INDIGO

Reading, Berkshire · b. 2003 · FARA Records

INDIGO (Indira Sandhu, b. 28 February 2003, Reading, Berkshire) is from a large, unglamorous, entirely ordinary Thames Valley town that most people only pass through, with a South Asian community that's been there for three generations and a motorway corridor that employs a lot of it. Her grandparents arrived in the sixties, her parents were born here, and she's the third generation — from Reading in exactly the way anybody else from Reading is from Reading, flat Thames Valley accent and all, with none of the subcontinental inflection people who haven't met her seem to expect. She found her way in through two years of night shifts in a distribution centre off the M4, which is where this record actually comes from: picking and packing on a ten-hour night, the same motion at the same interval for hours, a genuinely strange thing to do to a mind. She'd been making beats on a laptop since seventeen and getting nowhere; after the warehouse she knew exactly what she was making.

She doesn't sing and has no intention of learning. Everything she does vocally is spoken, extremely close-mic, breathy and flat — an internal voice rather than a performed one, closer to somebody thinking out loud than to anybody addressing a room. Delivery is unhurried to the point of being slightly unnerving and completely unornamented, and she stacks and pans layers of her own breath as a texture underneath. Underneath that she builds the whole record herself: a warm 4x4 kick, sub you feel rather than hear, shuffled hats with real swing, analogue pads and filtered chords, and no melodic lead anywhere. Her influences run the deep and minimal end of house, where a track is a state rather than a story; the dub techno tradition of building energy by opening a filter over eight minutes; and, more honestly than any record, the acoustic environment of a large building running overnight — the hum, the compressor cycling, the rhythm of a job done at the same interval for ten hours.

Very little public persona, and not as a strategy — she talks quietly, doesn't oversell anything, and finds the industry's enthusiasm faintly embarrassing. Live she plays long and builds slowly with no interest in a moment; the first twenty minutes are a filter opening, and the people who leave were always going to. She's funnier in a green room than on a microphone. INDIGO came from being called Indi at school; she found out considerably later that indigo is a dye Britain forced Indian farmers to grow for the best part of a century, which she describes as a coincidence she's decided to keep. She still keeps warehouse hours, working between two and six in the morning, which she says is the only part of the job she'd defend. Contained, dry, unimpressed.