Sheila Chandra
Quiet
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Quiet was Sheila Chandra’s writing debut album. It features expression vocals instead of lyrics which invite the listener to close their eyes and delve into the album’s ten individual, ambient soundscapes. Cyclic riffs and interweaving vocals are central to this evocative and experimental album. Originally released in 1984, this album was Sheila’s second solo project after leaving her band Monsoon.

“Quiet was my second solo album and marked my debut as a writer. It was the album with which I took a crucial lateral step in terms of direction, to provide a platform for my musical evolution and a showcase for the possibilities that I was developing for my voice.

“I did not take on board the contemporary short term view around me in 1984 that I ought to be producing slick, trendy product out of the already well trodden paths and over-refined resources of the pop world (both artistically and in the business sense) to help throw off the hopelessly kitsch, invalidated image of the Asian community constructed by the media at the time in Britain. I could see only artistic insecurity in that direction.

“Instead, the premise from which the team of writers worked on the album reflected my wish to abandon any known, sure-fire element so that more obscure methods, structures and elements would have to be explored and, to some degree, quantified. Consequently, it was decided that Quiet would be lyricless, the tracks untitled, and, rather than draw on any predictable or trendy connotated musical form, such as cool jazz or funk as a constant prop in its equation, that the album would explore the structural world of cyclic riffs, combined with as many tones and textures (out of the vast array possible both Oriental and Occidental) as I could vocally bring to the work. My aim was not to produce a well honed product, or to polish what we knew, but to force myself particulaly, into the kind of new territory where I would learn as a musician and writer; in other words to sacrifice the album as a product to the long term goal of my growth as an artist.

“For the first time as a writer, I was facing the ‘blank page’ - the potentially most powerful reflector of the human soul. I was terrified at the neccesity of committing to paper or vinyl what I really thought or felt musically - I still am sometimes - I insisted I ‘didn’t want to’ write, that I ‘couldn’t’ write, - even when I came up with three beautiful melodies at my first attempt for (appropriately enough) “Quiet 1.” I have since grown to deeply value the mental freedoms possible in the pure world of imagination that writing led me into, and its effect on my personal development. In it, I cannot be limited by any social, cultural or material restriction. I can think thoughts I was perhaps never meant to think. Quiet is the album where that process began.”

Sheila Chandra - 1996

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