What A Twenty String Indian Slide Guitar Sounds Like to Western Ears
The first thing you hear on Cardinal is a voice with nothing behind it. Track one, Just Give Thanks, arrives a cappella. Then the strings arrive, and they are not the strings most listeners will expect. Joel Veena plays a twenty string Indian slide guitar, and the record spends eight tracks showing what it can do.
You can listen to our full playlist which contains the artist’s music, and know more about the artist’s work by scrolling down the page.
What A Twenty String Slide Guitar Actually Does
Start with the instrument, because it explains the audience. A player holds the Hindustani slide guitar flat and moves a bar along it rather than fretting notes. Its extra strings then ring in sympathy with the ones he plays. That produces a sustained, layered tone.
There is a reason it can sound familiar. The instrument descends from two traditions at once, the Hawaiian steel guitar and the Indian vichitra veena, so the near and the far are built into it before anyone plays a note. Pitch Perfect described the result as a magical exotic sound that often reads like a traditional American steel guitar, which is a useful way in for anyone who has heard a pedal steel record but never an Indian classical one.
That double reading is the point. Cardinal moves from original compositions into traditional North Indian ragas and back out again. It asks for a start-to-finish listen rather than a shuffle. The two Raag Bageshree pieces sit at the centre, the alaap first, unmetered and slow, then the gat with drums underneath.
Who The Record Reaches Beyond The Classical Audience
So the listener this suits is a specific one. If you already follow Indian classical music, the ragas will do the work. If you do not, the entry points are elsewhere on the record. Resistance runs electronic beats under the strings, Just Give Thanks comes in through sung poetry, and Mountains Ramble is closer to what a Western folk listener would recognise. Nobody needs to arrive fluent.
Veena’s own sense of who the record reaches is broader than a single scene. He points to listeners who already follow sitar, tabla, sarod and sarangi players, but also to people who simply go to concerts and like being surprised, and to anyone drawn to experimental or progressive music regardless of where it comes from. That is a wide net for an album built on a North Indian classical instrument. It is also a fair one, because the record keeps offering handholds.
The album carries an explicit intention too, and he states it plainly. He made it, in his words, so listeners can “do the needful” in their own lives, under the dedication “for the benefit of all, for all of time.” That framing will matter to some listeners and not to others, and the music works either way.
What Joel Veena Brought Together To Make Cardinal
Veena, born Joel Eisenkramer, recorded most of Cardinal at Root Cellar Sound, his studio in Guilford, Vermont, and folded in sessions from the UK and India. He found the instrument on a 2007 study trip to Delhi. Today he is the only North American performer of the Indian slide guitar who tours regularly there. In 2023 the government of India recognised his contribution to Indian music internationally.
He does not carry the record alone, though. Jasdeep Singh plays jori on Reminder, the pair of drums that preceded the tabla. That track is the first documented recording of a Hindustani slide guitar and jori together in an original composition. Mir Naqibul Islam plays tabla on Never Too Late (For a Shower of Rain) and on Raag Bageshree (Gat). Vidhi Salla appears on the closer, Sabke Liye.
Reviewers have picked up on how those partnerships behave. Cinematic Giants wrote that Singh’s playing is “responsive without being reactive,” letting the slide guitar’s tones bend and extend rather than cutting them off, and called the album “music as a form of attention. Nothing ornamental, nothing filtered out.” Beach House Mag and Mexico’s End Sessions covered it as well.
Veena’s own account of why he made it is less technical. “My music is an offering and a process at the same time,” he said. “It’s an offering to the world, to this existence; a reality that has given me life and the power to positively affect people through my art. I am grateful for this life and I wish to spread that vibration.”
Where To Hear Cardinal And Follow Joel Veena
Cardinal streams in full on Spotify and Apple Music, and his live record sits on Bandcamp.
Veena posts across his YouTube channel, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, with tour dates and background on his official site.
