Anoushka Shankar has confirmed details of a new mini-album, Chapter I: Forever, For Now.

Anoushka Shankar, the acclaimed sitar player, producer and composer, has confirmed details of a new mini-album, Chapter I: Forever, For Now. Released by LEITER, the label run by Nils Frahm and Felix Grimm, it will be available on limited edition vinyl and via all digital platforms from October 6, 2023, in the same week she begins her US tour. Her first release since December 2022’s standalone single, ‘In Her Name’, which commemorated the tenth anniversary of the 2012 gang rape in Delhi of Jyoti Singh Pandey, the mini-album also follows Between Us..., her live album for LEITER earlier the same year, recorded with Jules Buckley and the Metropole Orkest and nominated for a Grammy for Best Global Album in 2023. It will be preceded by the digital release of ‘Stolen Moments’ on June 30.

Recorded at LEITER’s studio in Berlin’s celebrated Funkhaus

omplex, the four new tracks make up the first chapter in a trilogy of mini-albums Shankar will be writing and releasing as an evolving story between tours. Featuring guest appearances by Nils Frahm (piano, glass harmonica, harmonium, slit drum), Gal Maestro (bass) and Magda Giannikou (accordion), Forever, For Now was produced by Arooj Aftab, with whom Shankar had previously collaborated on ‘Udhero Na’, from the deluxe edition of Aftab’s ‘Vulture Prince’ album. This, too, was nominated for a 2023 Grammy, this time for Best Global Music Performance – bringing to nine Shankar's tally of Grammy nominations to date – and their creative reunion for Chapter I proved especially liberating. “I wanted recordings that express moments,” the sitarist says, “not my analysis of those moments from a future vantage point, which often happens when working on albums over a longer period.”

Forever, For Now’s dominant mood is set by the bewitching stillness of the opening ‘Daydreaming (featuring Nils Frahm)’, a fresh take on a traditional Karnatik lullaby. “I remember my mother and grandmother singing it to me as a child,” Shankar reminisces, “and one day last summer, while I was in the garden with my two sons and my sitar, I was strumming when one of my sons got tired and lay down in my lap. As I started finding this melody from my childhood, he fell asleep, and I remember trying to savour the beauty of the moment. This song is a snapshot of afternoon sun through leaves, roses in bloom, a child dozing on his mother's lap, the preciousness of a single moment fully lived and witnessed. This whole chapter, in fact, is about that feeling, being completely in the fullness and transience of a single moment, coming to forever – for now.”

Right from the outset, Shankar’s intention over the three releases was to work with a different producer on each mini-album, and Aftab was an obvious candidate for these inaugural sessions. “I’d always thought she was brilliant,” Shankar recalls. “and working together on ‘Udhero Na' confirmed our collaborative chemistry. I love the genre-fluid world she creates with thoughtful arrangements and sonic spaces. It’s something I also value in my own work, but she does it differently. I was really drawn to that different voice, that different colour.”

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