Lykanthea is the project of Lakshmi Ramgopal, a multidisciplinary artist whose performances and installations experiment with traditional South Indian art forms through pop idioms. Her debut EP Migration (2014) garnered praise from Noisey, Chicago Tribune, and Public Radio International’s The World for its alchemy of synths, catchy melodies, and Carnatic improvisatory techniques. The record led to a European tour, Leipzig’s Wave-Gotik Treffen, and performances at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Since then, Ramgopal has turned her attention to atavistic questions of motherhood and personal legacy with a multidisciplinary ensemble that includes Asha Rowland, Erica Miller, Johanna Brock, and Ben Zucker. Solo and with her ensemble, she has performed site-specific, immersive shows in spaces like Chicago’s Edgar Miller’s Glasner Studio and Garfield Park Conservatory, and the middle of a freshwater stream. In 2018 she showed A Half-Light Chorus, a sound installation commissioned by Experimental Sound Studio, at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Conservatory. In 2020 she and visual artist Nancy Davidson showed Hive (2020), a site-specific sculpture and sound installation, at Krannert Art Museum. The museum acquired it in 2023.

These journeys find a home in Some Viscera, an evening-length work of sound and movement that explores childhood, nostalgia, and kinship in the Indian-American diaspora in the wake of India’s independence, while questioning the boundaries of classical forms. Embracing the warmth of the sruti box, unprocessed vocals, and strings, Ramgopal’s ensemble draws on a wide range of influences to create a work that is as expansive as it is intimate. Some Viscera premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on September 26-27. The music of Some Viscera releases as a standalone album later this year.