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This is an important announcement:

The Knife is closing, there will be no further posts. The site will be taken down in 24 hours. We leave you with one weird closing mix.

Thank you all for reading, and thank you for all the messages, over the past years and over the past few weeks.

And thank you for all the terrible and beautiful music.

Some day you will find me. (caught beneath the landslide in a champagne supernova in the sky)

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Popular music in the world right now is weak, it is designed to be heard playing in supermarkets. This mix is a strange assortment, and it may not seem cohesive, but each song is from a different place or a different time, and is individually very important.

Listen here: http://www.mixcloud.com/consolidate/consolidate-008-an-evening-with-the-knife/

This is the kind of music you'd find yourself stopping for in unfamiliar streets, or the kind that would make for an exaggerated dance-walk as you slink slowly, alone, down a corridor filled with cigarette smoke. There is Indonesian protest music and rumored torture-by-female-Communists soundtrack, Konkani love-boat music, and the kind of music that encourages space travel (if you close your eyes and listen for it). There are cute Pacman-samples that soon break into sexy RnB; with voices rushing in and out of each other, with the urgency of sand through your toe-gaps under a receding wave.

I think it's important that you can feel extremes in languages you don't understand or even recognize, and there is music that illustrates that. Some songs accentuate the overcompensation of one impaired sense for another, like in the case of a visually-impaired and autistic composer from Japan. Some music will take you by the hand and lead you dancing into an Eastern European party you’re gatecrashing in your head, some will shock you into a dream-state where mountains, clouds and valleys careen into each other. There are songs that were married with Boris Vian novels to turn into films about flowering lungs; songs for a dark and insistent basement, or just a sunkissed afternoon.

Some music demonstrates that the hyperbole of the French may best find its voice in a lavish orchestra. And some will teach you to leave by tiptoeing out magnificently, a loud and limitless echo with every deliberate step.

[theknife-archive]

I was a little thrown by this Frame/Frame EP. It was simultaneously the kind of music that drove people out of the house with throbbing headaches, and the kind of music I’d find briefly haunting me for the hours I spent not listening to it. ‘Pastels’ was a track I even found myself missing, but it’s also very hard to enjoy without drugs.

Where the opening track falls short, the monochrome/telescopic artwork makes up for enough to draw you in. ‘Pastels’ is the clear stand out on this EP - the vocals, the lingering ghost voices, and the accompanying visual cues condition you to associate it with reflective or introspective nights with underlying hints of frenzy. With its throbbing synths, ‘Pastels’ has strains similar to XXYYXX - not slowed down enough as to present a substitute for drugs, but enough for you to lump it into the slightly less-sordid house party playlist alongside the likes of Thievery Corporation and Evy Jane.

This song segues almost seamlessly into the next, ‘Feather’, which is where you start to go underwater. It bubbles like an Eskmo track, moving in Brownian motion over skittering rhythms like in XXYYXX’s ‘Bill Gates’. The next track ‘Rogue’ comes as a loud, rude shock - an undesired intrusion into the chilled space that we had just settled into. ‘Swimmers’ ventures into almost aspirational-M83 territory, but without any shivering build of excitement. Collaborator Keshav Dhar’s (Skyharbour) ambient guitar textures makes for an atmosphere that escalates, and then climbs halfway through and breaks like a Broken Social Scene song.

Clocking a quick fifteen minutes, each track averaging about three minutes - it isn’t long enough to qualify as formless wandering. Amidst all the constant movement, the syncopation and displacement, the most accessible parts of this glitch-hop EP are the parts where Kaul’s singer-songwriter sensibilities shine through. There’s a measured incorporation of organic elements amid all the mechanized tropes, which is what makes Swimmers human and listenable. It’s been mastered by the same famous guy who does Amon Tobin and Eskmo records, but it lacks the delicacy and refinement of these, and at times comes across a little sharp and blatant. It’s a good sampler, and Frame/Frame has proven enjoyable live: a forever bobbing afro under the blue light of Cocaine.

[theknife-archive]

A Giant Leap For Mankind

The thing I love about young metal bands like Anthracite, is that they’re so earnest. Just like Gutslit. They’re the kind of guys who use their band name as their middle name, who bob their afros and write introspective songs like ‘Inner Voice’ and ‘Urgent Decision’, and place them in an album called Groove Sandwich. 

The video uses complex visual metaphors, punctuated by chicken jumps, and has its intense Kangana-Ranaut-from-Raaz-2 moments. Spoilers: The video and presumably the song, is about a sad girl who makes monochrome charcoal drawings transforming into a happy girl who makes rainbow drawings. During the transition, her angry reflection rips up her drawing in the mirror, then she fleetingly turns into a dude - the frontman of the band. Meanwhile in an alternate reality, this vocalist punches at the air and begins synchronized-jumping with his band (1:20). There’s a burst of light, the girl walks in on them, is cheered up and everyone lives happily ever after. Here, watch: 

[theknife-archive]

Three-dimensional Warfare

There are some of us who have lived long enough to look back and see a clear delineation where the past started to end; and what had once looked like “the future” to our younger selves, had begun. 3D printed bionic ears, to brainwashed consumers gushing effusively and buying into scarcely-disguised surveillance systems - the entire fad of “self documentation.” We’re living in a consumer-fed panopticon. Pop music, and reality TV, and genocide, and crimes clamoring to outdo each other in ferocity. As headlines become more brutal and explicit, as our hands grow clammier and our blood runs colder, it becomes clear that beneath the savagery and power-lust there must be an underlying chilling curiosity - just how much can another human body be pushed, how much can it take before disintegrating?

