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Of Indian background, trained in the West, and bringing together sounds and rhythms from widely separated worlds, Susheela Raman is one of the most surprising and intriguing new names on the international music scene.
Susheela Raman was born in London in 1973. Her parents were both from Madras, Tamil Nadu State, in southeastern India. When Susheela was four years old, the family moved to Australia, where she was brought up in the local Tamil community. She started to study classical indian music, including the carnatic repertoire of southern India, from an early age, and began to perform in public.
As a teenager she rebelled against tradition. At first she joined a funk band, then moved on to pop music, and finally blues. A period of crisis followed, and for a time she completely lost her voice.

In 1995 she travelled to India, where she rediscovered her roots. She studied with two extraordinary performers, Shruti Sadolikar, one of the greatest Hindustani singers, and Aruna Sairam, of the carnatic tradition of southern India. Regaining her voice, she started all over again, with renewed energy.

In 1997 she returned to Great Britain where she met Sam Mills, a musician dedicated to reworking the traditional Indian repertoire to make it accessible to a new audience.

This encounter gave rise to the Salt Rain project, which involved musicians from four different continents. In 2001 the Salt Rain album came out. It won the BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.

Susheela Raman’s second album, Love Trap, came out in 2003. The music on this recording alternates between songs of fascinating intensity, in a traditional Indian idiom, and songs where the western element, with a vein of soul music, are more prominent.

Her most recent work, Music for Crocodiles, is an album in which – as the music critic Giuseppe Videtti puts it – “Susheela Raman’s voice ranges beyond the limits of singing, and the instruments beyond the score, creating a perfect combination of pop and tradition, drawing the listener into one of the most appealing experiments of total music to be heard in recent years.”

Recordings:
Salt rain – Narada (2001)
Love trap – Virgin (2003)
Music for crocodiles – Virgin (2005)