Sebastiampillai Vasanberk & Sascha Brosamer – Ambha Paadhu

Sebastiampillai Vasanberk is a singer, musician, and performer from Jaffna. He is one of the key figures of the thenmody koothu tradition, which is one of the Sri Lankan Tamil traditional performance forms that combines dance and sung storytelling in the form of a theater play.

Sascha Brosamer is a soundartist from Berlin and visited Sebastiampillai Vasanberk during his stay in Jaffna, Sri Lanka December 2022 and they recorded this track a week later in Colombo.

Together they transformed Ambha paadhu into a contemporary interpretation using Voice, Harmonium and Electric Guitar.
Ambha paadhu, or Fishermansong; is a practice among Tamil communities of fishermen in Sri Lanka. Typically, they sing these songs to motivate themselves at work and have fun using praise and profanity. It is both an inventive and verbally, memorized format. They often improvise lyrics about their daily lives. The same beats are consistently used, and the tempo of the beat puts an energetic demand on the work which they do.

This project was supported by the Goethe-Institut Sri Lanka