Seattle-raised and Oakland-based artist Flung talks about her approach to the record and how she finds inspiration in her physical environment.
Flung is the moniker of Seattle-raised and Oakland-based multi-instrumentalist Kashika Kollaikal. Her 2024 album, All Heartbeat, is the result of listening deeply to her surroundings, tuning into what she calls the “hum of the world.”
Kollaikal joins KEXP’s Isabel Khalili to talk about her approach to the record and how she finds inspiration in her physical environment. They also discuss the field recordings that made it onto the record, the making of her own music box, and how her mother's harmonium became the central hum of the record.
EMILY FOX: This is A Deeper Listen, the show where we talk with musicians about the thoughts and ideas that shape their music. And today, we’re talking with the Seattle-raised and Oakland-based musician Kashika Kollaikal, who goes by the name Flung. KEXP’s Isabel Khalili has this conversation. . .
MUSIC CUE: “Intrinsic” by Flung
ISABEL KHALILI: Kashika Kollaikal’s third album under the artist name Flung is called All Heartbeat, and though there’s a steady confidence in the way she moves, there’s also a feeling of impermanence, almost restlessness. She rarely takes root in one sound for long.
MUSIC CUE: “Intrinsic” by Flung
One minute she’ll be singing a melody that somehow evokes nostalgia while feeling completely new.
And the next, you’ll be dropped from new age-y synths to a wobbly techno beat
MUSIC CUE: “Minute to Minute” by Flung
Flung also takes inspiration from her physical environment. By paying attention to the world around her, she says she finds music everywhere. Like in a distant rainstorm
MUSIC CUE: “Sometimes Longer” by Flung
Or a squawking bird
MUSIC CUE: “Crescent” by Flung
There’s something intuitive and natural about the way she shifts from one sound to the next. It's the result of really listening. Because these shifts are happening all the time.
In my conversation with Kashika, we talked about her practice of slowing down, how she brings field recordings onto the record, and what inspired her to make her own music box.
But first, we talked about her mother’s harmonium, and how it became the central hum of the record because of one night in an airport in Seattle.…
MUSIC CUE: “Crescent” by Flung
Isabel: I understand that this album has its origins in a night at SeaTac Airport in Seattle. Can you talk about that night and how it inspired the record?
Kashika: So I made this record over the course of 2022 and I started in, in late 2021 I was in Seattle visiting my parents for the holidays and my mom has this harmonium that she's had ever since she was pregnant with me in Varanasi in India. On this trip, I found myself super. Uh, drawn to it and I would just sit and and play it and you know for folks who might not know it's like a harmonium is this wooden box and there's a keyboard and you play with on the keyboard with your right hand then you use your left hand to to pump air through these bellows.
And you're pumping air through it. And it just, it felt like breathing. There was something that was so powerful for me and helped me slow down and, and, and orient in space and I just felt this deep connection with the instrument. And so I decided to take the harmonium back to the bay with me. I cleared it with my mom. She was happy about it.
So I'm at SeaTac, I'm flying home, it's New Year's Day, I, it's freezing cold, I have the harmonium, slung like over my shoulder, I don't have a case for it or anything, it's like very fragile,and my flight was supposed to take off, I don't know, at like six or seven at night and it kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed.
And finally it got canceled and I wasn't able to be rebooked until the next morning. So I ended up spending the night at the gate just on the airport floor with this harmonium. And there was, there was just, there was something that felt very like intimate about it. And I felt like I really connected to the instrument and it it almost felt bonding. Like I was like, Oh, I'm getting to know this instrument. And I just, I got home the next morning and immediately set up on the floor and this big, like whoosh of inspiration just like poured through me. And I created like the first initial batch of demos for what became this record, All Heartbeats.
MUSIC CUE: “Lilac” by Flung
Isabel: Thinking more about the harmonium, I love the way you talk about it as like breathing. And you've also described the album's central ethos as “listening for the hum of the world,” and I wondered if you could elaborate on that?
Kashika: I feel like the world is made of all of these tiny little sounds and they're everywhere. They're, they're all around us. And I think so often we're just kind of used to missing them or filtering them, tuning them out. And sometimes that's important. It's not like there's no purpose for that. But for me, there's something very powerful about developing a greater sense of sensitivity to everything that is surrounding us. It's a way to tune in more deeply.
