The Growth Eternal is the primary creative project of Tulsa-born, LA-based multi-instrumentalist ghalani. Conceived in 2018 as a necessary expressive outlet following years of rigorous jazz bass guitar study, the Growth Eternal (true to its name) provides ghalani with the consecrated space to intuit, evolve, and explore beyond the confines of genre and influence, operating, all the while, with humility and intention— a state akin to the Buddhist Shoshin (“beginner’s mind”).

On The Growth Eternal’s unflinching new single, “Holocene Pyre,” ghalani confronts incipient climate catastrophe with courage and heart, aided by a spoken word contribution from Native American writer, US Poet Laureate, and fellow Tulsan, Joy Harjo. Of the single and their and Harjo’s collaboration, ghalani writes:

“Holocene Pyre” was born in the hot summer of 2019. I felt an urgency many of us do towards the crisis of our climate - how can our collective hands change from harm to healing?

That’s why I’m thankful I had the honor of Joy Harjo speaking her poem “Let There Be No Regrets” as the ending. She’s a fellow Tulsan, USA’s first Native American Poet Laureate, and healer through her artistic power. We met in August of 2019 when we performed a set of her music for her ‘An American Sunrise’ book release event. Her poems and personhood give clarity.

Many textures in “Holocene Pyre” are meant to represent this transitional tragedy we’re going through. At the choruses past 5:08, the background chanting is from LA’s 2020 climate march. Synths imitate animals and vice versa throughout the track. Lighter sounds and fire noise are buried like warning signs have been for so long.

Ultimately it’s a picture of warning, grief, and a prayer that I hope embodies the times enough to give clarity. Clarity transforms.

The intention of “Holocene Pyre” is to support indigenous localized solutions to the climate crisis and land restoration through amplifying and donating a portion of the profits to the Hopi Tutskwa (www.hopitutskwa.org) and Ekvn-Yefolecv (www.ekvn-yefolecv.org).

Spanning numerous releases, including (most recently) 2022’s full-length, Parasail-18, ghalani has mined the rich cosmogony of jazz, soul, R&B, psychedelia, and the complexity of their personal heritage as a descendent of Tulsa’s historic Black Wall Street. The music released under the Growth Eternal moniker is fluid (see 2020’s Bass Tone Paintings, a collection of seventeen minute-long compositions with lyrics spanning four languages), but certain unmistakable trademarks suffuse this body of work: namely, an ineffable rhythmic sensibility informed by their mastery of bass guitar, and their distinctive use of a vocoder—a fitting marriage, aesthetically speaking, of the organic/earthen and the transhumanist/retrofuturist.