Words by Tom Curtis-Horsfall

With her new album, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, producer Sanaya Ardeshir (aka Sandunes) reconnects to her femininity, the natural world, and the collective experience of music-making in an ode to Mother Nature.

“In many ways the intention was really to reflect the world around me. The experience of ‘home’ being a fluid concept, considering my life has been fairly nomadic. I wanted to translate that into sound,” explains Sanaya Ardeshir, or as she’s better known, Sandunes. The artist’s new album,The Ground Beneath Her Feet, came into fruition initially as a reaction to the collective isolation experienced throughout the pandemic, with Ardeshir wanting to reconnect to the world around her. But as she pieced together the collage of global sounds and sentiments, the album — which Sanaya refers to as “part manifesto, and a little bit of memoir” — evolved into an ode to Mother Nature, with her connection to land and sense of femininity at the fore.

Nomadic is an apt way to describe Ardeshir’s life and career, who has recently relocated to Los Angeles from Mumbai after several years in London, with stints in Berlin and Oakland, California where she’d set up mini-studios to record sections of the album. Managing to pin her down during a trip back to India for a wedding, Sayana emphasised that her first release on Brighton record label Tru Thoughts is “a love letter to the Earth and the natural world, knowing the way we connect to the natural world is fragmented and blocked by our urban models of living.” The suffocation of lockdowns and restrictions were tangible in the EP’s she’d released prior to The Ground Beneath Her Feet, so being able to breathe and roam the world again impacted the album’s conception. “A lot of it is about land. The ground beneath your literal feet being the place you derive stability, belonging, identity, definitions of home. But also this reflection of the current state of the land in which we reside.”

“When they reopened borders after the first lockdown in India, I was able to leave Bombay [Mumbai] which had been my home for a long time. Predominantly our travel was within rural India, and most of the information and ideas around what it means to live in a way that's integrated and connected with the land came from those months spent in the Western Ghats. That's very much part of the feeling behind the album. It's more about wanting the world to be shared, pointing to the fact that it is shared, and then it's analogous to the body.”

For much of Sandunes’ output, Sanaya has built richly textured soundscapes that bridge her music to the physical world, making field recordings that filter into songs as either beats or simply background noise. It’s this consistent sonic exploration that typifies the diversity of her sound as an artist. “There are a lot of natural sounds that came locally from forests in south India. In 'Mother Figure', there are sounds from south Goa that the album opens with. The end of the song moves from a circadian rhythm from a night time recording through to dawn chorus which I recorded in Karnataka. There are field recordings from Mumbai under a bridge in Kemps Corner, which features in 'Feel Me From The Inside'.”

“It's a patchwork — it's not one of those albums that's made in one place, it's a documenting of travelling and that feeling of being tethered of 'oh yeah I'm a musician, I'm a producer, this is what I do' in a volatile, topsy-turvy time.” The Ground Beneath Her Feet is very much an electronic music album, Sanaya’s adoration for her Novation Peak synthesiser meaning it’s always within reach to flesh out ideas. But the album flirts with a myriad of styles and instrumentation. The aforementioned ‘Feel Me From The Inside’ echoes Bonobo’s breezy electronica (a Tru Thoughts alumni who Sandunes opened for at Manchester International Festival in 2017), cacophonous opener ‘Mother Figure’ swirls with waltzing instrumentals and ethereal vocals, the otherworldly yet traditional marimba and 18th century harpsichord in ‘Pelican Dance’ plume fittingly, whilst ‘Follow Me’ leans into rhythmic R&B territory. Though the genesis of each composition was the voice.

Whilst her partner was studying his masters degree in Oakland, California, Sanaya was afforded use of the music department at Mills College, which was formerly the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a hub for experimental music and art during the 1960s. “I was the benefactor of a bunch of free studio time. It was actually really lucky, as the building was full of beautiful old instruments and vintage synthesisers,” she gushed, evidently astonished still that she had carte blanche to mess around with a box of toys. “I didn't intentionally reach for marimba or harpsichord. They were more incidental. It was more voice.”

“I distinctly wanted a line down the middle between an instrumental side and another which was predominantly songwriting, more art-pop leaning tunes. I write a lot of those pieces, but in a lot of other instances I look to write with other artists. The permutations of having a voice leading you through.”

