Kashika Kollaikal, the multi-instrumentalist behind Flung, spent the first night of 2022 in the Seattle airport watching a screen display a continually moving departure time for a flight home to Oakland and carefully carrying a harmonium around the gate.
At first glance, a flight delay seems like an odd origin for her third album,All Heartbeat,but the intimacy forged with the harmonium through that night spent in the terminal watered the seeds for the project. Originally bought by Kollaikal’s mother while pregnant with her in Varanasi, the instrument called out to Kollaikal when she was visiting her family, and knew she wanted to bring it home to keep exploring. “I started playing around with it and I was suddenly so moved by this deep space that the droning creates,” she says. “Pumping air through felt just like breathing.”
Once she finally boarded a flight early the following morning and arrived home in Oakland, Kollaikal immediately set up the harmonium alongside a sequencer on the floor of her room and spontaneously laid down the first demos of new songs that would come to form the core ofAll Heartbeat.
As the album emerged in the year that followed, Kollaikal drew inspiration from walks around her Oakland neighborhood, early mornings on her grandparents’ balcony during a trip to Bangalore, and a constant attunement to the latent sounds of her surroundings. The resultant musical world ofAll Heartbeat evokes the passing sonic glimpses which allow us to peek into others’ lives: someone belting out their favorite song in a car swerving around a corner or the steady thump of bass wafting out of a bedroom window onto the sidewalk below. “I was thinking about how we connect with spaces, with each other, with ourselves.” Kollaikal says. “I wanted this album to create a place or a moment for people to live in, something that feels like how the world is always humming.”
This central ethos is at the core ofAll Heartbeat,and its traces are everywhere in the tracks. “Intrinsic” begins with a click and a crackling, sibilant hiss before the melody comes shimmering to the fore, as if hearing someone put on their favorite cassette tape. The insistent squawk of a bird greets the listener at the start of “Crescent” before the song rolls into a hypnotically languid murmuring.
Throughout, Kollaikal’s deft production sets up a rich interplay between intense intimacy and the blurriness of distance. Her vocals sit closer in the mix than in her previous work, reflecting new timbral explorations in her singing and a renewed lyrical conviction that pulls the listener close. In other moments, songs mimic the feeling of hearing a neighbor’s music on their boombox or over a garden fence, celebrating the accidental joy of briefly communal sonic spaces.
Tactility courses throughAll Heartbeat. To augment her sound’s signature electronic experimentation, Kollaikal worked with her hands to draw out the organic voices of instruments, materials, and field recordings. Inspired after stumbling upon a music box performance by artist Sidney Chen halfway through the making of the album, Kollaikal crafted the music box flurries that ornamentAll Heartbeat by methodically punching paper scrolls one hole at a time. “You have to start all over again if you make too many mistakes and lose your place,” she laughs. “The process reminds me what slowness and patience feel like.” The effort pays off -- a twinkling melody clambers over a robotic vocal refrain in the title track, before the listener hears the same melody (this time by Kollaikal’s enthralling vocals) in “Lilac”. The music box renders nostalgia before the event, an ache for a memory the listener is not sure they’ve had.
Elsewhere, aluminum foil weaves through piano strings to create a sensitive buzzing, a wooden slide whistle flutters through rainfall and a bassy melody, and a cassette player hurls magnetic tape forward, backward, and in spluttering bursts seconds after a song has seemingly ended. UK-based experimental pop musicians Mica Levi and Tirzah Mastin are a large influence on Kollaikal: “I love the way their sounds are not just sounds. They become almost anthropomorphic - they develop a personality, an attitude,” she says. Following in this same spirit, the palette of textures and samples that definesAll Heartbeat lends feeling, character, and familiarity to the music.
There were even times while recordingAll Heartbeat when sounds seem to leap into the songs. While putting finishing touches on the album at a cabin near Guerneville, California, Kollaikal visited a state park for a walk at sunset. As she took photos in the hollowed-out heartwood of a Redwood tree, she began to hear the steady approach of a deep tonal roar. She quickly began recording what turned out to be a park maintenance vehicle; upon returning to her computer to find a spot for the clip, she realized it happened to match the exact key of a new track she was working on, album opener “Baby I Hope.” The world is humming indeed.
All Heartbeat is Kollaikal’s third release as Flung, and rather than shy away from earlier material, it honors that work. Fans of Kollaikal’s past albumsShaky But My Hair Is Grown(2020) andApricot Angel (2022) may recognize pieces of familiar songs re-arranged, reversed, and stitched into the fabric of these new compositions.
The Easter eggs are sure to delight careful listeners, and these windows connect to a deeper question for Kollaikal: how do you return? She references her love of Milton Nascimento, the renowned Brazilian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who frequently revisits his songs by recording new iterations that call back to other moments from throughout his sixty year career. “Milton’s music has taught me a lot about how to approach your earlier work, and your earlier selves, with care and generosity instead of judgment and self-consciousness,” she says. With this new addition to Flung’s catalog, Kollaikal is surfacing and honoring her past while forging lucidly ahead.
All Heartbeatis out April 5th, 2024 via Get Better Records.