As a rule, any given isolated system will tend toward achieving maximum entropy, a state of maximum disorder. Viewing the world as a thermodynamic system however is a step too far back, it doesn’t address any of what’s going on. In statistical mechanics, the term is scientifically defined as mixedupness. Though the incidence of violence and insanity are not measurably triggered at a molecular level, perhaps statistically we’ve reached the point where the rarest odds are multiplied by a large enough sample size to kickstart a domino effect of destruction. With the increase in world population, there’s been a biomagnification of depravity. There may be hope for our country yet, our fertility rates are almost level with the replacement rate - education may have nothing to do with it, just that people are too busy watching television to reproduce. There is a high likelihood that we will live through a World War in our lifetime. Will we be outnumbered, by the small masses / freak occurrences of purest insanity and psychosis, who will kill off large portions of our species in independent miniature-massacres? Perhaps this is the course that nature is due to take, but it’s unnerving to think of what will be left behind.

I once used to have this notion of apathy being weaponized, I mean that as a positive term: that it could’ve collectively been our strongest means of defense. In some kind of naive dreamlike situation, each human as a unit keeping to itself without causing harm, the absence of a need for governance or an externally placed moral code - a prerequisite of which would’ve been complete and unerring biological uniformity. And to be apathetic now in actuality, is a realistic defense up to a point, until the radius of your internet-powered bubble slowly retracts and the destruction starts hitting closer and closer home. 

We are obviously horrified, but I wonder where all of this is going to take us. This inbred sense of entitlement has permeated so far, and with it a smugness - hordes of perpetrators so indifferent to consequences. It’s not only this country, the whole planet is slowly going insane. It’s astounding that any legislative body in the world feels like they have jurisdiction over women’s bodies and life choices, that this is even considered an issue up for debate. With the Delhi gang-rape, things finally became relatable enough and sensationally violent enough. 

We’ve created an unnatural, dystopian human atmosphere by basically banning sex. By making it a mysterious, dirty creature not to be spoken of and absurdly linking it to concepts like honor and respect. (And auto-marriage). The imbalance is where the violent upsurges stem from, an abnormal subjugation of women and the mandatory secrecy that surrounds any sexual information. Sex is only one medium however, since it is presented as the most straightforward and convenient means of establishing power. Our ‘culture and upbringing’ instils in us the belief that promiscuous women and sex are ours for the taking, never an experience of equal gratification.

In the name of religious freedom, we allow glorification of hypercults-gone-wild. All religions are cults, even science, I’m assuming if you’re reading this you know what I’m outraging about. This and this and this and the rest.

“Fri Sept 13, '13. India. The highest of penalties imposed for the murder of one. The highest of honours granted for the murder of thousands.”

We sit in our houses and walk out on our streets being hit by quakes of realization that a democracy gone wrong may be irreversible - as we learnt from our friendly neighborhood water-cannon-wielding police forces. As of now, we’re going to be governed by either a mass-murderer-cum-CEO, or a daft stoner representing slightly-apologetic mass murderers. And in general, the sheer existence of Mamata Banerjee perplexes me. 

I tried to keep it to music, but apparently this is the most important music in the world now.

So yeah, bye I’m going to go eat chowmein.

[theknife-archive]

Stories Of The Places You Never Want To Go

While we’re on Chennai, we must also address the disappointments:

“Thought you were my friend. Have you been avoiding me?” YES, Family Cheese, you get it! One afternoon I came across this new video release, “UNIR” by this Chennai/Bangalore/Ahmedabad/Mumbai(?) band called The Family Cheese. It’s astounding. They’ve also released an EP - Stories of The Places You've Never Been, in which each track is about 7 minutes longer than it should be. That is all. Who are these 5,000 people who actually voluntarily listen to The Family Cheese? Let us attempt to gauge this from their YouTube comments. 

The appreciation is primarily directed toward the bass player’s hair’s similarity to Kevin Figueiredo’s hair, which obviously signifies that they are indeed great musicians.

The term ‘virtuoso’ appears a lot. This indicates the presence of engineering students amidst their fanbase.

The word “boob” was mentioned.

Verdict: Waste of decent artwork. Gnight guys.

[theknife-archive]

  Knives Falling Out of The Moon

“It’s funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they’re related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there’s a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.” - A.M.

