Ganesh Anandan’s CD introduction states:

Anandan describes two hybrid instruments that he plays on this CD. One is a metallophone, built in 1995 from aluminum plates, and tuned to the Indian Shruti system; a 22-shruti octave. This metallophone is played with mallets and sticks.
The other instrument is a Shruti stick with a small solid body with a large, fretless neck and 12 strings, medium to bass gauge. Anandan can adjust the instrument for various tunings by means of mobile bridges and certain preparations of the strings. The instrument also holds two custom pick-ups, one near the bridge and the other one close to he nut. When played – with thin sticks, South Indian finger drumming techniques, a bow and also other things -, the Shruti stick is mounted on a horizontal stand.

Composer and musician Terry Riley said the following in an interview in 1976:

When Ganesh Anandan speaks about himself as an Indian musician living in the West, I wonder if there is some kind of correspondence between the situation that Riley describes, and Anandan’s situation, culture wise. In the case of India, it is clear that its age-old and ancient traditions absorb and integrate any influences or incisive cultural penetrations. In the case, on the other hand, of Ganesh Anandan, we have an Indian musician penetrating the Western world. I wonder if the Indian culture in Anandan is so strong that it still cannot be destroyed, but will live on in what Anandan will do even far into the future, way into a distant culture. Perhaps, as prone as it is to absorb what is coming to India and integrate it (I listen, for example, to a raga on a Western acoustic slide-guitar on radio tonight, with Pandit Debashish Battacharya), it also is to accept the influences streaming unto it through its Anandan guise from a foreign culture like the North American – or maybe nothing actually is foreign to it? As a universe, it engulfs – and, maybe, as an atom, it… permeates?

I suppose Anandan displays that whole concept of life, of new and old, of past and future, through his words:

“The New meets the Old and the Old sees itself in the New.”

Ganesh Anandan displays a sprinkling lucidity of wittiness and light thoughts, not least in the naming of his pieces, thus giving a brilliant demonstration of the unity of everything we falsely see as divided. The pieces, individually named between the brackets, form a sentence:

Do things happen for a reason? / How accidental / our lives are / and how influential / circumstances are / Is chance randomness? / How to recognize chance as it happens? / As Louis Pasteur said: / “Chance favors those / who are prepared / to take advantage of it” / Sometimes things work / Sometimes they don’t

Yes! A revelation simply through the titling of tracks!

Haha! And even the bar codes on the CD cover have something to tell! The CD is called Double Identity, so the bar code is displayed twice, in black and white! These extras are like quirky little smiles out of the corner of Anandan’s mouth, which lighten the experience considerably – and also deepen it; speaks to the listener on several levels!

As I start to listen, I am – again, as with former Anandan CDs – struck by the sheer brilliance and presence of sound, for which I am indebted to the sound engineer Dino Giancola. He stands out as a wizard of pure sound and persuasive air compressions. There are good sound engineers, and then there is Dino Giancola!

The metallic percussive pick-up moment feels decisive, immediately opening a large realm of tumbling sounds and soaring samurai swords, a soap bubble universe of many colors, light and deep, dark and light, rolling and ricketing and droning, coming across in a temptation of smooth varnish and glaring surfaces.

In the second piece the motion gets more violent, but still with a lightness of touch and direction, addressed with more banging in a series of hasty utterances and sudden grabs by the collar, though perhaps in a Zen master’s surprise act of fierce friendly force.
Towards the center of the piece a serene clay pot percussion pendulum dances around the premises in a restful downwind duffel coat of 1960s’ bohemia – and thus the piece concludes its duration.

Third track shows magic dynamics, from the deepest frequencies of closely miked vibratos, up through cowbell suspensions into the upper layers of audibility, letting the trembling, soaring sonorities sweep the last shreds of apprehension and hesitation away, lifting the listener across glaciers and rock deserts and holy insights, into a blessed circumstance of bodiless perception, in the middle of the light! This music is liberating, sea gulling high above the sea of confusion and pain. I’d like to stay in this notion, in this endless breath of light!

Track four addresses friction of glaring, jangling surfaces, whining and shrill, while also misty in a soft-spoken way, letting the bamboo grove groove, until a transition into rhythmic patterns purify and intensify, mamboing through the underbrush like a storm of sanity seekers sweeping the savannahs for any trace of tribal transillumination. Colors give way to Morse codes that slowly broadcast in pointillist dotworks through the haze of consciousness. Indecipherable messages are stored for felicitous futures in far-flung fairylands.

