Auroville-based artist Krishna McKenzie performs with Emergence. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Tamil dishes, permaculture, organic farming, and jazz all anchor artist Krishna McKenzie’s mind like few other things. With his band Emergence, he’s recently released the new album Cage, featuring songs that are all about life’s philosophies (and a dash of romance), which the British-origin pondered as he spent years living “the pioneer life.”
“I know what it means to have no water and build your own hut from bamboo, coconut husks; to put a few bricks, make a fire, and cook your dinner on that fire under the stars every night,” he tells Rolling Stone India. “I know that life and the songs definitely have their roots in that.” There was a “simplicity” in that, gathering around the hippies who populated Auroville, as well as villagers. “It was a fire every night, with the music and friends,” he says.
Founded in 2006 — a good decade after McKenzie began running Solitude Farm, an organic-focused café and farm — Emergence now have four albums and several achievements to their name, including playing Glastonbury Festival in 2009. Past members have included virtuoso artists like French bassist Mishko M’ba, and the nine-track Cage features bassist-producer and guitarist Dhani Muniz, trumpeter Edmund Held, drummer Joey Van Leeuwen, plus co-production, synth, and percussion by Navneeth Krishnan. Violinist-composer Karthick Iyer is also credited for “So Full,” a trippy, downtempo-turned-urgent tune.
It features Tamil vocals by Snigdha Sharma but also sees McKenzie – who studied at the J. Krishnamurti School in Hampsire – dive deep into the core of Cage with lyrics like “The ancient urge to change oneself no longer can be found on pages of old books.” Speaking about the track, he says, “I wrote on the back of a very devastating love story. There were years of real deep introspection. Until you go into yourself, you won’t go beyond yourself. These songs are definitely a cathartic and healing thing for me.”
The album’s opening track, “Ballad Of The Open Road,” was written by Auroville-based beat poet Roger Harris and sets the tone for an album with songs that gradually build up in tempo and mood rather than anything too jarring. It is perhaps a reflection of McKenzie’s approach to farming – to gently nurture a sound that starts off in pop songwriting and is fertilized by layers of jazz. McKenzie credits Dhani Muniz as a key collaborator for this sound, even remarking that he and Muniz’s dad were in a band a few decades ago. “All the stories behind these relationships and how things have grown, I guess you can hear it [in the songs],” McKenzie says.
At the end of Cage, the mood lightens with “Carla’s Song,” in which McKenzie sings about love, “happiness without reservation,” and self-belief over a raw demo-like production treatment. He says, “Carla was a girl I had a little love scene with, she was just a very sweet and beautiful person. I remember walking down from my house, going to see this girl, and this incredible piece [of music] descended on me.”
In the Instagram age, more people know McKenzie for his Reels and Tamil than older indie music fans who remember him from Emergence, as well as their festival, Lively Up Your Earth, hosted at Solitude Farm for more than a decade now. “It’s not been strategic,” he says about accruing over 560,000 Instagram followers who come for his food tips, recipes, plant facts, impeccable Tamil, and colored turbans. He explains, “About 20 years ago, I guess I had a really deep perception that the local foods that grow around us are the foundation of a culture.” McKenzie firmly believes that when people forget their local foods, they begin to lose their local culture as well. “You can see it’s happened in England, or, you know, or America, and then you have a fragmented society. So that sort of narrative became very clear to me, and the solution to that became very authentic, in the sense of what we’re doing at Solitude with farm-to-plate,” he adds.
Much like his approach to creating content around sustainable living and eating, McKenzie says he never actively sought recognition as a musician, even with Emergence. They’ve had some recognition along the way, but have often been forgotten in the digital age, despite having three albums before Cage, including Here I’m (2008), Chosen By God (2010), and Can You Record Me (2017). There’s a possible tour in the works to promote Cage. McKenzie says, “It’s not easy because clubs and budgets and all that. But we’re trying to put that together and actually working on some new singles already.”
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