Flung

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Album Release Party for All Heartbeat (April 5, Get Better Records)

Kashika Kollaikal, the multi-instrumentalist behind Flung, spent the first night of 2022 in the Seattle airport watching a screen display a continually moving departure time for a flight home to Oakland and carefully carrying a harmonium around the gate.

At first glance, a flight delay seems like an odd origin for her third album, All Heartbeat, but the intimacy forged with the harmonium through that night spent in the terminal watered the seeds for the project. Originally bought by Kollaikal’s mother while pregnant with her in Varanasi, the instrument called out to Kollaikal when she was visiting her family, and knew she wanted to bring it home to keep exploring. “I started playing around with it and I was suddenly so moved by this deep space that the droning creates,” she says. “Pumping air through felt just like breathing.”

Once she finally boarded a flight early the following morning and arrived home in Oakland, Kollaikal immediately set up the harmonium alongside a sequencer on the floor of her room and spontaneously laid down the first demos of new songs: the core of All Heartbeat.

As the album emerged in the year that followed, Kollaikal drew inspiration from walks around her Oakland neighborhood, early mornings on her grandparents’ balcony during a trip to Bangalore, and a constant attunement to the latent sounds of her surroundings. The resultant musical world of All Heartbeat evokes the passing sonic glimpses which allow us to peek into others’ lives: someone belting out their favorite song in a car swerving around a corner or the steady thump of bass wafting out of a bedroom window onto the sidewalk below. “I was thinking about how we connect with spaces, with each other, with ourselves.” Kollaikal says. “I wanted this album to create a place or a moment for people to live in, something that feels like how the world is always humming.”