Musical statues

When Antony Gormley heard Nitin Sawhney's latest album, he decided to supply the CD artwork. Charlotte Cripps talks to them about how mutual artistic appreciation developed into a deep friendship

Saturday, 4 October 2008

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Man in the middle: Nitin Sawhney visiting Antony Gormley's studio in London [PAUL BURROGHS]

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The acclaimed British sculptor Antony Gormley is far better known for his Angel of the North sculpture and for winning the Turner Prize in 1994 than he is for designing album artwork. But when he listened to his friend Nitin Sawhney's new album London Undersound which features collaborations with musicians including Paul McCartney and north London reggae singer Natty as well as Imogen Heap, he got so carried away, that he handed Sawhney a heap of line drawings, which now illustrate each song on the album.

"I have never made drawings in response to music before," says Gormley. "In the process of listening to all the tracks on Nitin's album – I did about 35 drawings. I said to Nitin, 'why don't you pick one for the cover and maybe use some of the others too?'"

This special relationship between the two artists developed when they collaborated on a dance project for the choreographers/dancers Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui who performed Zero Degrees at Sadler's Wells in 2005 – but since then they have become good friends.

The relationship deepened between the two artists as their social circles crossed. Gormley introduced Sawhney to his friend Simon McBurney whose piece A Disappearing Number for Theatre de Complicite Sawhney later scored the music for.

Despite this creative bond Sawhney, who is sitting in his London studio for this interview, says he was extremely surprised to receive quite so many drawings. "When I went through them all, it turned out that I'd selected exactly the same ones he thought of as representing each of the tracks."

He had been to see Gormley's sprawling steel tube sculpture Firmament at the White Cube gallery earlier this year. He swung on it as you would a climbing frame in a children's playground – before he wrote a piece of music for it. He even went on to perform "Firmament" for Gormley's sculpture at the gallery, before including it on his new album. This in turn prompted Gormley to return the compliment, which came in a flood of line drawings.

Sawhney's album London Undersound is largely about how London has changed since 9/11 and the album's artwork also captures the concepts of isolation and connectedness, apparent in the album's narrative structure. "He gets across an idea so perfectly – capturing the psychological perspective of each track," says Sawhney. Gormley who spent the weekend on the south coast at his brother's house, where he drew many of the drawings, says: "It was a good experience. Nitin's music became for me during that time a special architecture in which my thoughts could both be born and float."

The soothing composition of Sawhney's "Firmament" is orchestrated for acoustic guitar, flute and cello and seamlessly mixes the classical music of east and west. It now has an accompanying drawing by Gormley that replicates his very own matrix-like sculpture. Other songs serve as an "emotional diary" for Sawhney and his host of talented collaborators. The opening song, "Days of Fire" – featuring rising star Natty with the sounds and rhythms of the tube system is accompanied by Gormley's image of a helpless figure in the midst of chaos. "Natty relates his personal story of having been in Tavistock Square on 7/7 when the bus exploded in front of him and coincidentally two weeks later he was a couple of train carriages behind Charles de Menezes when he got shot," says Sawhney.

"My Soul" – a frustrated love song sung by McCartney and blended with classical Indian singing refers to being hounded by paparazzi with Gormley's matching drawing depicting two figures swinging on precarious ground.

The dreamy and repetitive sounding "Bring It Home" featuring Imogen Heap was created in a day as she roamed London with Sawhney. It now sits alongside a clean grid-like drawing by Gormley containing four isolated figures. "Charu Keshi Rain" – a new arrangement of raag made popular by the sitar player Ravi Shankar has new life breathed into it by his daughter Anoushka Shankar and a simple drawing by Gormley of rain.

"I don't want it all to be doom and gloom. And I certainly don't think of London in that way," says Sawhney. "The piece was meant to be purifying as well. It's music that washes away all the impurities that can populate your mind."

The ethereal sounding "October Daze" featuring the Brazilian-Spanish singer Tina Grace has been illustrated by Gormley, who drew the back of a passenger's head on a train. "Shadowland" is an instrumental track featuring Ojos de Brujo, the nine-piece band from Barcelona who featured on Sawhney's last album, Philtre and features Gormley's drawing of a figure with its looming shadow.