Track five mumbles, fumbles, like a contrabass bummer beaming down the midst of an obscure set of circumstances somewheres midstage in life, trying, eagerly, hot-headed, to get out of some situationist entanglement.
The tones – bending, flexing - are flung hither, thither, strung up and brought off like ill-directed arrows off a bow – hectic, impatiently… mosquito swarm audio disappearing into a fast and immediate darkness all around!

Track six comes on like some instances in John Cage's music for prepared piano, like Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos, for example. The metallic preparedness lifts this musical endeavor into elevated layers of artistic enjoyment, as the overtones glistens and glimmer, shimmer and simmer: clouds of semitransparent sonorities – traveling the Indonesian Gamelan way! You name it, we like it!

Track seven brings the Gamelan analogy right home, as you take your seat in the middle of the ensemble, this time in spacious sonorities reminiscent of Le Gong Gede of Bali; a liturgical music that was recorded, perhaps for the first time, by Jacques Brunet at the temples of Batur and Tampaksiring in 1972, for the French Ocora label. Ganesh Anandan paints these fabulous golden and bronze sonic colors in sweeping motions through the lofty realms of your compassion; a peculiar merger of colors and rhythms, of bouncing spheres and misty, curving horizons.
The track is interrupted by a phone call… and the duration given on the cover (6:44) is not correct. It’s merely 3:21.

Track eight is 6:44, but the cover says 4:44. Doesn’t matter. This mismatch continues all the way to the end from this point. It’s just some administrative error.
This track has a shrill, cautious melody toe-tipping through the higher pitches, counterpointed by deep, dark slabs of clay and middle-range bucketer browsings.
The music is wonderfully conversative, rubbery thumb piano panegyrics engaging in stumbling exchanges with shrill string practices and bouncing copper vessel vibrations. This is a metal lingo with no need of interpretation. The sonorities reach right down your nerve paths, lighting up in glowing sensations through the switchyards of audibility. Beauty and wit! Like a swarm of wasps on an apple-core!

Track nine brings on microtonal embellishments, leaning like lilies through the night; wonderful fragrances through the auditions! Velvet whirlwords are soft-spoken through the curtains of windows opening on nights filled with secrets; eyes catching the last drops of the moon. Circular motions are spelled out from a center of tonal bliss. You seldom hear percussive attacks this tender, this courteous – but Anandan tightens the muscles towards the conclusion of the piece, proving who’s in charge.

Track ten sprinkles gray metal dust over eyes closing for cover, while chalk dust falls off of slates of late, as little goblins ring their bells in turned-away moments of forest meadows in moonlight. Spider webs are hung with dewdrops; the fabric of your life is hung with passing sensations and wasted-away moments.
The grating of sour sounds has golden dimensions curled-up to the eleventh degree of quantum mechanics, gathering strength and density, conjuring up a tonality that vibrates like a drone of a city overheard from deep inside a city park.

Track eleven marches in a limping tourage down the duration; a jester jacketijacking down a lane, hitting trashcans on the fly; caring lesser and lesser for human affairs, allowing for a venomous wizardry of rhythms and sharp-edged percussive attacks. A silent traffic is storming by behind the night, sensed only through a disturbance in your thought-stream.

Track twelve murmurs and squeaks like the Romanian oeuvre of Iancu Dumitrescu, metal surfaces fondled in tight be-frictions through the night; almost erotically colored, sensually sensed. The metal speaks, the minerals call out of molecular bindings, alien pain leaking through cracks and crevasses in the sound – a scary magic creeping upon you from within… jingling, jangling like a Tambourine Man…

Track thirteen contains a mere 14 seconds of near-silence, with just some hinted attempts at indefinable motions in the gray zone of existence.

This is a Ganesh Anandan solo album, featuring an array of musical and rhythmical ideas that could, one by one, easily have been extended to a CD each: such is the potential of these sounds; at times eerie, at times full of bliss – always interesting, catching the attention of the listener to the fullest measure.

The CD also carries an mpeg movie showing Anandan playing his Shruti Stick and Metallophone.