Sometimes distance works in mysterious ways, it makes you look at a person, a thing or a place in ways that you didn’t think of before losing them. For an artist, that yearning manifests in concealed elements of their creative project. After settling in the city of Bangalore years ago, an acute longing fleshed out in the heart of musician Yuhina Lachungpa. A longing for her home that lies in the state of Sikkim. In her new musical project, she revisits the roots of her identity, using her art to reach parts of her home and understand her relationship with it. Her EP, MNEMONIC, becomes a tender journey of healing from the past, letting go and holding on to the parts of your home that mean the most.
Her home city, Gangtok, has a very rich musical culture. She tells us, “everytime we would hang out at anyone's place or our local pub, we will always find a guitar, and people who are just ready to sing. Growing up, it just became a very ingrained part of who I was.” The city had made music a very integral part of her being since childhood, through which, she explores many questions of her life. The all-compassing question of "Who am I?" is troubling for her as it is for many of us. Since there is never a simple answer to this question, no wonder, it gives birth to beautiful forms of art, each unique in their own way. Yuhina explores her own journey through this question in MNEMONIC. The five-tracks album expresses different stages of Yuhina's life, which makes it an project of self-introspection—an attempt to understand her roots, the overwhemling nature of adulthood and to have a strong yet emerging sense of self by healing from the troubled parts of life.
MNEMONIC | Art-direction by Shivang Joshi
The album contains many aspects of her home. The track, "For Chenrezig", originated from a Buddhist chant, a peaceful melody that can direct you to a trance-like state. This chant is for Buddha's incarnation of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, which is refered as Chenrezig in Yuhina's native place. "I know it by heart!" Yuhina exclaims. She further explains, "when I was young, there was a cassette at home and this chant used to play on it. It always used to make me feel something very visceral and deep. At that time, I was too young to really understand what it was doing to me. A few years ago, when these big shifts were happenning in my life, this chant just kind of came back in my subconscious. I knew that I needed to find it again. I didn't even know how to look for it, didn't know what it was called or which God or Goddess or whatever it was for.” Searching in the deep well of Youtube and Google, she finally found it, and it soon took the place of huge support system in her life.
One day, while the EP was in progress, she was sitting in her balcony and felt an overbearing feeling to include the chant in the album, “I just had this strong feeling that I have to do something with this. I have to make like my own version of it somehow." With the rebirth of this chant in her life, she felt the need to include this sense of compassion that her EP, in extension, herself was lacking.
Her divine seeking in the album also meets electronic beats. The choice of making electronic production again rings her back to Sikkim, where she always had people who she could trust with instruments. She tells us, “singing used to be my only thing but getting into electronic production was I think a product of loneliness. It felt a bit impractical to like find people, form a band, and have that sort of deep connection, which was quite automatic back home.” If Gangtok sparked the passion of singing in Yuhina, Bangalore completed her music by making her hands jam on electronic beats.
Although, one cannot ignore that Gangtok has greater roots in her music. Not only the city has directed her towards music but also intertwined her self with nature, which is missing in the streets of corporatised Bangalore. Growing up she was surrounded by mountains. "In the mountains, your voice also sounds different", she tells us. Her mother was a wildlife researcher so Yuhina was used to welcoming unusual pets at her home including, owls, reptiles and even a leopard baby. Such interaction with nature and the loss of it found a way into her music. She further explains “surrounded by greenery, nature, wilderness, it just awakens something quite primal inside of you, which, in my case, found an expression in form of music.” Her track, "OMW", represents her connection with greenery, mesmerising us with a gleam of purple neon light in the forest. She bids farewell to her past that troubles her present and be on her way for a new journey.
“So long, farewell. I was under your spell.
I’ll be on my way now to myself.”
​Yuhina, in the end of our conversation, says that she hopes to take the EP from where it was born, "I would love to just go back home and take my music back because I've not been home since I've actually started putting out music. So we'll see, the journey continues!"
Words Paridhi Badgotri
Date 04.01.2024