Some records feel less like documents and more like vessels, carrying grief, memory, and longing in forms that language alone can’t contain. Kadahin Milandaasin, the latest from drummer and composer Tarun Balani, unfolds with patience and emotional depth. Its textures are spacious and deliberate, shaped by ambient drift, devotional resonance, and a rhythmic language that leans inward. Drums move like breath, guiding rather than driving, while melodies surface slowly as if emerging from a distant past. The music holds space for what has been lost and what continues to echo across time. Silence becomes a collaborator, offering presence without insistence. This is a record that doesn’t seek resolution, only the clarity that comes from staying close to what still flickers.
ڪڏهن ملنداسين Kadahin Milandaasin is out now on Berthold Records. Get it HERE. Tarun Balani can be found on Instagram and via his website.
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As always, to start, let’s go all the way back. What are some of your earliest memories related to music and sound? Was there a lot of music around you and in the house growing up?
My earliest memories of music are of my mom and dad playing cassettes at home. My dad loved Indian classical music and would play artists like Bhimsen Joshi, Ali Akbar Khan, and M.S. Subbulakshmi every morning while driving us to school. My mom, on the other hand, played a lot of ABBA, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Bee Gees. I also remember my grandmother singing and practicing devotional songs — bhajans — as she sang at the local temple every Sunday. So yes, there was a lot of music around me while growing up.
When did you start playing an instrument? And what prompted your first forays into writing and playing original music?
I started out on the keyboard when I was about 13, but it was the drums that really pulled me in—the sheer power of the beat, the physicality of the instrument. By the time I was 15, I was playing drums in the school band. I didn’t start writing or composing music until later, during my time at Berklee College of Music. But there’s one moment I remember so clearly: seeing Roy Haynes perform with his quartet, Fountain of Youth, at the Village Vanguard in New York. Watching him lead the band with such fire and finesse—that’s when I knew I wanted to be a drummer and a composer. Just like him.
Kadahin Milandaasin is rooted in your Sindhi heritage and the memories of your grandfather and father. What was the emotional starting point for you in creating this album?
When my dad gave me two photographs — one of my grandfather, the late K.S. Balani, a postmodern Sindhi writer and artist, and the other of my grandparents — it really hit me that I didn’t know much about him, even though I had grown up surrounded by his paintings and photographs. I never met my grandfather. Growing up, we rarely spoke about him. There was a palpable grief my family carried from his passing in 1970, at the age of 40.
I knew of him from his paintings, his square 6×6 photographs, and his Yashica 635 box camera. I often wondered what it would be like to meet him and ask about his life in post-Partition India as a Sindhi artist — his inspirations for writing, his painting styles, his approach to street photography. But also about his life back in Naushahro Feroze in Sindh, and how he migrated to Lajpat Nagar, New Delhi in 1952.
It hit me then that I had been grieving his loss — slowly, silently — all these years. And that there was another, deeper grief that my family, like many other Sindhi families, had carried across generations: the grief of a lost homeland — of Sindh.
It was this question, born from longing and the desire to tell the stories of the Sindhi diaspora — stories often missing from the larger Partition narrative — that became the emotional starting point for Kadahin Milandaasin, or When Will We Meet?
You’ve spoken about seeing the world through your grandfather’s lens, even though you never met him. How did this invisible bond begin to shape your identity as an artist?
As a child, whenever my parents went out, I’d sneak into my father’s cupboard, take out my grandfather’s Yashica 635 box camera, and spend the entire day pretending to be a filmmaker — creating stories in my head. I would spend hours gazing at his paintings, imagining entire worlds within the abstractions of color and form.
His paintings — like his writings — are provocative, layered, political, and emotionally rich. To experience that kind of art at such close proximity from a young age had a profound impact on how I see the world.
Art, for me, is about perspective. And that early experience of reimagining and interpreting the worlds within his paintings and photographs gave me the space to begin developing my own artistic lens— one shaped by pure joy, freedom, and the space to imagine new possibilities.
You’ve called yourself a sonic storyteller. In what ways does storytelling shape your approach to rhythm, composition, and improvisation?
Yes, I see myself more as a sonic storyteller than simply a composer, drummer, or musician — because it frees me from the preconceived notions that often come with those labels, especially within the jazz world.
For me, it has always been about telling stories through sound — where the composite sonic experience is the ultimate goal. When I put on the hat of a drummer, composer, or improviser, it’s always in service of the story. These roles become tools to help narrate an emotional or conceptual arc, rather than being the driving force themselves.
In other words, it’s not rhythm, composition, or improvisation that leads the music — it’s the story and the feeling behind it that shapes how those elements come into play.
The album moves between newly composed material and reinterpretations of older works. What led you to structure the album this way? How do you hear the conversation between past and present in these tracks?
Revisiting older pieces was like rereading an old journal entry—you see who you were then, what you believed in, what you were reaching for. Some compositions from earlier years had always felt incomplete to me—not musically, but emotionally. This time around, I returned to those pieces with a different perspective, shaped by lived experience, loss, and a deeper sense of cultural clarity.
Rather than discarding the old, I chose to weave it into the new, allowing the music to evolve naturally. That process of reimagining allowed me to stretch the sonic palette—introducing elements like ambient textures, and more layered improvisations. It felt less like rearranging and more like finishing a conversation I had started years ago.
