High Power – Mahamaya Experience (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Ranjit Makkuni might lean into some timeless and traditional sounds with his Mahamaya Experience music, but he is still a musician of the modern age. Even when working with the authentic sounds of the past, he often uses digital sounds and modern instruments to enhance and empower his music.

High Power is a mercurial mix of the past and the present, the authentic and the experimental, seemingly born in a place where world music crosses progressive rock in one direction and jazz cuts through avant-garde pop in the other. It’s a strange mixing of sonic minds but the result, as you might expect from such creative threads all being knotted together, is both odd and ornate. And I mean odd in the most complimentary sense of the meaning.

Odd is, after all, synonymous with being unique and different and outside the conventional. It is the opposite of mainstream; it defies fad and fashion. It is the music of the here and now rather than resting on the laurels of the past. And whilst the music of Mahamaya Experience always embraces such anomalies, to some degree, never has Ranjit Makkuni done so to such a glorious extreme here.

This ten-minute track is a strange, stomping, jazz-infused chant, angular and meandering, rather than the usual deft and delicate fast-paced pieces that are the norm. But that shows you what Ranjit and Mahamaya Experience is all about. Just when you thought he had no more sonic worlds to conquer, he can still find, expore and even build unexpected musical otherworlds to call his own.