Nyima Vol. 1 is an interesting release. A press release informs me, “Nyima Records, one of Femme Music’s flagship sub-labels, was launched to champion English singer-songwriters that deserve a global audience. The label’s first release, a compilation featuring 11 artists, is the first step in redefining the South Asian female artist narrative.” There are very few solely female-focused platforming ventures within the country’s sonic landscape, and Femme Music is supposed to be just that — a culmination of efforts coalescing to give women / femme individuals the support required to enable recognition on a much larger scale than the creatives listed on their roster have had so far.
I watch a coterie of these artists sing and perform extracts of their release to an almost-packed Bonobo audience. The evening is mostly mellow, marked by enthusiastic, encouraging singing from friends and patrons across the floor in accompaniment with the musicians. For one, it is a pleasant set of presentations — and it is admittedly refreshing, to have a succession of femme creatives take stage, it is a statement, self-professedly so, by the label — and a number of the performing names are familiar to me, courtesy my tertiary involvement in the city’s music ecosystem.
Nyima, Vol. 1, in all honesty, is a mixed bag. A lot of it swings between being easy-to-listen, comfort music — the kind of thing that you could let play on your drive or your kitchen, and some intriguing arrangements that make you stop in your steed and pay attention. There is no genre-binding that has been done in the tracklisting, in fact — it has been assembled in what I would call a free-flow state, or perhaps a dissipation of moods, where the more intimate, pensive, Come Sit By My Bed by Tabitha Kagoo, Anika Bharwani, and Jenn Steeves sets the stage for a introspective soundbed, carried through to Ro Maiti’s Daytime — crescendoing somewhere around ruhdabeh’s Turn It Around, opening up to more relaxed dream-pop directions with k o k u m and Subid Khan’s Summer Chill, before moving radially into multiple thematics.
The record has some interesting numbers. Tiana Tara and Sanoli Chowdhury’s Wallow is perhaps the most mature in terms of production, and writing — it flows almost waterlike in form, borrows from lo-fi electropop but not so much that there is an abysmal loss of intent, and generally just sticks with you. Ro Maiti’s Daytime is interesting — she is almost seductive, slightly dreary, and her synths keep your attention — before the pitch shifting hits you, and there is an almost intuitive humor to the kind of “leather and smoke” promised in the press release. There is this sense of mystic that she creates which is never really matched up with in the rest of the album, and that is to her exceptional credit.
There is another fun chunk on the album — where Sahana Naresh’s Into The Wild and Anjali Manoharan’s Raindrops on a Windscreen form this ruminating, indie-pop-rock and R&B synthesized core, which lends the album a certain kind of optimism, which is not really anticipated, but not unwelcome.
The album has groove to itself and interventions like Nyima are necessary to conjure female artistic mobilization into the independent music space, because the excess of male artists and the phenomenon where women have primarily been reduced to feature potential has not gone unnoticed. It is also not nearly a quarter as lost as a lot of the drivel that is produced just as cash-grabs, even within the alternative music space, solely dictated by trends and reel-fluenced hooks — and it clearly has it’s crests, it’s very solid victories. The album being given the title of a first Volume, implies the existence of many more, and one cannot help but be hopeful for it — as an intervention, and as a body of music.