You sing for the first time on the title track — what did it feel like to express yourself vocally in such an intimate and symbolic way?
Actually, I had invited my friend Arooj Aftab to sing on the record, but she couldn’t make the recording date due to her packed touring schedule last summer. So I ended up tracking the vocals myself — and to my surprise, it just felt right.
It served the story in a way I hadn’t anticipated, and sonically, it aligned with the aesthetic I was after — especially in the way Sufi singers repeat lines to evoke a trance-like, meditative state. That repetition, that intimacy, became a powerful way to express the emotion of the piece.
The phrase “Kadahin Milandaasin” — When will we meet? — is such a poignant refrain. What layers of meaning did this question take on for you as the album evolved?
The phrase Kadahin Milandaasin was inspired by a poem by Shaikh Ayaz, one of Sindh’s most beloved poets. In the original, he writes Tade Milandaasin — We will meet then — but I chose to flip it into a question. For me, it became a question directed at memory, ancestry, and belonging: When will we meet again, if ever? Will I ever truly know the stories of my grandparents? Will I ever see the land they left behind?
This question has echoed through generations in displaced communities like ours. It holds both the ache of separation and the hope of reunion — whether literal or imagined. Using it as the album’s title felt right, because this project is, in many ways, a long and ongoing conversation with those I’ve never met, but still carry within me.
Yet, I didn’t fully grasp the emotional depth of those words until much later. During my father’s final days in the hospital, as he lay in a coma in the ICU, I sang to him Kadahin Milandaasin — When will we meet? It was only then that I truly understood the weight and tenderness those words held.
Sadly, I lost my father on November 2nd, 2024.
Migration, memory, and grief echo through the album, but there’s also a deep sense of celebration and rootedness. How did you balance those emotional tones across the record?
Yeah, it was really tough to tell a story rooted in migration, grief, and a deep sense of loss — but also one that points to resilience and celebration — without slipping into victimhood or just nostalgia.
I spent a lot of time reflecting on this while composing. I knew the album needed to unfold like a journey — beginning in memory and moving toward self-discovery. The opening tracks feel more meditative and introspective, grounded in familial memory and the weight of grief. But as the record progresses, the music becomes more outward-facing — bringing in elements of hope, resistance, and reclamation.
There’s a sense of circularity as well — some motifs return in altered forms, like how certain memories reappear over time, transformed by perspective. The title track poses a question rather than offering resolution, echoing Kadahin Milandaasin — When will we meet?
The album is a sonic arc, mirroring the emotional path of understanding where you come from — and how that understanding shapes where you’re going.
Could you share more about how each band member brought their own emotional or cultural perspective into these compositions?
Dharma is a multicultural band, and we’ve been playing together for over eight years. Over time, we’ve developed what feels like a secret language—a way of making music that’s rooted not only in trust and deep friendship, but also in a shared openness to each other’s emotional and cultural worlds. That sensitivity—toward sound, toward stories, toward difference—comes naturally to us.
There’s one moment in particular that really captures this. We were working on Sailaab in the studio. I had come in with a fairly defined structure, but something wasn’t clicking. It was Adam who suggested reimagining the piano solo as a completely free improvisation instead of a written section. That shift—his spontaneous offering—became the missing piece of the story. I remember stepping back, just listening. And suddenly, it wasn’t about my story anymore. It was about our shared response to the music at that moment. That’s when I knew that this album wasn’t just about me as a composer—it was about us as a collective. The way each of us brought our intuition, vulnerability, and cultural perspectives to the table allowed the music to breathe, evolve, and come fully alive.
What were some of the things that surprised you when making this record? What challenges did you have to overcome?
The biggest surprise was just how personal this record became. When I started working on Kadahin Milandaasin, I thought I was simply tracing ancestral memory—telling the story of my grandfather, our shared Sindhi roots, and the post-Partition diaspora. But in the process, the music opened up an emotional landscape I hadn’t anticipated. Especially as I began confronting my own grief—not just for a grandfather I never met, but eventually, for my father, who passed away while the record was still coming together. Singing to him in the hospital—those words, “When will we meet?”—took on a weight I couldn’t have imagined when I first began composing.
Of course, there were more practical challenges too. Just coordinating everyone’s schedules was tough—especially since Adam and Sharik tour a lot, and we’re spread out across continents. For me, traveling from India to New York has never been easy. I’ve been doing it for 8 or 9 years now, and slowly, it’s beginning to feel like a second home for music. Every time we’re in the room together, making music, it reminds me why it’s all worth it.
And lastly, to close, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The Azaan—the call to prayer sung at a mosque at dusk and dawn—has to be one of the most comforting sounds in the world. I grew up listening to it echo from Nizamuddin Dargah every day near my ancestral home in Lajpat Nagar, New Delhi. It’s etched into my memory, a soundscape of home.
I also love the click of a shutter on an analogue film camera—there’s something so tactile and nostalgic about it. And then there are the quieter, everyday sounds: rustling leaves, and the call of the koel bird, which is so common in Delhi. These sounds ground me—they remind me where I come from.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
What a fantastic interview. This album is my favorite of 2025. So much depth and extraordinary playing.