Songs for Puppies (Full Spectrum) TAPE + Digital Album

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Beast Nest is the primary performance vehicle for Sharmi Basu, a queer South Asian woman of color focused on creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. One day, Sharmi aspires to have an ensemble called “Dog Divas,” which will feature her lying in the grass surrounded by Casio keyboards played by overexcited 6-week-old puppies.

With that in mind: ​Songs For Puppies​ marks her Full Spectrum debut. A dense mosaic of textures and sonic ephemera, these recordings explore intersectional dualities, catalyzing a political – yet ethereal – aesthetic by combining her anti-colonial and anti-imperialist political leanings with a commitment to spirituality within the arts.

Over its duration, the listener is transported through densely layered aural environments that are at once becalmed and brutal; light and dark; ordered and collapsing utterly into entropy. Recalling, at times, the toothsome noise jams of the late Yellow Swans, or perhaps Rashad Becker’s biomimetic aural sculptures, we are thrilled to feature this remarkable work as part of the Full Spectrum catalog.
credits
released 02 March 2015

All songs produced, composed and mixed by Sharmi Basu in Oakland, CA.

Mastered by Andrew Weathers.
Album Artwork by Gretchen Korsmo

Virgo Rising is dedicated to my mama and Rishi.

This record is for the eye of the cervix, for Beni (my puppy), and for all those using creative music for moments of liberation in struggle. This record is for knowing that all brown and black bodies will rise up out of the ashes of our suffering and glow through the rage of our ancestors. This record will never be for cops, white supremacists, or perpetrators of gendered violence. This record is not for the complacent. This record is for encouraging the people at their work, and exhorting them to help one another.

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