South London artist Tara Lily was July's featured artist for our Clash Live series at Metropolis Studios, created in association with our partners Ellesse.
Tara's music explores the sweet spot between programmed sounds and ornate instrumentation: heady, sensual and nostalgic. Growing up in South London, her exposure to a confluence of sounds and subcultures led her to intermix and reconcile her classically-trained jazz roots with a sonic palette that pulls from the underground electronic continuum, RnB and neo soul.
In conversation, Tara touched on how her recent releases - last year's 'Last Flight Out' and current single 'Double Time' - communicate feelings of movement, belonging and transience, delving deeper into the East meets West cultural synthesis she’s been exploring since her debut; be it through Indian classical drones or allusions to Bengali folklore or iconography.
With a new project on the horizon, Tara expresses a desire to subvert expectations with darker, funereal sonic experiments. By her own admission, her sound is “niche, eclectic, and not for everyone…”