We have featured the music of Sun Kin, AKA Los Angeles-based musician and songwriter Kabir Kumar, several times in the past. First on a collaboration with Miserable chillers and then later with last year’s single, ‘Doom Scroll‘. Both releases were rooted in a vivid, highly polished pop style and dealt with the decidedly contemporary themes of social media and insidious capitalism. But the latest Sun Kin EP, Painting Whales, Part 1, takes an altogether different approach, both in terms of style and substance; a collection of meditative ambient tracks rooted in the natural world.
The concept originated with an image of a beaked whale breaching in icy water posted to Twitter, a photograph which captured Kumar’s attention and would go on to be the basis of the album’s painted artwork. “Since an early age, I’ve loved watching Discovery & National Geographic shows,” Kumar explains, “especially those that focused on whales in the open ocean. As someone terrified of the ocean, and who was uprooted and moved across the world more than once as a child, it felt very empowering to imagine myself as one of these large creatures flying around without need for tickets or passports. Whales make the largest migrations of any mammals.”
The challenge became evoking these cetacean ideas in music, forcing a move away from Sun Kin’s typical pop tones and into sonic textures large and spacious enough for their inspiration. “With the scale of these animals, and of the ocean itself, it felt like every element should have a sense of its own massiveness,” as Kumar puts it. “How its movement would be felt elsewhere in the track.” This means moving beyond the immediate imagery of the ocean and reaching for a more comprehensive picture of the environment. “It’s amazing to me that whales and other aquatic animals and birds are not only connected to the Earth and the ocean,” Kumar continues, “but also to the moon, which moves these elements steadily across the globe. The way the bass moves in these songs was intended to represent these cosmically influenced, shifting tides.”
Which is not to say Sun Kin’s usual focus on human themes is entirely absent. Opener ‘Here We Go Down’ is indicative of the patient, subtle nuance of the release. It is steeped in the calm melancholy of the natural world. A sadness in part derived from a newfound fragility within such systems for which humanity bears sole responsibility. From the general catastrophe of the dawning climate disaster to the more species-specific dangers of man-made sound interfering with cetacean communication, the relaxed songs of Painting Whales, Part 1 are haunted by a lingering sense of sorrow. The sensation of things deteriorating, however slowly that might be.