety underlines our collective consciousness, exacerbated by the recent announcement of war, this anxiety is exactly what his performance sets about addressing. The richly eclectic textures and haunting vocals that define Mercury-Prize nominated Beyond Skin and the recently released Prophesy, combined with haunting samples and sounds collected from around the world made them word-of-mouth hits with a huge cross-section of society.

And that cross-section is out in force tonight. The Cambridge-bourgeoisie, eccentric, middle-aged and so tastefully middle-class; the giggling Asian babes, aglitter with bindis, bangles and Top Shop combats; the coffee-table couples, morphed together to relive those sofa-sharing, intimate moments. Ravers, students, hippy-girls and canehead-boys. My mum. All here for Nitin Sawhney action. And not one, I'll bet, leaves disappointed.

In the flesh, Nitin's sound is every bit as organically vibrant, inspired, and poignant as it is in your living room. Beautifully crafted, imbibed with jazz, funk, tabla beats and flamenco, this is music to make your soul quiver. Tina Grace [vocalist on Letting Go], with Aid Not Bombs scrawled across her white T Shirt, lends the tune fresh passion, investing the music with an emotional immediacy to rival Beth Orton or PJ Harvey.

Poeticising the sounds and lyrics are startling frame-to-beat visuals that leave the audience rooted to the floor, spell-bound and memerised. Live footage from Afghanistan, combined with holocaust mushroom clouds, smiling African kids and images lifted from around the world lend the music an edge that allows people to emotionally connect on issues in a collective way.

Rarely seen in musical performance, this is connecting to people, voices, faces, cultures in a time when fear and paranoia increasingly are polarizing us all. And the effect is profound. 'Nitin's music', says Mark, of Yeast Films, 'has a 'political' edge to it that's political in a humanitarian way and an image can really help communicate the point being made'. And the point being made, it seems, is wake up and smell the bombshells.

Nitin himself appears at the side of the stage with his piano, offset against the rest of his brilliantly talented collective – a gesture suggesting the modesty, kindness and general all-round-nice-bloke reputation he's generated amongst those he's met.

Catch our interview with Nitin: it's tres fucking interesting.

Ruth Collins