Nine months ago, I’d chanced upon a sub-50 plays-on-Soundcloud band from Chennai, and quietly reveled in the discovery of what I’d imagined were a couple of jittery South Indian kids - gawky, with big hair and tambourines and access to a lot of Vampire Weekend, awkwardly explaining their acoustic bedroom songs on scratchy work-in-progress recordings. I’ve been waiting for this debut, basically. The F16’s are jet fighter aircrafts, antibodies against influenza, code for mental and behavioral disorders due to use of hallucinogens, and five guys from Madras (they’re sentimentalists, this is important). 

They’ve got great hooks, loud guitars, fitting harmonies, and they obviously sound roomier and fuller. ‘Light Bulbs’, released as a single a few months ago, came as a pleasant repeat-friendly surprise. The F16’s sounded much unlike their anxious acoustic selves, and became more of a Nada Surf resurrection. What stayed intact was their way with words, painting a yellow-tinged picture of a despair-soaked bar and isolation - carefully placed so you wouldn’t notice unless you stopped to look beyond the happy singalong chorus. There’s a brooding undercurrent to most of the Kaleidoscope EP, and there’s specific imagery. There’s ocean-floor dancing, heavy drinking, crumbling houses, betrayal - and then if you look at the elaborate illustrations accompanying each track, there’s war and isolation and mountains and smoke and rooftop parties in abandoned future-cities.  

The album opener ‘Prelude’ is like Mutemath meets Foals, and then it segues into Incubus circa 2004 (best year in music this past decade) like an extra mini Movement of the Odyssey. ‘Light Bulbs’ is slowed-down upbeat palatable pessimism, I held my breath for ‘Avalanche’ for fear of what it may have become. It works. Deconstruction: That Dirty Projectors-like hook, to The Strokes; somewhere in the middle they fleetingly find their own, before a vocally cringeworthy moment around the three and a half minute mark, right before it drops into a Foals-ish segment then ends with a Strokes-esque solo. ‘Kings Dream’ is basically ‘Cold Hard Bitch’ with more zealous/purposeful lyrics and a Martin Luther King sample. 

‘Who Robbed The Rogue?’ starts with catchy friendly synth a la Two Door Cinema Club and ends in dramatic Muse-like fashion. It’s almost my favorite song on the EP - but I’m really hoping those lyrics aren’t “Protect your nuts”? This track is followed by carousel music, ‘My Shallow Lover’, about the casual-but-efficient discarding of adulterous lovers. I like the last track ‘Nuke’, I can’t even stop moving to it, but only because it sounds like a Foals B-side.

There’s nothing jarring or divisive about Kaleidoscope, it’s very easy to like, there’s also nothing particularly inventive. The EP was released at a beach house party, and The F16’s have this amazing DIY thing going. In the space of just about a year, they’ve actually recorded and released an EP, been painstaking and intricate about their illustrations and artwork for each track, building an aesthetic, they’re gigging and touring far more actively/frequently than any of their Chennai compatriots, and I have such high hopes for this band. Once they find their footing, they’re going to be some of the most spectacular alt rock this country has seen. 

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All The Sweetest Sweetest Things

There’s an unparalleled sense of spirituality/fanaticism that comes with discovering a great new band - almost holding it in your hands; faced with the choice of selfishly stashing it away like your personal secret, or giving it to everyone you love and making them feel everything you’re feeling all at once, in one breath, in awed silence. You find this music in the modest corners of the internet, songs played less than 200 times, and sometimes you just know on first listen - this is going to mean something to you and your life. 

The first time I saw Ganesh Talkies was close to the end of 2012, at this open-air Converse band competition where they won basically everything in every category. Perky little kids in glimmering jackets, sounding mediocre from afar, we waved them away into a haze of smoke and didn’t give them another thought, for a long time. I saw them again, in a basement in New Delhi, the vocalist in a saree, eyemasks, and Bengali headgear and her band members as the glitziest mini-Bappi-Lahiri’s of our generation. And I saw them again, and again, and they were fun and I’d find myself dancing every time in every place, but I’d never leave with an aftertaste or a significant memory. But maybe that is the objective of their band, to make you forget. We’re living through dark times in this country, and dancing your way out of it feels like the finest form of escape.

There’s a place for everyone in the scene: I think it’s so cool that you could venture intoa suburban moshpit and emerge with blood on your shirt - unsure of who it belongs to, that bands are throwing DIY house party gigs, or that indie bands are regularly covering each other’s songs. Ganesh Talkies are doing things right - creating a distinct aesthetic, being harmonium-heavy, and actually bothering to make a fantastically kaleidoscopic music video for a very average song. However, as a music writer who mostly thrives on angst, violence, darkness or depression - happy disco kids weren’t entirely my scene. 