Trained as a pianist before developing into a composer and producer, Ardeshir’s gateway into composition was melody. Writing vocals for a series of collaborators which include Half Waif, KAVYA, and Ramya Pothuri, she wanted a clear sense of femininity coursing through the album, in an attempt to subvert the oft male-dominated projects she’s worked on throughout her career. “It was very important to me, conceptually,” she affirmed, about The Ground Beneath Her Feet having a feminine fortitude. “I've wondered so often with music that our taste and collective global preference in music is the result of a very one-sided representation of what the sonic imaginarium in someone's head is. The music industry is a space that has been male-dominated. I think that, in a way, I was hoping to create an analog that was both the Earth and the female body, that I was positioning the album as a new way of hearing. Having that being led by women I look up to, and women who I really enjoy working with, having an open approach to that. It's not just that women have worked on the record, it's that more women have worked on the record.”

She had a varied musical vocabulary with her collaborators, ranging from the familiar to the frantic - usually due to time constraints - but the experience of working alongside polyphonic singing artist Gideon Crevoshay and Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini was sacrosanct for Sanaya. “That was very special. Both Gideon and Peni are these two individuals for whom music is very sacred. A lot of people can operate within music and exist comfortably within the 'industry', promoting albums, doing interviews, you know. There are people who manage to do that, but don't lose their footing in their world. That connection is integral to what music they make.”

Having the two work on her album helped to secure her feet and keep her grounding in this sacred idea of music making too. “With Peni I was literally like, 'I need your prayer'. I needed that, hoping to create something that was worthy. It was interesting, as I sent her a piano thing, but when she sent vocal stems to me I was so moved. I was drawn to this idea of re-harmonising everything around what she'd sent. That piece, the album opener, is in free time. It moves. I would have never come up with that myself. Both of them grounded the music in that spirit.”

The album’s spirit was derived from its title, which Ardeshir borrowed from a Salman Rushdie novel of the same name. Centred around the Parsis community in Mumbai - a minority community to which Sanaya is a part of - Rushdie once said the crux of his novel was love, music and death. After finishing reading it, the title stuck with the producer. “It was open, a statement of invitation. To me, it was clearly a female-forward concept that doesn't necessarily have any finality in it. It just feels like an invitation to think.”

An Ableton Certified Trainer, Ardeshir has lectured for Ableton and took part in the company’s Loop Summit For Music Makers, as well as creating bespoke sample packs for Red Bull’s Search For Music project. Despite mastering a multitude of instruments and production software herself however, she still strives for the collective process of writing, recording, and performing with other musicians. In fact, it became a necessity for The Ground Beneath Her Feet. A live performance video accompanied the single release of ‘Feel Me From The Inside’, reiterating the collective experience of a live show with real musicians.

“I basically developed a strong aversion to solo performance, which was my primary performance modality for years. I mean, you're easy to book, you show up, you set up, you jet off to another country. It looks great to the rest of the world, but it's obnoxiously lonely. It's quite a drag. There's a real felt experience of this, which is ubiquitous, but people don't talk about it because it's got to look glamorous. It's got to look like it's a coveted position to be in. But it burned me out.”

“There's a robbing of the collective experience,” she continued. “Maybe that's felt less in certain styles of music that are performed collectively. It may just be more prominent in electronic music, because of how profoundly elegant the technology is. You can get so far without needing anybody else. It's bleeding into our creation patterns. We're just dissolving behind our screens.”

“Music can be so much richer in process than it can ever be in output, and that gets exacerbated when the focus is on the individual. I felt enriched going back to a band. It was like, 'oh yeah, this is why I did this in the first place'. this is a bold thing to say, but I don't think we have to put people on stage alone, you know. F*ck it. Everyone already has subliminal aspirations of being ‘celebritised’. Now we have social media, everyone's a brand. It's detrimental to what should be happening when we're putting these people on a proscenium of great importance, when we have an audience that shouldn't be taken for granted.”

Relocating to the lion’s den of celebrity culture in Los Angeles helped disintegrate any preconceived notions Sanaya may’ve had about the city however, finding herself immersed in a vibrant new music community. “I definitely had a pre-supposition that LA would be just about pop music and film scores. But all those ideas have collapsed. There's a lot of diverse music that's produced there, a real collaborative spirit and artists cross-pollinate between scenes. It's been way more pleasant than I expected."

The Ground Beneath Her Feet is available via Tru Thought now.