Mahal

After the unexpected success of their first release, blending Indian music with the popular soul sound of today, Glass Beams toured the world and performed at major festivals from Primavera Sound to Melbourne Music Week.

And now, at the end of 2023, the musicians finally found some time to record the 20 minutes of music they had been performing all this time along with their debut EP. The long-awaited Mahal was born. Accompanying the release is a performance recording in mesmerizing settings and costumes that have become the group's trademark.

The sound of Glass Beams traces back to the biography of founder Rajan Silva. His father emigrated to Melbourne from India in the late 1970s. Silva recalls how they watched the recording of the "Concert for George" together many times, which took place at the Royal Albert Hall in London on November 29, 2002, on the first anniversary of George Harrison's death. In addition to Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, and Jeff Lynne from Electric Light Orchestra, the concert featured the iconic Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar with his daughter Anoushka.

In Silva's father's record collection, recordings of Bollywood singers Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar coexisted with the blues of B.B. King and Muddy Waters. The combination of Western musical styles and traditional Indian music in the works of R. D. Burman, Ananda Shankar, and the duo Kalyanji-Anandji made a special impression on Silva.

Today, Glass Beams strive to convey this intersection of East and West, ancient and modern, in their music and in the visual world they have created.

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