A few clicks away resided the solo project of their vocalist, Suyasha Sengupta, aka Plastic Parvati. Listening to her music was like looking into a notebook, beautiful half-sentences scrawled haphazardly across each page. Sengupta is a tease, because these are only fragments of thoughts of songs. And yet, you’re left with such a void once a song abruptly ends in mid-air. These are mostly looping experiments, hardly clocking anything beyond a minute. But left on her own in perceptible darkness and a hash-mist, Sengupta is crafting things of beauty. On ‘Quintessential Love Song’, she’s like Gwen Stefani feeling vulnerable and lonely and seductive, with an Indian mix thrown in. She’s so fond of vocal layers and lush fadeouts, with barely discernible lyrics, like in ‘Love on a Loop’. A couple of tracks are Ganesh Talkies, but those don’t hold my interest. With the minimal ‘Summer State of Mind’, her vocals venture lower and she turns into something that was born in the past and thrown into the present. So many of these snippets could almost pass off as No Doubt B-sides, from their every phase - Tragic Kingdom times to Rock Steady. ‘I.Die.’ travels off into Deerhunter territory, encased in all this Basement Scene-like reverb. 

With early beginnings in an alt rock/cover band, Suyasha Sengupta has come a long way. Her solo music has a self-effacing visual identity: with acid cats, cats on toast, cats in fishbowls, and so forth. Cute detractions from the anguish dwelling within the walls of her song-lets, because they contain so much death and hopelessness and lonely frustration, and the desperate will to fight. There’s a fragility under all that glitter, and when she invites you into her bed, you want to go there to just hold her. And then slowly coerce her to complete those songs.

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Music to Escape the Winter

The sun is setting earlier these days, nightfall is upon us sooner. The street lights go on, we see each other as silhouettes in cars’ headlights, signifying the end of the productive day. It’s cold outside and we huddle close indoors clinging to music that is warm – Warm synths like a fireplace; a fiery mess of guitars, in layers that blanket us.

Thin voices multiply themselves to give the illusion of a crowded room, with a warmth from imaginary bodies surrounding us. We carry these voices in our heads to keep ourselves comfortable, they accompany us into sleep or dance or shroomeries. Trapped between headphones, our brains are letting go. Losing track of the time of night; cautiously treading fat bass-lines on the new Glass Candy and old Zombelle.

Somewhere a piano is veering so closely on the edge of falling out of tune, so precariously that it needs cradling, then you watch it unfold magically into a butterfly burst of bass. I once looked upon remixing with disdain, like a process of taking somebody’s art and words out of context and twisting it into something they’d never meant at all. 

Read More

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A Brief History of 2012 in Indian Indie Music

The year has ended and the world is technically still here, and we’re still at gigs; and still driving down long roads with the sun in our eyes, listening to music that’s over a decade old, holding onto parts of our lives that barely even belong to us anymore. This has been the year that we learnt to fight back (and loudly), using opinions as weapons. As a country, as a scene, as individuals.

It feels like it’s been a year of striving and of transit, momentous nonetheless, because 2013 already looks so promising. 2012 has been fabulous with regard to (a few) gigs, science and change. It’s been the year we landed on Mars and had humans free falling out of space, it’s been a year of far-flung festivals across the country, it’s been a year of outrage over ridiculous governance, it’s been the year my fiancée left me- without warning or explanation but some ofthe only new music I fell in love with in 2012, it’s been a year of Grizzly Bear and Sulk Station and Chikni Chameli, and it’s been a year of reclamation in terms of turning the unlikeliest of spaces into gig venues. Like I mean, we had gigs in Tihar jail. The Supersonics are back together, and we even have decent ambient electronica now. Read more 

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Spud in the Box - 'Lens Life' ‘Lens Life’ starts like a teenage version of that Porcupine Tree song everyone used to be into, only written by a 10 year old who’s really rich and spends a lot on recording. I guess the most positive thing anyone could find to say about it, with awkward grins and double thumbs ups, is “pretty nice bass dude.” The lyrics are adorable, prompting listeners to tip their head to one side and go like, “awww, babies!” Spanning strong emotional terrain alluding to rainbows and happiness and morality-colors, it’s worth a listen - if nothing else, to see how uninventive songwriting can get these days. I’ve seen them live though - super tight, right from the start; they are young and there may be hope yet. Ooh they have another song, ‘Good Way to Die’, lulz my day is made. Listen here. 

The Red Pills - 'Song#1' I like them because they’re dirty and muddy and moody and lo-fi and stoned and all that. Chennai’s the homemade post-punk capital of the country, this lives up. Check them out here. 

The F16s - 'Avalanche' Could this be our very own Temecula Sunrise? Tambourines, maracas, and acoustic guitars - the F16’s look like a ray of sunshine in the dark hearts of Chennai youths. In my idealistic mind, I see them growing up to be a Vampire Weekend or a Belle & Sebastien. They only have two songs out, unpolished first drafts recorded at home, speaking of vulnerable secret-keepers and metaphorical ceiling-painting. Stay acoustic forever, kids. Check them out here. 

Suraj Mani - 'The Tattva Trip' “You and me like the birds and the bees.” Subtle. Sadly there are only album samples up on Soundcloud, but I gauge that Mani’s solo album consists of the usual melodramatic hard rock. Motherjane loyalists and nostalgics, this is only 4 you. Listen to samples here. 

[theknife-archive]

Story of an Artist

I guess the real reason I stopped writing here was that I passed out from sheer boredom from that first listen of the Mavyns album. Well, thank god that’s over.

