Kerala Dust has great recognition in Poland thanks to their unique approach to music. Their characteristic sound combines modern electronic sounds with dynamic rock, creating unforgettable impressions at every concert, not only with a powerful sound, but also engaging and delighting with their musical power. Their performances are known for their enormous impact, so the Kerala Dust concert at the Malta Festival will be a unique opportunity for an evening party to the rhythm of dynamic and electrifying music.

Kerala Dust’s new album, “Violet Drive”, is a record deeply rooted in and inspired by their surroundings. The band, which formed in London in 2016, is now based between Berlin and Zurich and has created a deeply European album, oscillating between the past and the future. Formed out of a growing love of electronic music and experience in indie bands, Edmund formed the band at a time when making electronic music on a laptop “seemed like the most sensible thing to do.” He adds: “I got really into club music, I went to Fabric and Corsica Studios a lot. I became immersed in the endless repetitions of this music, the way it constantly repeats itself, something unfolds and almost becomes a strange kind of mantra, leaving you in a clear state of mind.” These mesmerizing elements are the driving force behind Kerala Dust, whose music combines blues and Americana with unconventional electronic beats. Playing in clubs around the world for three years after forming the band, they perfected a somewhat improvised and always fluid live performance that freed their songs from the shackles of their recorded forms and set the stage for a band determined to break the mold and constantly rewrite their own script.

While releasing their debut album Light, West in late 2020, the band immersed themselves in their new base in Berlin, allowing the city’s deep, complex history and landscapes to influence their next steps. During the lockdown, Edmund befriended film director Greg Blakey and spent his days wandering around abandoned streets and old abandoned buildings (with the help of a website dedicated to identifying such places and the difficulty of accessing each of them). “There is a certain richness and peculiarity in the history of Berlin, and the number of people who have occupied this place over the last 80 years,” he says. “I was brought up on British history, but here there is a completely different sensibility. In Britain we are told that the battles and victories of the empire are victorious, even though the empire has fallen and many of these events are quite shameful. In Germany, however, a deep, intense shame for these events is taught in schools.

“These remains are just sitting there,” he adds. “The remains of the wall in the middle of the city, the old highways built by the Nazis, all these things left to their fate because they are quite shameful. All of these elements carry a certain weight of history that wasn’t that long ago, and traversing these places really deeply influenced the sound and the album.” In a break from previous working methods, the songs on “Violet Drive” were built on drums, and these surprisingly unusual, unbalanced beats define the album; in line with the album’s inspirations, they often sound like a war cry. Recorded over two weeks in a studio in the Alps on the outskirts of Zurich by Till Ostendarp, the powerful drum beat provided the framework against which the album’s lyrics and instrumentation – flashes of bluesy guitars and hazy synths, Edmund’s deliciously deep, syrupy voice – bounce and fill the songs. “I was writing in quite an Americana way before,” he explains, “and this album is much more Central European in terms of influence,” with German legends Can as a constant reference point.

The universe that the album inhabits is also slowly developed through its accompanying music videos, which were shot in Berlin and beyond and feel connected to Kerala Dust’s European context.