This album flows more than anything I've done - yet it's the most diverse," says Nitin Sawhney. "It's also the most personal." Human is the sixth album by cultural pioneer and cutting edge musician Nitin Sawhney. Drawing on influences ranging from urban R&B to Indian classical music and the Velvet Underground, this record is his most autobiographical.

Daring and emotionally direct, each track encapsulates a certain space in time - from the joy and pain of birth in 'Eastern Eyes', to being the only Asian kid in a school dominated by the National Front ('Say Hello'), to the headlong teenage rush of the single, 'Falling', to the sense of integrating two cultures on the ecstatic song 'Fragile Wind'.

"I was thinking about William Blake's 'Songs of Innocence And Experience', and how as you grow up you become disillusioned with things you trusted when you were young - like parents, school, the media, politicians - but in so doing, you gain a sense of who you are," says Sawhney.

Human is charting new, more intimate territory. On previous albums such as Spirit Dance (1993), Migration (1995), and Displacing The Priest (1996), Sawhney has explored outward questions of religion, politics and racial identity. 1999's Beyond Skin looked beyond cultural boundaries, while his last album, the millenial epic Prophesy, involved a trip around the world and spanned the range of human experience - from aborigines in Australia, to a choir of Soweto schoolchildren, to a New York taxi driver alienated by technology.

Ms. Andrews, across the pond, today informed me of the release of "Human". I have listened to it and to put it simply it is brilliant. Go check it out right away at!

nitinsawhney.com