I also grew to not care. I’ve become disillusioned with the scene; it’s grown commendably in size and weight; diluted proportionally in quality. The scene snowballs and puffs up its chest with an exaggerated sense of accomplishment, and its purest components fade away into some romanticized oblivion. We’ve become.. I wouldn’t say formidable, but a passable music destination globally; in the eyes of musicians that aren’t necessarily has-beens. It’s a sign that programmers have developed better taste and brands are more willing to part with their money. It had to happen, an audience of 500 million youths is something that’s hard to ignore. 

As we continue to self-congratulate and glamorize how far we’ve come as a collective; the ones who have chosen careers as fulltime musicians, wither slowly and painfully, obscured from view. Being an independent original musician here, without a fallback, ensures that you can never entirely grow up and free yourself of dependencies. That you could never live a life on par with your peers, your audiences and consumers of your music; 

A day comes when my oldest friend tells me he is contemplating killing himself, and it happens again, and it happens again. He sits alone in a room with several hundred recordings- reworking them, making album art and posters, editing videos, endlessly entranced. It remains unchanged over years. There have been days when I’ve see grown men reduced to tears, when they go many days without food, face medical emergencies and are forced to go to free clinics - because venues/organizers conveniently avoid or delay payment. Measly payments, just enough to ensure they’d barely get by. Debts accumulated from buying the equipment they need. Talented bands I have man-crushes on, seen picking up stubbed out cigarettes in the street for themselves. These ones aren’t the rich kids, not the experimental hipsters, these are adults spending the best years of their lives following their passions - compulsively and thanklessly, unwilling to compromise. Talent and hard work does not deserve poverty.

It comes down to how much of a value you put on something. Indian bands playing original English music in India. Unwilling to fall to the depths of auto-tune, or contribute item songs to say, Dangerous Ishqq. It’s cute, you know, that we have this whole self-absorbed bubble of a scene. We live in a civilization that champions stupidity, taking ridiculousness to a whole new level. Ringtone music and Transformers-farts; pseudo-Jamaicans soliloquizing about ganja, while hitting play on iTunes; American-Indians discovering themselves. We haven’t yet come as far as we’d like to think. It isn’t just us though, it’s everywhere. 

From intimate conversations of the kind only strangers could have, I've seen burning stars eaten away by a fatigue from years of unfulfilled desires and broken relationships. The world has a cruel label for them: entertainers. And I've seen nothing sadder, than an artist growing old.

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The Mavyns breaking up right after the album releases, right in the middle of their launch tour, makes me want to listen to this more.

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Harsha Iyer - ‘Mystery Woman’ Harsha Iyer was definitely more fun on his first album, which we found most impressive when listened to in reverse order. He’s the best kind of badass teenager - making music to soundtrack high speed situations that kick up dust as they leave. After growing accustomed to the Blink 182-ness of the vocals and the nasal twang, you’ll find yourself in the hands of an accomplished and impassioned musician.

This new single is the first taste of Iyer’s upcoming double album, and it looks like a step farther into preserving the past. We’re going to fondly watch him growing up album through album, and he’s taken a clear step into his symphonic years. ‘Mystery Woman’ is briefly almost country music, before Iyer goes all Beach Boys on us with those delicious harmonies and layers. With less of the jangly guitars and more orchestra, Album#2 promises to be some kind of OST to Iyer’s mind-films. Download here.

eatshootleave - ‘Neo’ Chennai continues to revel in its solo bedroom musicians. Track over layered track of software instruments and clever self-harmonies. I smell engineering college on this one, alongside A Perfect Circle and Tool. This laidback prog rock could perhaps turn interesting, but it isn’t really yet. Download here.

Blek - ‘Fog + Strobe’ Where the rest of the world has Yuck, we have Blek. These three Mumbai kids will surely grow up to be Nada Surf. ‘Fog’ is the one repeat-worthy song off their debut EP, released strategically in time to soundtrack topless summer flings.  Download here.

Switch Bitch - ‘QOCETT’ Pleasant and warm electronica, mildly delicate and pretty. Switch Bitch’s three song EP in its entirety, travels from a bedroom to a forest, and stumbles into some cheesy party - chiming lights reflecting off mirror bits and disco balls.  Download here.

Kaav - ‘Thee’ Their new single ‘Thee’ picks up where the Mallu trio’s 2010 EP left off, fluidly like the gap of a year in between never happened. More sea-front instrumental prog rock goodness, their distinctive Malayalam context thrown in with spoken fragments from a movie scene. Looks like the album’s going to be worth the wait. Honest music.  Download here. 

Neel Adhikari - ‘Lights and Tunnels’ That guy at the party with the acoustic guitar who tries too hard and makes everything thoroughly uninteresting. Watch here.

Dhruv Visvanath - ‘Luna’ The guy at the party with the acoustic guitar you really, really want to listen to. Here’s our very own homegrown Andy McKee. Watch here.

