Around the World, (06)

Hello, around the world stays in the female corner, today with an indian singer who combines elements of her native lands with those from where she grew up and still lives, Britain, one can she she grew up very quick as at the age of twenty she took her first big break after a television carreer a UK hit and 4 indie albums all before she was 21...

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Sheila Chandra - The Struggle (85 ^ 98mb)

Sheila Chandra first came to prominence as a teenage actress on the British teen school soap "Grange Hill" playing the character Sudhamani Patel between 1979 and 1981. At the same time as she left the series Steve Coe head of Indipop was looking for a vocalist for his Asian fusion band Monsoon. Allegedly he found an old demo tape of Chandra's in a box at Hansa and was attracted by her rich, fluid voice and South Indian heritage.

Monsoon's debut single, the much sampled "Ever So Lonely", recorded when Chandra was 16, reached #9 in the UK charts in April 1982, but subsequent singles made less impact. Resenting pressure from their record company over musical direction, Monsoon as a band dissolved and Coe and Smith set about promoting Chandra as a solo artist on an independent label.

In the mid-'80s, Chandra was astonishingly prolific, releasing five solo albums over a period of about two or three years that drifted away from the Asian dance-pop of Monsoon into a more personal sort of world fusion. Chandra also began to write much of her own material, usually in collaboration with producer and husband Steve Coe; Coe had also helped produce, write, and perform the music in Monsoon with Martin Smith, who also assisted on Chandra's early solo records. Indian instruments were still usually employed, and electronic rhythm tracks still sometimes used to guarantee some measure of danceability and pop-rock appeal. But with increasing frequency, Chandra was pushing herself beyond the parameters of pop-rock with wordless pieces of both melismatic singing and percussive mouth noises, ambitious song cycles, interwoven overdubbed vocal tracks, and a 27-minute track based around a raga.

She made 4 solo albums with Indipop, before retiring at the age of 20, coming back in 1991 for a 5th solo album "Roots and Wings" for Indipop where she began to expirement with voice tracks laid over drones, a style which set the tone for her work in the 90s.. In the 1990s she released three remarkable albums on Peter Gabriel's Real World label, "Weaving My Ancestors Voices" and "The Zen Kiss" and "ABoneCroneDrone", fusing Arab, Andalucian, Celtic and Indian vocal styles with even older traditions such as Gregorian plainsong. She also performed live for 2 years in the 90s, for the first and so far only time in her career. In 1999 Real World released a retrospective of her work "Moonsung" and a retrospective of her Indipop work appeared in 2003



1 - Strange Minaret (4:02)
2 - Puppet Tears (6:01)
3 - The Struggle (6:43)
4 - Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram (6:19)
5 - Mukta Gaana (6:23)
6 - You (4:22)
7 - Lament (6:19)
8 - Om Shanti Om (6:17)

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All downloads are in * ogg-7 (224k) or ^ ogg-9(320k), artwork is included , if in need get the nifty ogg encoder/decoder here !