• Artist and researcher Abiraahmi on her debut self-produced musical project ‘Kapali’ and turning memory, grief, and connection into sound

There are places we return to so often in life that their significance becomes almost invisible. They become part of the rhythm of family life, associated with childhood rituals and familiar faces, until something happens that forces us to see them differently. For New York-based Sri Lankan-Indian artist and researcher Abiraahmi, Chennai’s Kapaleeshwarar Temple, popularly known as Kapali, had always been one of those places.

Her father was born in Chennai and her mother in Sri Lanka, while Abiraahmi and her brother grew up in Dubai. Annual visits to India inevitably included Kapali, although her childhood memories revolved less around the temple’s significance and more around baby chickens, cows, and peacocks, and the fresh badam and rose milk her father had ‘positively conditioned’ them to expect.

It was only following her grandmother’s death earlier this year that she began to see the temple differently. That experience would birth ‘Kapali,’ an electronic music project blending Sanskrit, Tamil, and English vocals and marking her first entirely self-produced release.

Kapali: A place that remembers

During every visit to Kapali, Abiraahmi’s father would gravitate towards a particular spot within the temple, one from which he could see both Shiva and Parvati. This time was no different. Between hospital duties surrounding his mother’s death, he returned to the temple grounds and stood in his usual place. Abiraahmi joined him and watched as he turned towards the west-facing Shiva.

“He said: ‘I came here when thatha died too.’” Then he turned towards Parvati. For Abiraahmi, something shifted. Her father had stood there following the death of his father and, a decade later, had returned following the death of his mother. Yet grief was only one part of the history connecting him to this place. 

“When Dad found his first job, he stopped at Kapali. When he met the love of his life and had a seven-year battle to marry a Catholic Sri Lankan girl, there was Kapali. When he brought his children to his hometown, there was Kapali again,” she said.

“I just understood how many births, deaths, and rebirths this temple has seen. It held some of our best and worst times.”

The timing made that contrast more pronounced. Her family’s grief unfolded against the Ther festival, with Mylapore alive with music and celebration, while within the family itself she watched the women rally around each other, at times literally holding up her grandmother’s devastated sister, the eldest of nine siblings and now the last remaining.

“This place has been holding my and many other families’ grief and joy long before I had any language for it,” Abiraahmi reflected. “It’s held some of my people through the best and worst of times, and I wanted to say thank you.”

Giving memory a sound

Abiraahmi has been making music for around a decade, beginning one summer in Dubai when she picked up the guitar and piano before attending a five-day rock camp for girls. It gave her her first experience of songwriting and performing, which she pursued through her teenage years before moving to New York at 18.

Her early music leant towards R&B and indie pop, often becoming closer to rock and roll when performed live, before her move into production drew her increasingly towards electronic music. ‘Kapali’ became the first project she produced entirely herself.

The project did not begin with a clear plan. During her time in Chennai, Abiraahmi began photographing the temple and the life around it, from its spaces to people sitting beside vegetable stalls in the shade.

“I knew I wanted to come to it,” she recalled. “I was taking pictures to memorialise it and come back to it in songwriting. There was too much to break down in words.”

Back in New York, she began experimenting with sounds alongside those photographs, a process she believes was shaped by her work in qualitative research, where listening for patterns and understanding individual experiences within their wider contexts are central.

“I don’t think I would have done that if I wasn’t a qualitative researcher,” she reflected. “Those people and places and context have started to become more top of mind when I’m writing and trying to create imagery.”

“As ‘Kapali’ developed, Abiraahmi realised the music was moving in two directions. Chapter One, comprising the title track and spoken-word ‘Reprise,’ became intimate and reflective, while Chapter Two transformed the same foundation into a bass-heavy future rave remix.

“For me, the project had to capture the grief and the hope in depth as well,” she explained. “I realised the songs were going two ways. So I thought, let me do a more intimate piece alongside the ‘Reprise,’ and then, using this same foundation, how do I amp it up into something that makes you feel like something is being released from you?”

Her decision to work electronically was also significant. Although ‘Kapali’ draws on South Asian traditions and incorporates the Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra, Abiraahmi consciously resisted presenting herself through the conventions of devotional music.

Although ‘Kapali’ draws on South Asian traditions and incorporates the Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra, Abiraahmi consciously resisted presenting it as devotional music. Having grown up outside India and Sri Lanka, and conscious of the years of training required to properly perform devotional and Carnatic music, doing so would have felt less authentic than allowing those influences into the electronic language she had developed for herself.

Refusing to split herself in two

That question of authenticity extends beyond music. Alongside her artistic career, Abiraahmi is a researcher working in human development, a path she pursued after moving to New York and completing her Bachelor’s degree in Applied Psychology at New York University.

Social justice had always existed alongside her interest in music. She wanted her work to contribute towards better outcomes for children, particularly those from lower-income communities, yet for a long time she felt her scientific and creative lives needed to remain separate.

When she first entered professional research spaces, she would quickly brush aside mentions of her music, worried that colleagues discovering this other part of her life might affect how seriously they regarded her. “It was a risk I didn’t know if I could afford for a long time,” she said.

Today, she introduces herself as both researcher and artist. “It’s important to be able to show up in the places where you’re doing work that you care about without feeling like you need to hide certain parts of yourself.”

She is also careful not to treat her own experience as universal. The freedom she has found to build both careers has been shaped by where she lives and works. “If I were born in Sri Lanka or India, would I be able to pursue a career like this, the scientific field alongside singing? I don’t have the answer to that.”

What once seemed like competing identities has become increasingly interconnected. Research shapes how she listens and observes, while music gives her another way to explore questions of identity, memory, and whose stories are given space.

Deciding what counts

‘Kapali’ has also arrived during a broader reassessment of what Abiraahmi wants from music. By late last year, years spent trying to work out how to make a ‘successful’ song had developed into something of a creative crisis, with success increasingly reduced to streams, followers, views, and tickets sold.

‘Kapali’ performed well by some of those measures, including more than doubling her social media following, but those are not the numbers she returns to when describing its success. Instead, she points to responses from friends and family who understood the experiences from which the project emerged.

“I don’t know if it’s translating as well in Spotify streams,” she said. “I’m not too pressed about it. My focus is producing songs that mean something to me, and ones that people, even if it’s only a couple dozen, can resonate with.”

Her next planned single, ‘The Throne,’ moves towards a more melodic EDM sound while asking what success means when the conventional measurements stop feeling satisfying. The song emerged from her realisation that she had tried almost everything she thought she needed to do musically and still reached the end without feeling accomplished.

For her, the answer increasingly lies in who is given the authority to decide whether a life or body of work has succeeded. “The throne chooses who reigns,” she said, “and we are the throne in all our lives.”

It is a shift that seems particularly significant a decade into her musical journey. Abiraahmi is still experimenting with what she wants her music to sound like, just as she continues to negotiate the space between artist and researcher, and between the different places and cultures that have shaped her. What appears to have changed is the need for any of those things to resolve into a single, easily defined identity.

Perhaps the success of ‘Kapali,’ then, lies in what it allowed her to do: make something deeply personal on her own terms, trust the instincts that led her there, and become a little less concerned with whether the result fits neatly into anyone else’s definition of what her music, or her life, should look like.