By Kavita Daswani for South China Morning Post

Musician and activist Madame Gandhi visited some of the most intimidating places in the world to record nature at its most extreme

Madame Gandhi’s journey to creating her latest album, Let Me Be Water, has roots in an overflowing rubbish bin at her Los Angeles home during the pandemic.

“There were stacks of takeout food containers,” she says. “This was my New York City upbringing, where we grew up being able to eat at any restaurant any time of day without any awareness of how that impacts our climate and sustainability.”

That snapshot of her pandemic life became a potent symbol.

“This is horrible,” she recalls thinking. “I don’t want to have to throw this anywhere. I don’t want to participate in this.

“I can see this for what it is and this is sad. I’ve only lived in cities and I’ve only ever known this highly capitalist, highly unsustainable way of living.”

Gandhi – real name is Kiran Gandhi – is an award-winning musician, activist, DJ and international speaker known especially for her vibrantly percussive electronic music.

Born in Boston and currently based in London, she has lived all over the world – Mumbai, New York and even a stint in Hong Kong, where she studied mathematics at the University of Hong Kong and performed at the now-defunct Makumba bar and lounge in the city’s Central neighbourhood.

An ardent respect for the environment lies at the heart of her latest album, which was released in mid-May.

The project kicked off in late 2023 after Gandhi was contacted by We Make Noise, an organisation dedicated to fostering equality in music and technology.

Gandhi was invited to be the lead artist at one of its songwriting camps, working with 10 teams of female musicians. She was so pleased with what they created that the 10 tracks formed the basis of the new album.

“We took stems and different parts from each of the teams and ended up making something with it,” she says.

Part of the motivation was statistical. “Only 2 per cent of the world’s music is produced and performed and [with] songs written by women. So we have a long way to go.”

But Gandhi wanted to send out a louder message. She had the idea to record organic sounds of nature and incorporate them into one of the tracks.

Let Me Be Water (feat. Nature) was released at the end of April, blending her spoken-word-style expressions of consciousness and personal responsibility with sounds from nature.

And not just any nature – extreme, capricious, untenable nature.

The sounds came from three places – the icy vastness of Antarctica, the fragile Arctic, and the lush, cacophonous jungles of the Colombian Amazon – which Gandhi visited over the course of two years.

They were recorded partly using underwater microphones she had built while studying a master’s in music science and technology at Stanford University in the US, where her thesis involved using the sounds of whales in California’s Monterey Bay to create drum beats.

Visiting some of the most treacherous and intimidating places in the world was inspiring, she says.

“During the Antarctic expedition, recording the sounds of glaciers literally melting was like this tragic but beautiful experience. That’s where the work took off.”

Over two weeks, she captured as much sound as possible within the limits of safety and fast-changing weather.

“You don’t have set-up time – nature is on its own time,” she says. “There’s a humility. Producers in the studio might tell a vocalist ‘sing it again’, but when you’re trying to record nature, you have to be ready, you have to be present, you have to be subtle.

“You just have to be able to put the mic on and boom – go.”

Her Amazon trip brought her to an eco-lodge run by long-time Colombian conservationists.

“It was life-changing,” she says.

After a series of flights and a ride in a tiny boat down the Amazon River, she spent six days off the grid.

“Every day you take hikes into the jungle recording the sounds. It’s different because there’s constantly sound, whereas in Antarctica and the Arctic there’s much less wildlife.”

She describes the rhythmic transition from birdsong in the morning to insect hum at night as “so melodic and so musical”.

The sounds have been collated into a pack that other artists can sample from, and streaming royalties from specific tracks will be channelled to help fund conservation efforts.

Gandhi has a number of live performances lined up over the summer – at SXSW London as well as dates in New York, Portugal, and Cyprus – and she is already at work on her next album, which she describes as “my other side – the first time I’ve made a love album that’s very Justin Bieber-ish, in my own interpretation of pop”.

After three years of globe-spanning, sound-chasing environmental work, Gandhi is ready to celebrate human connection.