Digging for Meaning

a bird, a weightless soul pouring out its music into nothingness...

was listening to Rob Dougan 's ' One and the same '. Its such a beautiful song. If you close your eyes while listening to it, it gives you a feeling of continuous upward motion. Not flying, but floating upwards. Like having achieved all that your life was meant for. A content smile playing on one's face powering the upward descent. (Hmm.. christian influence on me?) And then I saw a mosquito.. doing just about that. flying steadily upwards. I was jealous for a second there.

earlier i would never listen to songs on loop. i constantly needed to listen newer and newer stuff. sara tavarez, illapu, Bonobo... give me more, give me more! the thirst for excellence once discovered, is inextinguishable. the genius i was hearing to was evidence of other geniuses out there. its a never ending quest for sublime. the beauty is indefinite and never ending in many shapes and sounds. but then grace sets in with some songs. songs that mean something to you. Songs anchor our lives to certain moments in our lives. within the first note of that song it yanks us through our throats to that time. there's no point in fighting it, its part of you now. instead, swim in it, until it lasts. whatever the memory be, its always delicious. its ok to be a bit masochistic, go ahead suck on that pain. if it weren't delicious, you wouldn't have been remembering it. long live continuous loops.

arziyan saari mein, chehre pe likh le laaya hun... (delhi 6 soundtrack) a lump forms in my throat after the first verse. and all i am left with is a sense of serene submission; of lightness; of happiness though not content. i close my eyes, and sway with it, and sing perhaps a few lines along. its not a song in grace, its in yearning. its in a world where the notion of defeat and winning is defeated itself. its a still fluid world. the song is the water with which we wash our hands, feet and face before stepping into a mandir,masjid or dargha. listening to it turns this room into a joyous open space, light playing hide and seek with the walls, waves crashing onto it. its perhaps amongst the very few tracks which leave me incapacitated to do or think of anything else while listening to it. all i wish to do is submit to it.

just heard samuel barber's 'adagio for strings '. and put it on loop. i had heard it earlier, maybe as OST of some movie or generally in my playlist at shuffle. but today it made me pause and listen to it alone. its so bloody beautiful! it flies. leave me alone.. let me dissolve in these sounds.. as it flies over cities, times, people; let me too experience the colors of the world mixing in a rain. the true fresh colors left after the rain cleared the greys and false shiny ones. The adagio is like the first rays of the sun... going around the world... liberating it from darkness. 'adagio for strings' is the smell of wet soil. it is open spaces. it is so universal. it has that sublime quality of beethoven's 'moonlight adagio'. funny, because barber was more a brahms and bach guy. its one of those pieces with strenght in them.. strength to lift a soul up by the sheer beauty of music. you want to submit to it at times of hardship knowing that it resurrect ...

Perhaps, the single most important force that shaped my life is my impatience and greed for newness. i loved playing synthesizer. i joined classes to learn it when i was in 5th standard. the day I learnt 'papa kehte hai' i was riding my bicycle wildly with joy and hands in the air. no handlebars. triumph. I saw triumph in the fact that quickly i was able to find melodies of any song on keyboards within minutes. then the quest became to play faster songs. then it went to learn classical notations and ragas. (i never paused then to master my fingers, to control, to hold, to pause, to get that exact timing. i was much too impatient.) and that was my undoing. I saw this vast reserve of yet unknown music. the book of notations that my teacher had, was quite expensive. and i wanted all of the notation sheets in it. so i set about writing those notations in my notebook. that took away a month or so. and then my teacher didnt have to teach me, so she kept on supplying me with notation...

music's ability to displace time and our proactive attempts at shape shifting the day. was listening to habib koite. some of his songs just make you feel the dusty warm afternoons. the golden sun - the sweat charmer. the dusty roads and relaxed market place after the morning's hustle bustle. sitting on a chair under shade. but would i ever listen to Habib Koite or ali farka toure in the afternoons in the office? hell no. at that time i absolutely need some morning songs. stomach heavy with lunch, is forcing eyelids to shut. you need some very upbeat happy songs. its as if we are trying to expand mornings until evenings. and then sudden nights where one either parties hard or crashes to bed. crashes.. no afternoons but those of sunday's. but even then all life of the week is supposed to spring out in celebration of that sparse freedom of time. so how can you let go afternoons to 'waste'? it makes one feel guilty. evenings and mornings. thats all we know now.