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A few years ago in a dimly lit living room in Bangalore, amid an assembly of projectors and new friends late at night, Rahul Giri would meet Tanvi Rao. Lounge Piranha guitarist Abhijeet Tambe would host these mini house parties, periodically throwing into a room an abundance of burgeoning talent, and they subconsciously became the messing-around ground for a sub-scene. Vocalists met producers met writers met opera singers, and into the early hours of the morning, collaborations would appear and disappear, occasionally leaving behind something that would last far longer.

Those nebulous evenings caused the intermingling of some of the most spectacular music in the country- illustrated alt rock from Lounge Piranha, volatile operatic-pop from Sridhar/Thayil, fragments of future psychedelic bands, and the evaporative electronica of Sulk Station. 

Till You Appear is mellowdramatic/downtempo act Sulk Station’s long awaited debut, a sweeping fifty minutes of rainwashed music that slowly drips blue-grey all over your surroundings. It’s been on loop since its release four days ago, we’re all waiting to get sick of it, but it just isn’t happening. Giri has built an ominous castle of echoes to surround Rao’s glassy vocals, a crystalline presage. With its recurring themes of lostness, Till You Appear soundtracks an unhurried yet frantic timelapse of a life spent in yearning.  

By virtue of its own distinct sound, different music exists at different altitudes; rock and roll was always closer home and earthly, dirty when at its best. Electronica had the inherent ability to be pretty and ambient in a way that lonely guitars couldn’t, until it grew to include the Transformers-farting that passes as mainstream music these days. It is the most dehumanizing genre of music, and it takes commendable talent to tiptoe beyond prettiness and lace it with intimacy. As for altitude, this is a stratospheric record, also unlike anything produced in this country. 

This isn’t a singles album with singular highlights, it’s designed to be experienced in its entirety. A continuous set of surreal, dizzying revisitations of places suspended translucently in mid-air; colored by mild anxiety. Effortless, Tanvi Rao’s vocals are descending into octaves you really aren’t expecting. Levitating on her haunting harmonies and sparse minor chords, are lyrical longings and paranoia that signal away from any tranquility apparent at first glance. 

Giri uses this album to pay homage, to influences he’s loved and learnt from and obsessed over, to Portishead and Kid A-era-Radiohead and James Blake and Jon Hopkins and Massive Attack. And to Tanvi Rao. Till You Appear skitters and breaks, shivers and sparkles, combining the cold eerie screeches of Portishead, the strategic pauses of Jon Hopkins, and the burgeoning warmth from James Blake-y synth sweeps. ‘Take Me Home’ is especially reminiscent of PH in their Glory Box glory days, loungey with a quiet desperation, building into something deliciously menacing. 

The album opens forcing the listener into a dreamlike state, all words fading into blurs. “Sometimes I see an open window, makes me fear,” and the lyrics of ‘Downlift’ limning a sudden insecurity trail off into a loud, threatening spiral. All through the record, you don’t even notice the transitions from English to Hindi and back, noticing only that you understand. Everything falls into place mid-album and there is breathing space, with the laidback ‘Contentment’, before returning to uneasiness Rao speaks of the sweet sounds in her head, all the while becoming ours. 

About a year ago, I was driving through hills lining the coast, winding down a mountain covered in verdant tea plantations with a magnificently broken heart. One of Sulk Station’s demos began playing on the stereo then, ‘Bindya’. I believe certain situations can bleed permanently into your perception of a song, and entire atmospheres can be encased in its memory. I’ve listened to The Prodigy while punching someone in the face and I’ve listened to Chopin at the foot of Chopin’s grave. The tea-tinged mountain air and the light from that evening remained trapped within that song, and it felt right. Coming from a city where the weather outside is always perfect, erring perpetually on the side of a slight chill, a city that falls asleep very early, this music is staying up late all alone amidst everything that’s quiet.

Buy here, now, do it.

Sulk Station’s CD launches in Bangalore on March 9th at B-Flat. Stay tuned for a special essential mix from the band.

#sulk station

[theknife-archive]

Of course everyone was at the Pentagram JD Rock Awards for the free alcohol. This edition was refreshingly semi-open air, and otherwise full of the bizarre assortment of kinda familiar B-list celebs we have come to love and adore. Not.

Conspicuously missing this year was Farex baby Aftab Shivdasani, who had lovingly presented the Best Band award to deserving nominees Scribe last year. We were, however, treated to a dashing Prateik Babbar wearing leather pants and an Ek pal ka jeena shirt. Which he probably presumed was rock-clothing. The staple annoyance, Luke Kenny, hosted this year’s event again- which brings us to wonder at his recurrent presence at all commercialized scene representations. Is it for his razor-sharp wit? (No) His fabulous dance moves? (No) His heart-wrenchingly beautiful songwriting and vocals? (No) But I digress.

After a certain point of inebriation, it gets entertaining though. In terms of sheer irrelevance, the JD Rock Awards have clearly positioned themselves as our local counterpart to the Grammies. Here are the awardees of the night, who were requested to run up on stage, cut the speeches, collect their awards and scoot. Since they were short on time.

