A guitarist who lays hands on strings and builds worlds, Rafiq Bhatia presents the guitar as figurative language: the representation of a physical space, a sound and function beyond conventional uses of the instrument. In Bhatia’s hands, the guitar is an invitation to new places meant to be explored.
On his new album Environments we find a collection of dreamscapes and a gentle awakening that brings us back to now. Based in New York City and also a member of the band Son Lux, Bhatia’s last solo full-length album, 2018’s Breaking English, looked forward by adopting the studio-as-instrument approach, while Environments is fully improvised and reaches further still, feeding those technical innovations back into jazz’s time-honoured tradition of improvisation. The alchemy isn’t behind the wall, or the board – it’s live, present, and boundless.
Ahead of this Friday’s album release – he shares ‘Volcano △’, a song that melts, molts and shifts with the sounds of life on Earth. Listen below to the fully improvised album version and a session performance that was also captured in one take.
Rafiq Bhatia – ‘Volcano △’
Rafiq Bhatia – ‘Volcano △’ (Live Session with Ian Chang and Riley Mulherkar)
“I’m coming from how folks in more electronic music use noise, and use walls of sound, and the power and viscerality of sound to inspire transcendence,” Bhatia says. “I see a throughline between that and Coltrane and what Hendrix is doing on ‘Machine Gun.’”
For Environments Bhatia assembled a trio of kindred spirits and close collaborators. His Son Lux bandmate Ian Chang, contributor of acoustic and electronic percussion, was an obvious choice – over a decade, the friends have explored defying the expectations of their instruments together, and Chang’s signature off-kilter swagger of drumming is as comfortable in producing hush or roar. Trumpeter Riley Mulherkar, whose acclaimed 2024 debut album Bhatia co-produced, brings a breath-driven approach to slowly developing sounds and avian flourishes that are naturally at home on this uncharted voyage.
Using sound to evoke a sense of place feels like a natural outgrowth for Bhatia given his recent forays into film scoring—as a member of Son Lux he earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations for the band’s score of 2023’s Best Picture-winning film ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’. The trio also scored this season’s critically acclaimed and surprising Marvel blockbuster Thunderbolts* and recently announced their involvement in the new Mahershala Ali-starring ‘Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother’. But it was On Blue, a collaboration with the Thai auteur and Cannes Palm d’Or winning filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, that most clearly inspired Bhatia’s evolution on Environments, with Weerasethakul’s dreamlike elongation of time and use of natural sound leaving an indelible mark on the album.
“The guitar is central to who I am as a musician, and nothing I’ve done as a studio composer beat sitting down with this thing and having it be the conduit between what’s inside me and what’s out there,” Bhatia says. “I had to figure out how to merge my practice as a guitar player with my practice as a studio composer. How was I going to get the guitar to truly incorporate these techniques I’ve been developing away from it?”
It will not take long into the journey of Environments for listeners to understand that Bhatia’s recommitment is worth it, for his innovation and growth as an artist and our good fortune as witnesses of something new, whole, and real. When you hear it, you’ll know exactly where you are and who delivered you.
“Rafiq Bhatia evokes various interweaving ecosystems on ‘Environments’ with confidence, gratitude and grace … Devastatingly expressive and intricate.” – The Wire
Rafiq Bhatia
Environments
Pre-Save Environments
Tracklisting
1. Aviary I | Sunrise
2. Rain On The Canopy | Melting Sky
3. At Midnight On A Black Sand Beach, The Raging Tides Begin To Speak
4. The Sky Breaks Open
5. Glimmers In The Ocean Deep
6. Volcano △
7. Clearing, Crickets
8. Aviary II | Air
