Hotel Kali

Hotel Kali isn’t a place but a story; one collectively told by four people who first happened to be in the right place at exactly the right time and then managed to transcend both space and time through their music. The German-Indian band’s self-titled debut album was not designed on a drawing board but rather came to life in spontaneous jam sessions, driven by a desire to integrate four distinct voices into one narrative and marked by all the happy accidents that took place along the way. Hotel Kali is a living, breathing entity that theoretically picks up on many different musical traditions but in practice challenges them all. English and Bengali, motorik grooves and intricate guitar lines, pop sentiments and exploratory iconoclasm come together, dance around each other, and over the course of seven songs find a common ground somewhere between and far beyond cosmic rock, experimental dance music, and adventurous postrock. The story of Hotel Kali began in November 2018, when the Berlin-based musician Theresa Stroetges — also known as a solo artist under the name Golden Diskó Ship and member of the three-piece Soft Grid — came to Kolkata for a two-month artist residency organised by the Goethe-Institut and Musicboard Berlin in collaboration with the Border Movement initiative. Wanting to collaborate with local musicians rather than working in isolation, she reached out to Varun Desai for recommendations. Once the promoter, synth nerd and solo artist, who is active under the monikers 5volts and Varundo, had sent her some of his own pieces, he was the first to come on board. Soon thereafter, Stroetges and Desai were joined by the versatile double bass player and seasoned session musician Debjit Mahalanobis and the songwriter and storyteller Suyasha Sengupta a.k.a. Plastic Parvati, a former member of The Ganesh Talkies.