Best Band: Pentagram Best Album: Pentagram - Bloodywood Best Song: Pentagram - ‘Tomorrow’s Decided’ Best Drummer: Vibhas Venkatram of Eccentric Pendulum Best Vocalist (Male): Vishal Dadlani of Pentagram Best Vocalist (Female): Subhadra Kamath of Fire Exit Best Keyboardist: Stephen Kaye of The Ska Vengers Best Bassist: Abhinav Chaudhary of The Circus Best Guitarist: Randolph Correia (Pentagram) Best Producer: Miti Adhikari for Menwhopause - Easy Best Venue: Blue Frog Album Art Of The Year: Hemant Kumar for Dischordian - The Feni Farm Riot Video Of The Year: Pentagram - ‘Lovedrug Climbdown’ Emerging Act Of The Year: Bombay Bassment Years Of Excellence: Lou Majaw

It was on this fateful night that I felt the beginnings of an epiphany coming on, this must’ve been how Neo when he found out about The Matrix. As words like “stellar” and “sharp songwriting” and “massive production” were ascribed to the horrific Bloodywood, as award after award was given out to electro-something band Pentagram, it dawned upon me. I zoomed out and began to view the crowd as in isolation, a brainwashed mass of bobbing heads in black dresses and scene-supporting shirts and jeans. Programmed, by some untouchable manipulative force, using methods perhaps not unlike those in the Josie and the Pussycats movie.

The nominations this year were a fair enough distribution, biggies like Indian Ocean thrown in with newbies like Peter Cat Recording Co. and Eccentric Pendulum. Everyone will always wonder what befell the jurors, and why Fire Exit would win Best Female Vocalist, but it happened and some things you just don’t question like in your eyes I see my future in an instant. Bombay Bassment’s great, but they definitely didn’t emerge in 2010. But in a world where Bon Iver is Best new artist in 2012, I suppose it makes sense. As the soulless Pentagram won the award for Best Male Vocalist, I snorted into my Coke. The jury had outdone themselves with this category, managing to handpick the most abysmal of all nominees. The winner himself, timidly accepted that this award most definitely did not belong to him, and Siddharth Basrur deserved it far more. I would’ve gone with Kishore Krishna, but then I remembered we were in the Matrix. I was looking for another video to demonstrate my point, but with this I kind of rest my case. 

The erudite cricket commentator Mandira Bedi made an appearance as a presenter, and the fabulous Stefan Kaye jubilantly obscured her from view for a photograph. The sound was beautiful, as it always is at Mehboob Studios, and Sky Rabbit were beautiful through their four-song set. Opening with ‘I become I’ and ending breathtakingly with ‘Maybe is Open Tonight’. Ankur Tewari played a short set, which was horrible, obviously. Indus Creed concluded the evening as pure noise, the audience members wrinkled their noses and trickled into the smoking area, and ran for their lives. 

[theknife-archive]

Driving back home from the Sky Rabbit launch, with the first play of that CD in a gorgeous sound system, sea breeze in my eyes I thought to myself, “What a bummer.” A perfectly unnecessary comedown from a wonderful gig, with this record they had clearly let their own music down. Only in contrast to the freshness of a few hours before. 

 We would then drive around all night, trying to get into this album as much as we longed to, being pulled over by cops every so often. For drinking illicit coffee, for driving girls around in our car, for curling up in backseats with strange music and mysterious intent. I’ve seen Sky Rabbit more times than any other band in the past year, I would go see them consecutive nights sometimes. Because they were just so easy to like, and because I loved some of those songs and didn’t have recordings of them outside of 2009 Soundpad singles. 

There is nothing audacious about this eponymous debut, nothing sinister or immersively desolate, Sky Rabbit are perfecting the art of unemotion. They’re just about making music for the sweetened club rats, as for the post-post-punker crowd and the softer Radiohead-heads. It’s frontman Raxit Tewari’s deadpan vocals that make this album, however much complaining has been focussed on its laziness and mumblecore qualities. Take one syllable, chop it into fine pieces and very elastically lengthen it into a half a chorus that stays stuck in your head. Recordings are growing tinnier, more metallic and soulless, as we move into the future. If only as a product of the loudness war. And that is all I have to hold against this album, but this does significantly rob it of value. A loud lack of rippling warmth. 

After that first listen that night, every other day for the next full month, this album found its way onto my playlists. If only a song or two, or repeat-spins fading into the background, soundtracking mornings to nights of time-lapse. The amount of turmoil you may be in, always affects the way you experience an album - mostly unfairly. Sky Rabbit stands the test of the emotional spectrum, and finds highlights in loopable tracks like ‘Oil’, ‘Sweet Smile Diving’, ‘Swimmer’, ‘Hilltop’, ‘I Become I’, and some.

There’s some preserved youth inherent in this album, bursting peculiarly forth from within layers and layers of unhurried simplistic samples. Decidedly pastel chords ring out long enough to let Tewari’s vocals fall backward onto them and disappear. They’ve introduced ‘Sweet Smile Diving’ at gigs as a song about a pair of lips, diving forward into water. I’m not sure they ever mentioned drowning, but that is what it is - a sunny drowning. Album centerpiece ‘Swimmer’ is their most meticulous set of layers, and where their intensity peaks. While all their lyrics are made up of half-conversational fragments and floating semi thoughts, here you find them talking about the strings holding your eyes open and the proximity of yesterday. And underneath it all, there are lush layered samples unfurling in sequence, and all beneath them attempting to spring outward. This is where they openly display they’ve learnt from years of listening to Radiohead, and well.

