Mattias IA Eklundh / B.C. Manjunath - Primality

Mridangam and konnakol by B.C. Manjunath recorded and filmed at Laya Digi Studios, Bangalore, India. Engineered by Pramath Kiran. Everything else recorded, mixed and edited in the Freak Audio Lab. Mastered by Torben Schmidt. Primality Sometimes the internet can be a wonderful thing. On March 8th I received a message on Instagram that blew yours truly right off the chair. The absolutely fantastic B.C. Manjunath, whom I had adored and respected for years, wrote to me and said he... was an admirer of my work (!) Needless to say, I went bananas and bombarded master B.C. Manjunath (or Manju as I now call him) with praise and love for his tremendous understanding of time. Manju is so next level it hurts. What followed was a whole lot of brotherly writing and Zoom meetings. Manju really wanted to do a collaboration of some sorts. He didn’t have to ask twice. So, after completing the daunting (yet wonderful and inspiring) task of finishing all the vast material for this summer’s Freak Guitar Camp I put the composer helmet back on and went to work. Very quickly a structure in 89/16 popped up in my Viking skull and I built the majority of the tune around this rhythm (21/16 x 3, 13/16 x 2). If anyone could groove over this with both konnakol and the mridangam and make it sound like the most natural thing in the world, it would be B.C. Manjunath. I got all the files from Manju and went into mixing and video editing mode right away. I felt so extremely honored as I was tweaking the audio and chopping the footage, hour by hour, and I still have to pinch myself in the arm. This really happened. Sometimes the internet can be a wonderful thing... IA