And I think for me, thinking about these little sounds and, you know, that might be the hum of my neighbor's air conditioning unit or standing in one particular spot and hearing a bird on my right and a bird on my left and hearing kind of a polyrhythm between how their, their calls are, are interacting or hearing the kind of roar of a crowd of people on the soccer field across from my house when someone scores a goal.
There's all these little sounds and for me tuning into them helps me like see this possibility that there could be music everywhere. And for me, what that means is there could be beauty everywhere. There could be awe everywhere. And I think there's also a way in which it really helps me to orient in the places that I move through.
So, a lot of this record, you know, on All Heartbeat I was focusing on sounds, found sounds from my neighborhood. And I would go on these walks, because I mostly record from home, and I would go on these walks, these recording breaks, and just listen to the sounds that were happening. And, and also be quiet enough to be able to listen, right?
MUSIC CUE: “Away from the Whir” by Flung
I feel that sometimes if we're, if we're always talking or always filling our ears with some other, and, you know, I love to listen to music too, when I'm walking or whatnot, but if that's all we're doing, then there's just, there's a lot that we miss that we're, we're being too loud or we're filling our ears with too many other things to listen to the quiet sounds that might be missed. And so on these walks around my neighborhood, I think there was something, it was, it helped me feel like I understood my neighborhood in a different way. To me that is a way to inhabit the world, I guess, or inhabit the spaces or the communities that I'm in in a way that feels sensitive and responsive and like how I want to be moving.
MUSIC CUE: “Hour to Hour” by Flung
Isabel: In thinking about being tuned into your environment and responding to it, I know there's a lot of like field recordings, found sound in the record. And I wonder if you could talk us through some of that or what are some of the experiences you had out in the world when you were paying attention and taking in your environment, where that made it onto the record? And can you share how that happened?
Kashika: So you might have noticed there are these sounds kind of like a child's music box throughout the record. And in fact, those are music boxes. Um, and particularly on the title track, “All Heartbeat,” there's this melody that is played on a music box.
MUSIC CUE: “All Heartbeat” by Flung
The story of the music box is that I was at this incredible building called Chapel of the Chimes, which is a columbarium. It's designed by Julia Morgan. It's in Oakland. It's one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever been in, and it's like a total maze. It's, you could wander in there for hours and hours and hours. There's these rooms that connect to other rooms. A lot of it is open air. It's gorgeous.
Once a year on the solstice, they do an experimental music festival where they have like 40 different performers of all kinds of genres, many playing experimental instruments, all throughout this space. And you just kind of wander and walk freely between the different things. You can stay as long as you want. And the whole thing goes for like four hours, and it's incredible, and this is still one of the best nights of my life. It was my first time in that building, and I just, I went by myself, and it was so special. And at sunset, at the end of the night, I'm on my way out, everyone's leaving, the sun's setting, it's this open air space, it's incredible, and I hear this tiny little sound and I walked towards it and I see this guy with these music boxes and these long like scrolls of paper that he's feeding through the music boxes and he, all he's doing, he's just, he's turning a crank.
MUSIC CUE: Sid Chen music box
I was so transfixed. I sat on the floor. I put my ear up so I could get as close as possible because it was such a quiet sound and there were all these other sounds happening of, you know, people leaving and clanging and the other, you know, performances. And it was just, it was so moving to me. His name is Sid Chen and he has started this actually during the pandemic. I talked to him afterwards and I've gone back every year since. And basically how you use these music boxes, you punch out every note individually with this tiny little hole puncher dot by dot by dot by dot. Every note you have to punch by hand. There's no real easy shortcut. And it's such an exercise of patience. And so anyway, I went home and immediately ordered a music box kit and ended up incorporating it into the record.
MUSIC CUE: “All Heartbeat” by Flung
Another sound on this record that I really love is on the first track, “Baby I Hope,” about halfway through before there's kind of a drop where there's this slice of silence. And before that, there's this big crescendo.
MUSIC CUE: “Baby I Hope” by Flung
The story of that crescendo is, I was finishing this album in the woods. It was maybe November, 2022. I went to this cabin and spent about a week there. And I was walking around in the redwoods at sunset in this redwood forest. And it was my favorite time of day when it's getting dark and my eyes are kind of adjusting and I stepped into this redwood tree, you know, where they have these like giant kind of cavities in the center.
