Anoushka Shankar, the acclaimed sitar player, producer and composer, shares the 2nd instalment of a trilogy of mini-albums she began with 'Chapter I: Forever, For Now' in October 2023. The series follows 'Between Us...', her live album for LEITER, a collaboration with Jules Buckley and the Metropole Orkest nominated for 2023’s Best Global Music Album Grammy.

'Chapter II: How Dark it Is Before Dawn' was recorded during sessions with British producer and composer Peter Raeburn in his two Soundtree Studios, first in May, 2023 in LA, where Shankar had just performed her father Ravi’s Sitar Concerto No. 3 with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, then in London in September, 2023 before she set out on her North American tour. It finds Shankar expanding her horizons, both artistically and sonically, exploring a mesmeric, at times almost ambient soundscape that nonetheless picks up where Chapter I’s final track, the fluid "Sleeping Flowers", left off. That collection captured the feeling of a drowsy summer afternoon in Shankar’s London garden, while Chapter II’s opening track, the dreamy "Pacifica", begins a journey into night, continuing through four more exquisite, expansive pieces until first light, when the shackles of slumber are slowly shaken off with the rousing "New Dawn", its hypnotic character inspired by Phillip Glass.

The new collection opens up whole new musical realms for Shankar, with its tranquillity given an additional glimmer and shimmer that can at times make it sound as much like a timeless Eno-esque vignette (“Offering”) as it does a lost cut from the Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand (“What Dreams Are Made Of”) or even something by New York trio SUSS (“Below The Surface”). In fact, Shankar confesses she had a further, albeit subconscious ambition for these recordings: to overcome the spiritual clichés sometimes associated with instrumental sitar music. “I’ve been wanting to make slow, peaceful music like this for a while,” she explains, “but I have no desire to create an album that makes people flashback to the 1960’s. It's about looking forward. The explosion of fresh, neoclassical piano music has been inspiring, and it's about time the sitar was discussed in the same way.”

Chapter II offers a refreshingly innovative, profoundly beautiful and emotionally eloquent sanctuary from a world that increasingly demands it. “This was always going to be about the idea,” Shankar concludes, “that I might need to take myself away to heal for a night before facing a new day, that all of us are carrying too much and need to be able to stop and heal, and that the world itself needs to take a pause, reset and go in a new direction. This music is for whatever part of us needs to hold on through the dark in trust that there is a dawn.”

'Chapter II: How Dark it Is Before Dawn' is out on limited edition vinyl.