What influenced the two artists to collaborate with each other in such a generous and intimate way?

"I felt that Antony's Firmament really captured the profound spirit of human development and communication. I felt there was something very beautiful, graceful and moving in the way in which these simple beams interact to emerge as a human form when you step back far enough. I tried to reflect that in the 'Firmament' music by using interweaving harmonies and melodies that draw from western and Indian classical traditions but ultimately emerge as a cohesive form," says Sawhney.

His first impression of Gormley was that he was "a warm person" and "very measured in the way he speaks and thinks". "Anything that he says comes from deep reflection and thought. He doesn't say anything superfluously. I really liked that about him immediately."

For Gormley who had always been impressed by Sawhney's "swift comprehension of very complex structures within music" and "an encyclopedic understanding of music from east and west" – says, that responding to his music came organically. "He is an extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive person who has somehow translated his own personal story of experience into a both politically and emotionally sensitive account that gets into his music quite subliminally. He is aware of both the pleasures and the dangers of the multicultural evolution of life in Britain and has both suffered and profited by it." There is also a "generosity" says Gormley, in Nitin in wanting to make music that "soothes and heals in what he sees as the underlying social tensions in a multicultural society."

For Gormley these drawings made a pleasurable change. "The drawings I've been doing in the last two-and-a-half years aren't of anything. I went back to a previous way of drawing which was more to do with evoking present from absence and thinking about landscapes as an engagement with light and the edges of things. What the music took me to was the place of the body in the city and thinking about how cities then relate to the elements and the whole notion of the underground where we are temporarily stored in these tight tunnels and spots."

The London-based composer Sawhney was born in Dulwich in 1964 after his parents had migrated from Punjab, and grew-up in Rochester, Kent. He is a man of all trades: a club DJ and producer, songwriter, a classical-trained pianist, flamenco guitarist, composer for orchestral symphonies as well as film soundtracks and video games. He is famous for marrying styles, including jazz, drum and bass, soul, hip-hop, flamenco, electronica with Indian classical music and for exploring religion, politics, racial identity and spirituality.

He set out on his career more than 20 years ago as a member of the acid-jazz band James Taylor Quartet. But his solo career took off with the release of Spirit Dance in 1994, inspired by Massive Attack. Since then his fourth studio album, Beyond Skin, was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize in 1999 and his last studio album Philtre (2005) won him the 2006 Radio 3 World Music award in the "culture crossing" category. His eighth studio album, London Undersound, also pulls its influences from a wide musical and cultural vocabulary.

"I wanted to explore through my music the dynamics of a city which is going through a major transition. Music has always had a political edge to it but I think more recently we have been lulled into a false sense of reality," says Sawhney. "It has got to point where we accept rubbish – lies and manipulation. But I don't feel hopeless about London. I think there is a spirit simmering under the surface waiting to come up again."

For Sawhney exchanging ideas has always been the hot ticket. He worked with sculptor Anish Kapoor in 2002 on Kaash (If). "Finding a flow of ideas and trying to find your way into that flow with other people is what is really enjoyable about collaborating. Whatever the art form – you find yourself swimming together down a stream of consciousness. The process is always the most rewarding thing. "

This time for Gormley what was most poignant for him in this collaboration was the connections between his sculpture Firmament and Sawhney's album. "Firmament is an evocation of the connections that might happen in a nervous system or within the fibres of a plant that suggests another unseen connectivity. This is pertinent to the album because it is dealing with the unacknowledged connections between people that this place and time gives us."

This latest collaboration with Gormley is a unique exchange that may never be repeated. Meanwhile Gormley's original drawings for Sawhney's London Undersound that appear on the album artwork are currently kept in a safe gathering dust. "He hasn't charged me a penny. He did the drawings just because he wanted to," exclaims Sawhney.

New album 'London Undersound' is out on 13 October. Nitin Sawhney will be touring the UK in October and November. www.nitinsawhney.com