WORLD BEAT

Feb 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef

While traveling the globe to assemble the sounds that would become his latest album, Prophesy (V2, 2001), one-time Asian underground leader Nitin Sawhney remembered to bring his mantra — the album's title track — no matter where he was playing.

“When I went to India, I played ‘Prophesy’ at dawn on guitar,” he recalls. “I played it on the beach of Armenland in Australia and on top of Mount Pilanesberg in South Africa. Even in America, I played it on Mount Shasta in a blizzard at four in the morning. I was retuning my senses wherever I went. The track really focuses energy, and it has a mesmerizing effect on people. It is a good way of channeling energy, so I enjoyed playing it across the world.”

A seamless, near-mystical album on which drum 'n' bass rhythms slide under Bollywood orchestras, London raps, acoustic Brazilian music and dark spoken word, Sawhney's concept with Prophesy was to record authentic cultures in their natural habitats, erasing borders and uniting people through music. He recorded the album across the globe with a Soweto youth choir, a Brazilian orchestra, aboriginal musicians in Australia and a South Indian orchestra.

Sawhney achieved his philosophical mantra by using technology as a tool, not a panacea. “It is important to physicalize things first; then, get into technology afterward,” he explains. “I did travel with a Mac laptop and a G4. Sometimes I worked with a MiniDisc recorder. Then I would go into a local studio, like with the Brazilian Symphonic Orchestra in Rio. I used the [Digidesign] Pro Tools setup they had there.” During his journey, Sawhney discovered that using technology helped create the path to cohesiveness.

“I realized the best way to synchronize the sounds in a new studio was to just place a click — timecoding can get phenomenally complicated — so I would just literally grab the waveform from my laptop and put the click at the beginning so I could visualize the click on the waveform,” he says. “Whatever I recorded, I knew it would be in sync because the same click was in the beginning of each waveform. Then I would just take the waveforms back to the laptop, and there was no deterioration in the sound. I brought a lot of things back and remixed them my own way. I used a combination of Pro Tools with [Emagic] Logic Audio and followed a consistent way of limiting and compressing the music. I wanted a consistency to the sound and the emotional feel of the album without sacrificing diversity.”

To sustain a musical harmony, Sawhney avoids sampling: “There is very little sampling on the album. The point was to get into a routine of recording things live and being there when they happened. You'll hear Nelson Mandela's voice. I was there in his house; it was real to me. Sampling can make you lazy to where you lose your human feeling. An album, for me, is like an emotional diary — each album is a record of how I am feeling at the time.”

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