listen to this track.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tpE33fNMaw&feature=related turn down lights. switch off everything around you. sit in a corner. preferably with friends at the tail end of a party. drinks would be good, but are wholly unnecessary. close your eyes. and just listen. muse has this enigmatic energy about every single track of theirs. but blackout stands out for its ethereal calmness that masks the contained energy within. the lingering vocals hold you and take you with it to a world different from here and now.I love muse's music. it in a way questions and then celebrates our existence. the music has fatality to it. the music struggles and fights the inner commotions and eventually rises supreme over every other thought. Another musician whose music is shaped with forces of fatality and virility in celebration of our existence is Rob Dougan. listen to his ' one and the same ' track from album 'furious angels'. or the more famous and one of the ...

whats about them old hindi songs!? they are magical. its only old hindi songs that spring into the media player of my head for any slight emotional gear shift. some of these songs i have never heard in original. its as if the collective memory of the world around me seeded that song in me. a big pool from which this memory draws these songs is antakshari. through numerous games of antakshari, i know so many old songs that i have never heard in original. some others i had heard as background score in movies. mostly its people around me humming those songs. my dad's singing is another source of this memory.. though he is just as bad with remembering lyrics as me, so its the tune mostly that sticks. Speak about viral! these are bloody the best virals ever. which viral ever lasted for decades? yesterday i was humming geeta bali's 'taqdir se bighdi hui ...' what a wonderful song. and i had never heard it myself! i googled straight away and found it on a obscure website.

there's this french song in 'moulin rouge' called ' La Complainte de la Butte '. i don't even fucking understand the language.. but the song's been going on in my head since a while now. its beautiful. well, the amazing vocals of rufus wainwright did help ofcourse. but the beauty of it, i believe, lies in the simplicity of it all. the simple melody wafts about and coils around your head, feeding in ears the delight of the luxuriantly sweet notes every now and then. a while back i got introduced to edith piaf. her 'Non, je ne regrette rien' us absolutely fabulous. i mean, firstly hearing that almost guttural and lively voice is surprising & a pleasure in itself, but the melody.. its one of those compositions which take you, lift you and and then never leaves you through the life. it alights on your soul on a certain occassion and lifts you up everytime u feel low. other such compositions are ennio morricone's music for cinema paradiso.. god...

sheer awesomeness that is youtube.. a while back i was searching for bryan adam's song ' here i am' on youtube. the video is that of the song alright, but the music that gets played is something else altogether. this is something that is happening regularly, with big music labels stripping their audio content from youtube. * well the awesomeness is in what youtube has done in this situation. the audio that gets played instead is of, presumably, other artists who want to market their music but don't have big labels to back them. youtube puts a label which indicates where the content is sourced from. the link takes to the artist's youtube page. well, in this case the track is pritty shitty. but i see a brilliant opportunity here for youtube to make money on something that was a cause of headache to them earlier.. wonderful strategy by them. smart buggers.. and it helps the small guys as well, the small guy gets to ride on some established reputation and gets sampled. ...

its amazing the way the forests absorb sounds and voices and turn it into a part of itself. so a shout, a shriek, a murmur doesnt remain a shout, a shriek, a murmur but is transformed into a caress, a shiver, a touch of the winds off the palm of the leaves. (hm.. too many ofs.. cant help it.) Once inside a forest, it takes in everything and sets the rules. what it takes in has its edges chopped off, and turned into something fluid and movable. directions become suspect. light breaks and falls in diffused surrender. sounds coalesce and loose their rasp and bounce and slip deeper within our heads. they don't just bounce off your ears, but they travel within and linger and become a part of a symphony which the woods is playing. oh the sweet symphony. what would i give to be able to listen to it whenever i want! The prelude is usually a chirpy welcome song which subsequently gives way to a lingering adagio. The longer you stay, the more moods of forests are revealed to you. i have expe...

Arrgghh.. the ethical questions hound us? or do they? digital natives are devided over the ethical question regarding free downloads, piracy etc. and its reflected in popular media thus ... Wierd Al Yankovic's 2006 song 'don't download this song' was one of his first outright political songs. See the kickass video of the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz-grdpKVqg . The song was released exclusively on August 21, 2006 as a digital download . It is a style parody of "We Are the World" and other similar charity songs. The song "describes the perils of online music file-sharing" in a tongue-in-cheek manner." - wikipedia Here we see Wierd Al's strong criticism of file sharing of paid content. However at the same time we have MC Lars's response with his song 'download this song' where he says - Hey Mr. Record Man The joke’s on you Running your label Like it was 1992 Hey Mr. Record Man, Your system can’t compete It’s the ...