Indian-American musician Karsh Kale dives into his new album 'Dust'

Having taken a break from music, Karsh Kale found inspiration again from painting and freestyling notes on the piano

In an industry increasingly driven by algorithms, metrics, and screens, Karsh Kale's returns with Dust is embedded in its organic inspiration and process. The pioneering Indian-American musician and producer, known primarily for his experimental tabla playing within electronic music, ventures into the full-length solo album for the first time in a decade. However, it all started with painting, rather than inside a recording stlosudio.

After a trip to Los Angeles in 2023, where conversations with a record label left him disconnected from the evolving language of the music industry, Kale chose to step away. "It actually started from not wanting to make an album," he says. Instead, he returned to Goa and picked up painting, something he hadn't explored deeply before. "The first thing I did was to paint. It started to inform this sense of creativity, why I ever get inspired to make an album." Over time, he created 28 paintings, each one becoming a visual prompt, a starting point for sound rather than an accompaniment to it. This reversal of process would define Dust.

Alongside painting, Kale started to "play a lot of piano". "Organically. I was not looking at my computer screen anymore. I felt like I needed a reboot to be reinspired." What emerged were what he describes as "diary type entries," shaped by chord progressions and lyrics that reflected his inner landscape.

For five months in New York, Kale immersed himself in this process, deliberately resisting the pull of digital production. Even when he began to formalise the project into an album, the ethos remained intact. "I still didn't look at the screen. I wanted to keep bringing my imagination to the music without that." In doing so, he reclaimed a tactile, almost pre-digital approach to making music.

This method also sparked a deeper question: who was he creating for? In an era where audience targeting is often central to the creative process, Kale moved in the opposite direction. "The big question was who am I making this album for and I just realised that if I make an album for myself as a kid, then I'm heading in the right direction." That childlike perspective free of expectation, unburdened by reception became the album's emotional compass.

The influence of his early years extends beyond mindset into method. Kale contrasts the tactile experimentation of the past with the convenience of modern production. "When I made my first album, most of the technology that exists today didn't exist at all. There was a lot more experimentation back then." Instruments had to be learned, sounds had to be physically created, and ideas had to exist fully in the mind before being executed. In contrast, he notes how contemporary workflows often begin within the computer. "And even for me, I'm guilty of that." Dust becomes his way of resisting that shift and of returning to a space where ideas are born before they are processed.

The past decade has been transformative for Kale, both personally and artistically. "I turned 50 years old in the past decade," he laughs. "There's a lot of wisdom that comes with that. A lot of experiences, a lot of huge life changes." The album, he explains, became a way of chronicling these shifts as emotional impressions captured over time. The title itself encapsulates this duality of ending and renewal. "Dust is kind of about surrender. Surrendering to the end of eras." It is both a conclusion and a beginning, a motif that runs through the album's lyrical and conceptual core. He elaborates through lyrics that anchor the project, "I will surrender and I'll be complete/ when I become the dust/ the dust beneath your feet."

Here, dust is acceptance, dissolution, and rebirth. Kale frames it as both the end point and the origin. "It's also the place from where the phoenix rises. It's the beginning, it's the end, it's acceptance." Turning 50 seems to have sharpened this awareness, bringing with it a sense of perspective that permeates the album. The recently released single Night Turns offers a glimpse into this world. In choosing to disconnect from the noise of the industry and reconnect with a more instinctive, almost childlike form of creativity, Karsh Kale reconnects with making music itself.