Audio Culture: Aaradhna's Sweet Surrender
My 2025 update of Aaradhna's Audio Culture profile.
Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.
In December last year, I spent a couple of hours hanging out with the New Zealand Samoan Indian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Aaradhna Jayantilal Patel, who records and performs under the mononym Aaradhna. Over the last twenty years, Aaradhna has built up a cult following on both sides of the Tasman (New Zealand and Australia) and further afield throughout North America and South Asia via a series of spellbinding R&B and contemporary soul albums, most recently, 2024’s Sweet Surrender.
Fittingly, we met up at Aaradhna’s inner-city studio in Wellington, where she spent the last eight years crafting Sweet Surrender. Surrounded by walls adorned with orange saris, black and white portrait photos of her Black American soul, funk and RnB inspirations and a bevy of keyboards, instruments and other studio gear, Aaradhna burned incense and manipulated her studio lights to create a vibe, while walking me through the events that ultimately culminated in Sweet Surrender. Afterwards, she showed me some hissy cassette tape demo recordings she made in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
Here’s an intro excerpt from the feature story: Aaradhna Jayantilal Patel burst onto the Australasian music scene in 2004 when her vocals featured alongside the R&B sibling duo Adeaze on their platinum hit single, ‘Getting Stronger’. In the years since, Aaradhna has repeatedly proved her mettle in the studio and on stage, affirming her status as one of New Zealand’s most beloved modern R&B and soul artists.
During the first major arc of her professional recording and performance career, Aaradhna played a central role in the first rise and second coming of South Auckland’s storied Dawn Raid Entertainment hip-hop/R&B record label. This run culminated in an electrifying moment when she spoke truth to power at the 2016 Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards before pulling the pin and rebooting herself as an independent artist.
In 2017, Aaradhna received a Grammy nomination for Best Reggae Album for her songwriting on American-Samoan singer J Boog’s Wash House Ting album. She spent the next seven years playing live across New Zealand, Australia, and Southeast Asia, living life, writing, recording, and producing her fifth album, Sweet Surrender (2024). At home, her talent and accomplishments have firmly etched her name in our local history books. Through her last two albums, Brown Girl (2016) and Sweet Surrender (2024) and her work with J Boog, she continues to move ever closer to doing the same within the annals of popular music worldwide.
You can read the full feature here.
DAZED DIGITAL:
Four times a year, I write a recap of ten great releases from around the world for Dazed & Confused. The latest edition of my column features Chizawa Q’s jazz-tinged cyberpunk club tracks, Fergus Jones’ trip hop revivalism, Sierra Leonean YATTA’s fusion of West African palm wine music and 2000s US indie-folk, and seven other releases. You can check it out here.
WORK:
Just a general note: I'm always looking for new clients to work with. If you're an editor looking to commission feature stories or a musician or record label looking to hire someone to write artist biographies, press releases or album liner notes, feel free to get in touch with me here.
Last year, I worked on album liner notes projects for Sublime Records (Japan), Gazebo Records (Australia), Frederiksberg Records (US) and helped Mokomokai and Revula out with crowdfunded vinyl pressing campaigns through Holiday Records.
I was also lucky enough to continue writing for DJ Mag, Rolling Stone, Test Pressing, Audio Culture, Dazed, Variety, Ransom Note and copywrite regularly for a who's who of musicians, record labels and management groups, but I'm always keen to do more and take things further.
WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO:
There’s a long tradition out there of jazz, folk, soul and jazz-folk-soul adjacent musicians chasing the feeling of autumn in their music. I’m sure you know what I mean. At this point, most of us have heard an album that sounds like an autumn’s day spent in New York’s Central Park or perhaps London’s Greenwich Park.
With Music For Autumn Lovers, the London-based songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Adam Scrimshire, aka Scrimshire, turns his hand to this time-honoured tradition over eight breezy instrumentals. I say breezy because you can practically hear the autumn leaves rustling through these minimal, acoustic-led pieces.
Expect sunset guitar figures, woozy synthesiser lines in the playful mode of Mort Garson and Wendy Carlos, pastoral percussion and the heavy dose of OST style cinemania which was inevitably going to come with all of the above. It’s a great suite of songs to listen to while cooking, relaxing, or contemplating life. I could also imagine it serving very well as the soundtrack to some contemporary dance choreography, perhaps a video following everyday people through the streets of London, where daily movement is imbued with a poetry of grace and poise. Something to think about, Adam!
Oneironaut (plural oneironauts): A person who explores dream worlds, usually associated with lucid dreaming.
Lucid Dreaming: A form of dreaming in which the conscious mind takes control over the contents of the dream.
I’m sure most people reading have had some sort of experience with lucid dreaming, or an experience that felt like a lucid dream. I definitely have. I wouldn’t call myself a oneironaut or a lucid dreamer per say, though. However, if I was, I think I’d be pretty keen to throw mu tate’s wanting less album on while I was falling asleep and see what happens. It’s a foggy soundworld of a record. Super evocative and detailed, but easy to zoom out from if you don’t want to get lost in the minutiae. Relaxing not relaxing music for these not very relaxing times.
By 1998, the late great Rei Harakami already had a very clear idea of where electronic beat music, abstract techno, IDM and braindance was heading. He was receiving visions of the future well ahead of schedule and I’m so sad he didn’t get more time on Earth to explore them. Revisiting his debut album unrest is a bittersweet experience.
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:
The Conceptual House Album That Tells the Bittersweet Story of Newark’s Post-Civil Rights Era: The New Jersey trio Blaze’s singular 1990 record ‘25 Years Later’ wrestles with the unfulfilled promises of Black liberation. For Hearing Things, Justin A. Davis.
How Fuse brought Detroit techno to the heart of Brussels: In an excerpt from Fuse – 30 Yrs Of Making Noise, a new book celebrating the Belgian clubbing institution’s three-decade run, author Koen Galle traces its musical origins and inspirations. Read here.
FIN.