And I was just standing in this tree and I hear this sound that sounded so melodic. At first I thought someone was playing music or something. But it was just this kind of droning, and it was getting louder and louder.
So I immediately pull out my phone and start recording it. And it was just, it was so beautiful it made me want to cry. And I ran back to the cabin afterwards and realized it actually fit perfectly into the last song that I was working on for the album, which was the first song, “Baby I Hope” that I'd been struggling with for months and months and months and months. And it was just, and the crescendo of it was just this perfect, oh, and I should say what it was. It was this, it was a vehicle. It was like a park service vehicle that was driving closer and closer until it was right where I was. And I was like, Oh, that's not magic. That's an automobile. But it, like it just leapt into the song. It was in the same key too.
MUSIC CUE: “Baby I Hope” by Flung
Isabel: I understand that a lot of the inspiration for this album was in your environment and the sounds you were encountering on a day to day basis, just as a person living in the world. But I'm wondering if there were any other artists or particular pieces of art, I know you've already talked about the music box and how that kind of worked, how you worked that into the music. But are there other inspirations that you held onto throughout the making of this record?
Kashika: A big one for me is the writer Ross Gay, and he has a book—
Isabel: Love him. Makes total sense.
Kashika: Yeah, he’s so amazing. I've read like everything he's done, but specifically Book of Delights. He has this book where he's, he has this practice a year of his life where he's writing every day he writes a delight and it's just this tiny little bite sized meditation on things that are as everyday as carrying a tomato plant through the airport or the joy of nicknaming your loved ones or weird signs or something.
And I think that's just been so helpful the last couple of years for me in that practice of slowing down and noticing these tiny little things. And I've actually started a delights list that helps me ground that in my own life too. So that's a big one. I would say, musically, two for this record that were very inspiring to me. I mean, there's so many, but one is Nala Sinephro and—
Isabel: We speak the same language.
MUSIC CUE: “Space 1” by Nala Sinephro
Kashika: Yeah, her record Space 1.8 was so helpful for me. I remember I heard, there's an interview she did where she talked about getting into this state where she can play the same note for 10 minutes straight and just play that note. And like sit in it and hear different things in it each time. And for me that's, you know, there's just something so powerful about that space and way of sitting still but not totally still or not stagnant.
MUSIC CUE: “Space 1” by Nala Sinephro
And then the other one, the other one I'll lift up is someone, kind of an acquaintance of mine who I played a show with, who released a record in 2022 when I was working on this album. KAINA, her album, It Was a Home.
MUSIC CUE: “It Was A Home” by KAINA
That's just such a beautiful record. There's so much sweetness and love and it's. She's just so unabashed about sweetness and love and family and connecting with the places that, you know, have shaped us throughout our lives and different versions of ourselves and how she talks about that record too.
MUSIC CUE: “It Was A Home” by KAINA
Isabel: Our final question is we like to ask artists to put us on to other artists we might like. This chain of music discovery is really at the heart of what KEXP does. So what song would you recommend to our listeners today?
Kashika: Today, I would recommend the song “Horizon” by Briana Marela. It's from her album Teardrop Star that just came out recently.
MUSIC CUE: “Horizon” by Briana Marela
She's an artist. She lives in the Bay now. We know each other a bit. But she spent many, many years in Seattle as well. And in Olympia and in the Pacific Northwest. And this song is from this album she just released. She initially made it, I believe in 2018 and various things happened and she didn't end up releasing it then and is releasing, did a self release now. And there's just something I find very beautiful about that project of looking back on previous versions of yourself and being in relationship to those other versions. And the song is just so beautiful. It's that perfect blend of like super catchy and like anthemic in a way, but also like deeply sad, but also deeply hopeful.
Isabel: Yeah, all of those things.
Kashika: Yeah.
MUSIC CUE: “Horizon” by Briana Marela
Isabel: Kashika, thank you so much for this conversation. I've really enjoyed it. I wish we could keep talking, honestly.
Kashika: Me too. Thank you, Isabel. This was lovely
MUSIC CUE: “Intrinsic” by Flung
EMILY FOX: That was the Seattle raised, Oakland-based musician Kashika Kollaikal, who goes by the name Flung.
