Hand Of Thought revealed itself to me as a way of tracing the threads that run through the women in my family —
The things we inherit that go beyond genetics.
This specific way of writing music - at the piano - has always felt linked to these ancestors.

I’m thinking a lot about the women who came before me — the parts of their lives that were never spoken about, the pain they carried quietly, and the strength they somehow held on to while living inside patriarchy and religious expectation.
The music on this album came from a place of wanting to honour all of that — the gifts, the rebellion, the tendencies that feel like they were woven into me long before I was born.
Realising this also brings a sense of responsibility.

The Hand of Thought is the hand extended across generations: weaving together a shared ownership of history, strength, tenderness, and a collective refusal to let the light of creation be extinguished.

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The album draws on the experiences of the Parsi women in my family, who grew up in mid-20th-century Bombay as part of a small community of fewer than 100,000, descended from Persian refugees who migrated to the Indian subcontinent in the 7th century. As Ardeshir explains, “This is the first time my work is drawing from the culture of my community and family in a very direct sense. It was not uncommon for Parsi households in India to own pianos by the 50s and 60s, and in a way I’m using the piano as a lens to examine the specific experiences of the women in my family as Parsis living in Mumbai in a newly independent India.”

The album title is inspired by Opening the Hand of Thought by Kosho Uchiyama, a seminal Zen text that Ardeshir was reading during the early stages of the album’s formation. She began to draw connections between her meditation practice and a new language emerging at the piano, one that hovered “between meditation and composition.” She describes practising minimalist motifs “to the point of being entranced,” often feeling as though her hands were “being taken over by a larger force or ancestral consciousness… operating with less volition and more in line with a stream of consciousness.” The notion of the hand of thought became, for her, a metaphor for a hand extended across generations, an intergenerational collaboration with the women who came before her, carrying their potential as well as their deficiencies.