At their insistence, we come to associate their new identity Sky Rabbit, with “rabbits in the sky”, which eventually leads us to subliminally agree that this album is cloud-watching soundtrack. Personally though, I love this. Because I love records that take me back to high school corridors in an imaginary overdramatic world where you can turn your head and look at ex-lovers in slow motion.

Buy the album here.

#Sky Rabbit

[theknife-archive]

Wall of Want, released on the first day of 2012, could be compared to the effort of a petulant child defying his parents just to see how far he could possibly go, before they feel compelled to zap him to dust. Delhi cabaret band Peter Cat Recording Co. have released a pet rock, with hints of magic buried within. The fourteen track album could fool you into thinking the band has been dead for years, and we're hearing obscure unreleased demos, bootlegs and outtakes. But then again, that’s something few bands can truly produce. A legacy of sorts, albeit pre-humus. Our track-by-track review:

‘Krypton’: Like the beginning of some eerie prehistoric Bollywood soundtrack, that subsequently cheats you by containing very little actual meat. This ode to Superman’s home planet makes for a pretty, but mostly hollow start. 

‘Servants’ is lovely. Four loops of a gorgeous turn of musical phrase with an ascending vocal harmony in the distant background, but I hope they turn it into a fuller, more orchestrated song. The lyrics seem to be part of a lecture being given to someone.  

‘Sun 1987’ is the first major highlight of the album. It’s a merger of digital lo-fi + barbershop quartet style coated in cheese, a love song undeniably pretty which will undoubtedly leave many an untamed woman swooning.  

‘After Dinner’ is suddenly, shockingly noisy. Dragging guitar echoes gradually build up into a gutted groove, when suddenly a barely audible human voice comes cackling through the hung noise, thus coalescing into louder noise. Eventually speakers and patience break down. But to not turn it up is missing the point of the song. It can/will make you dance, even though you can't understand a single word. Hideous unless drugged though. 

‘A Glass or Two’ is also impressive. Combining two of the uglier voices in music - Dylan and Mangum, this song seemingly features a talented bridge troll as a guest vocalist. The lyrics are excellent though, and frontman Suryakant Sawhney shamelessly mines Dylan's vocal style cunningly. God bless him. 

This is followed by an apparently early version of Sinema's ‘Love Demons’ (which is such a crass song compared to their others). This version does improve on what we’ve heard on their debut though. With more Doors-like character, it sounds beautifully recorded even with the ‘Karma Police’ ripoff ending. 

The first of the entirely unlistenable songs arrives at us when ‘And a Now’ begins. Hopefully, the band won't ever throw anything like this at us again.  

‘Barbarossa’ continues the reign of the unlistenables. I wonder if they released this one only for the sake of giving it a cool description, but I see what they mean by old pirate film soundtrack. A few seconds in, the novelty wears off, leaving your ears bleeding crimson yet again. No thanks PCRC.  

‘Television Screens’ is a much-needed respite from madness. It could be a poem by an architect and its a pretty little burst of sound. There's a hint of scary insanity near the end, before we run into a pleasant wall of looping sound in ‘You are the Sea’. To imagine a Jeff Buckley trapped in purgatory, followed by him being released in a church, only to sing the next song ‘Burn you’. Wall of Want turns up an unlikely falsetto we never saw on 2011’s Sinema.

‘Waltz in C minor Op 001’ is groundbreaking, in that PCRC has successfully created an interestingly produced, autistic toy symphony. Listeners will find, in between moments of anticipating Beethoven, their own real memories attaching themselves to this song.

‘Kishore Kumaris’ has one of the most promising beginnings, only to yet again end in utter unlistenable glory. Sawhney captures an incredibly accurate rendition of imitation-Kishore Kumar's 'La's', then spins them into an harmony of echoes, when another repulsive voice interrupts. Another waste. 

‘Sweetest Poison’ is more dirt, an early Joy Division-esque piece, unflatteringly sung but successful at reproducing immense quantities of more tape filled lo-fi punk. Repeated listens make you dislike the song more, but it’s fun at first. 

Sawhney is obviously mixing and matching singers that influence him with ease, and this album is an exceptional attempt at making what PCRC refers to as "past music". Replete with analog white noises and dirty tape echoes, it does introduce a novel new sonic angle to their sound. 

What we can hardly ignore though, is the sheer lack of effort on these songs, whether it be on the songwriting or production. It’s a little insulting to audiences even, that the band doesn't so much as feel the need to screen what they release into the public. PCRC is still a spectacular band in our midst, and as they seem to be engineering themselves further and further back in time, one can only hope that by the moment their second album drops, they haven't disappeared altogether.  -Contributors.

Download the album here.