The thinnai is an integral element of South India’s architectural heritage, specifically within the Tamil Nadu region. Fashioned from marble and red oxide, the shaded veranda coils around the front entrance of the home, beckoning neighbours, strangers and family members to escape the heat. For most people it is a space to rest and gather, but for ganavya it’s also a sentiment that flickers at the core of her compositional practices, the latest iteration being her album ‘like the sky I’ve been too quiet’. “So much of our village can now live in the virtual world, so what if we can use this strange magic technology to invite more people to our house?” she asks. The NYC-born, Tamil Nadu-raised composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist likens the album’s foundation to that of a thinnai; it is not the final destination on one’s journey but rather a temporary fortress where her poetic lyrics, at times borrowed from an array of literature, are a warm blanket she pulls over our shoulders.

Today nestled in her home in California, ganavya holds a light towards an incense stick, spreading a trail of smoke across her sun-dappled study. Her voice croaks from fatigue having spent the previous evening working through a list of household tasks with a friend. Yet moments like these are a fulfilment of her desire to abide with loved ones, answering the call to surrender entirely to presence. It’s this same posture that led gavaya and a handful of collaborators through hours of improvisation to create the album, produced by Shabaka Hutchings in his London home. “When I arrived, Shabaka had invited many different people to the conversation. For three days we were in the studio making music non-stop,” she recalls of the sessions where she was joined by Floating Points, Tom Herbert, Carlos Niño and Leafcutter John. On the third day of recording, they stepped outside and into the rain to record the track ‘we made it to the underpass’. Sounds of the day turning, distant bird calls and car tyres against gravel create the canvas that Shabaka decorates with the wispy notes of his flute in response to ganavya’s croons.

‘Like the sky I’ve been too quiet’ drifts through the spectrum of soft prayers and stirring invocations delivered in Tamil, English and Spanish and often trails into wordless chants. The opening act ‘not in an anthropological mood’, a phrase taken from an essay by Marwa Belghazi, explores her yearning to witness humanity and be witnessed in return, but not through the lens of otherness or as a measure of comparison. Laced with suspense, the post-humanist score sets precedent for the journey through ganavya’s sensitivities. Shifting deeper into a dystopian overcast, we arrive at the ‘first notebook of songs’ which trembles with oscillating synths and flutes that imitate the softness of a breeze. And accompanied by Alina Bzhezhinska on the harp, third song ‘forgive me my’ lends from writer Teju Cole’s reflection on death and what it means to carry the weight of loss in its aftermath. Bzhezhinska controls the dynamic of the composition alternating between accentuated plucks and shimmering glissando techniques to which ganavya delivers the line, ‘forgive me my forgetfulness, no one can forget gentleness’. Moulded by her robust training in Carnatic music, a practice often rooted in the observance of ritual and ceremony, ganavya negotiates her palette of sound and texture to deliver a spirit-baring performance. Her uses of melisma, traditional ragas and other vocal ornaments are a medium through which she dances with the heaviness of her emotions, leading to moments of illuminating release.

Prayer is the posture through which ganavya encounters the world and invites others to join her in communion. In her living project #praytell, she opens a portal via her website for people to deposit songs, poems or phrases they are moved by which she sings back to us on her Instagram page. It’s her way of learning the dialect of humanity inspired by the teachings of the ‘Vimalakirti Sutra’. Of the Buddhist text, Ganavya tells me, “In chapter 1 they talk about Bodhisattvas or enlightened beings, who learn all forms of grammar so clearly that they can eventually speak to every single person in their language. To me that is beautiful.”

Her own education began at home with her family, who taught her music, singing and the storytelling art of harikatha. She studied performing arts at Berklee College of Music, attained a graduate degree in ethnomusicology at UCLA and a doctorate in music at Harvard. All of her learnings have been driven by a yearning “to study and bring liberative techniques into the world” by threading together the teachings from institutions and her spiritual devotion. “The academy for me is the way of the Bodhisattva. Then, there is a way of life where we transcend language and be together, sing together or be quiet together and that is the life I’m more called to.” As such, she allows the winding path of destiny to pull her towards the corners of the world where communion blooms at the centre of every gathering.

The recent months have been abundant for ganavya. Last December, she joined SAULT for their live debut at Drumsheds in London where she arrived just in time to christen the evening with an interpretation of ‘Ever So Lonely’ by Sheila Chandra and Monsoon. On this collaboration and all the kindred musicians she has co-created with along the way, among them Quincy Jones, Peter Sellars and Esperanza Spalding, she says: “I may not always know what my collaborators are reaching towards but I understand that we’re all collectively reaching towards something that is past our senses in this world”.

This spring she completed a residency with Love Supreme Projects where she drew us into her dwelling place of sound and poetry for a few days of performances. And in July, she released two singles, ‘draw something beautiful’ and ‘ami pana so'dras’, composed on a trip to China’s Dunhuang Caves and co-produced with Nils Frahm in Berlin. And there’s much more to come. Of the album’s title, taken from the poem ‘Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)’ by a dear friend and poet Kaveh Akbar, she says: “After seven years of being quiet, an older sister challenged me to get my shit together so that’s what I did. In the last two years I’ve recorded three albums and ‘like the sky...’ is the first one that I’m releasing.” The next, ‘Daughter of a Temple’ lands this autumn, which accompanies a US and European tour. And so, we avidly await these future blessings.