Shri

It was over a decade ago that Shri made his own breakthrough. In 1993 a British festival producer by the name of Simon Dove was in Bombay, Shri’s hometown. Chancing upon the bassist’s debut album Inspirational Satisfaction in the Indo-jazz section of a record shop, Dove was taken with the work of the then unknown quantity, Shrikanth Sriram.

Initially trained as a tabla player, Shri took up the bass when he fell under the spell of western artists like British rock legends Led Zeppelin and German bass icon Eberhard Weber. Dove took Shri to England to play with an up and coming British-Asian tabla player, producer and future Mercury Music Prize winner by the name of Talvin Singh. As well as working with Singh, Shri collaborated with the Dutch choreographer Ellen Van Schuylenburch at the Place theatre and slowly but surely he began to get himself noticed.

Thereafter Shri became a key member of the small stable of artists on Outcaste records, the label that put the Asian Underground on the map. Bollywood soundtracks, sitars and tablas were all the rage and a new generation of British-Asians asserted themselves with confidence right across the cultural spectrum, be the chosen artform music, dance, literature or television.

Nitin Sawhney emerged as a key new artist and Shri became a key member of his band. Soon after he would go on to make his 1997 UK debut Drum The Bass, a superb album whose title referred to the artist’s trademark percussive attack on his self-made fretless bass, an instrument whose body had been customized to be able to go beyond the reaches of bass playing as we know it.

Both intensely physical and delicately lyrical, the music captured and filtered the energy of the drum & bass and electronica scenes into intricate arrangements informed by both entrancing Indian ragas and cyclonic jazz improvisations.

Shri then struck up an excellent partnership with DJ/Producer Badmarsh, exploring the confluence of programmed beats, electronic soundscapes and live playing on albums like Signs. When the collaboration reached its natural end, Shri continued to sharpen his focus as a solo artist, taking time to hone his songwriting craft as well as his skills as a producer.