Mukta stand at the crossroads of two very different worlds, two musical cultures, two systems of thought, confronting the traditions of East and West. The group owe their genesis to Simon Mary, a talented doublebass player with a passion for Indian music. Mary started out heading a jazz quartet but a chance encounter with the female sitar-player Brigitte Menon changed all that and set him off in a new direction. The pair teamed up together to record the album Indian Sitar & World Jazz back in 1998, setting the course for what was to follow over the next decade. Now, ten years on, Invisible Worlds pushes East/West fusion boundaries back even further - despite the fact that Brigitte Menon has now left the group and been replaced by Michel Guay (a Canadian sitar-player who also trained in India).

As the title of the group's fifth album suggests, Mukta have entered another dimension altogether now, opening a window onto a world where what the eye cannot see is equally - if not more - important than surface visibility. "'Invisible Worlds' is about all sorts of things we cannot see, whether it be in physical terms like a planet being too far away for its light to reach us or things that cannot be explained rationally," says Mary, casting around for a suitable example of the irrational, "Like I never know why when the musicians are just as invested in what they're doing every night, there are some concerts where everyone gels together and others where we don't!"

No stars in the Mukta system

It is questions like these that Simon Mary and his musician friends probe together as a musical collective, each of the musicians in Mukta being free to come up with his own theory. "Generally what happens is I turn up with a rough outline of a track, something that's already structured and noted down," says Mary, who writes most of the group's material, "But that doesn't stop everyone else from coming along and putting their own spin on it. Everyone's free to use my rough outline as a basis for improvisation. It's only after this initial process that we go ahead and make a demo tape. Even after that, though, nothing is written in stone. When we transpose the recorded material for live shows, for instance, we work out what new directions we can take a piece in and look at parts that can be stretched further on stage." The one thing that counts above all else in Mukta's make-up is that no one musician overshadows another. "There's not one big star in the Mukta system," insists Mary, "There are no Zakir Hussains* in our group!"

Mukta do not impose any musical limits on themselves on their new album, either, venturing off into new musical territory whenever the fancy takes them. N’Toto Mountains, the eighth track on Invisible Worlds delves into African rhythms and even verges on the Brazilian at times while an earlier track, Blue Tala, experiments with Jamaican influences and Ijazzat (a track including vocals) taps into an Afro-American groove.

"The thing is," says Mary, explaining the group's insistence on expanding their fusion sound ever further, "is that we've spent so long mixing, fusing, melding and interweaving jazz and Indian music - this type of fusion sound is so completely familiar to us now - that it's only natural we should want to open a few new doors and bring new things together in our work. I think we know each other sufficiently well for that now! The core of the group (trumpeter Geoffroy Tamisier, drummer Jean Chevalier and percussionist Olivier Congar) have been playing together for ten years now and over half of that time our sitar-player Michel Guay has been involved, too… I've always listened to a lot of very different music. Believe me, there's nothing thought out and deliberate about our approach. I think Mukta's fusion happens internally in a visceral sort of way."

As if to illustrate his point, Simon Mary then proceeds to roll off a list of his current musical listening which ranges from the duo Robert Plant & Alison Krauss to Steve Reich, The Beatles, Radiohead, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and sixties and seventies jazz. The final track on Mukta's new album, One for Turiya, is actually dedicated to John Coltrane's wife, Alice Coltrane. "Turiya is the Hindu name she adopted in the seventies," Mary explains, "I wanted to pay tribute to Alice/Turiya because she was one of the first musicians to start spreading Indian culture and Indian styles of music in the West. She opened a window onto non-European cultures - and, I have to admit, influenced me heavily in the process!" Meanwhile, Simon Mary and the fellow members of Mukta will be doing their own bit to spread Indian culture at this summer's music festivals before hitting the road for a French tour this autumn and heading off abroad  at the start of 2009.

*a star Indian tablas-player