Elder Ones is the quartet performing the compositions of vocalist Amirtha Kidambi (Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl/Elizabeth-Caroline Unit). Situated in concentric musical circles and communities in New York City, her collaborators saxophonist Matt Nelson (Battle Trance/Tune-Yards), bassist Brandon Lopez (Nate Wooley Quartet) and drummer Max Jaffe (JOBS/Kid Millions) have crossed paths in the DIY underground and permutations of free improvisers in
clubs and concert halls across New York City.
The instrumentalists chosen for this project draw from a wide variety of vocabularies from hip-hop to the avant-garde, each bringing their highly individual language to the group. The quartet uses composed material and loose structures for improvisation, over a bed of Indian harmonium drones and synthesizer like non-
idiomatic playing on the instrument. Oscillating between worlds of Raga and microtonality, to jagged rhythmic precision and punishing brutality, Thyagaraja, Alice Coltrane or Stockhausen could be equally suspect sources of their sound.
