Elephant Stone

Elephant Stone play Hyde Park Book Club on Tuesday 17 November, from 7:30pm to 11:00pm. They're a Montreal band, and the whole project centres on Rishi Dhir, a songwriter and sitarist who's spent about twenty years blurring the lines between Western psych-pop and Indian classical tradition.

It started back in 2006 as a quest for transcendental sound, and since then it's grown into a singular, self-contained vision. Dhir works out of his own home studio in Montreal, Sacred Sounds, where he produces, engineers and mixes the band's increasingly complex and cinematic output. Over ten acclaimed releases, the group has meditated on loss and existential wonder, with a discography that stretches from the 2009 Polaris Music Prize long-listed debut The Seven Seas — influenced by Dhir's spiritual travels in India — to the 2010 The Glass Box EP, the 2013 self-titled album, and 2014's The Three Poisons. The synth-infused Ship of Fools followed in 2016, then Hollow in 2020, and the GAMIQ-winning French EP Le Voyage de M. Lonely dans la Lune in 2022. They've collaborated with Beck and The Brian Jonestown Massacre along the way.

It's a long run of records, and the sitar is right there in the mix, sitting alongside psych-pop and cinematic arrangements. The set will be at Hyde Park Book Club, 27-29 Headingley Lane, Leeds, LS6 1BL, on Tuesday 17 November, running from 7:30pm to 11:00pm.