Track 6.
my people are alone, fighting

For the entire album on Bandcamp, follow this link.

Here’s a long description of my work on this album.

I’ve been working on releasing new music for the last two years. You'll find hundreds of unreleased tracks on my laptop that serve as a map of my struggle to find a coherent sound and theme. I found both towards the end of 2019. Three things happened that changed me, that rejigged my worldview. One, India experienced an accelerated worsening of communal strife. I witnessed this from outside the country for the first time in my life, and therefore saw it through a different lens: with distance and a sense of discomfort in voicing my views on something happening in a place I call home, but one that I had nonetheless left. Two, I was with someone from a different race, and therefore experiencing a heightened sense of anxiety about the goings-on at home. And three, in part due to these circumstances, my sense of anxiety was getting worse. These circumstances resulted in my experiencing a constant sense of suffocation, of being unable to express my innermost feelings.

At the same time, I had also started getting increasingly influenced by Indian art and music, especially Hindustani classical music. Multiple visits to India at the start of 2020 only served to cement this influence on my life and my musical palette. When I returned from India on the last of these trips, I emerged into a world about to be locked down. Borders were being shut, and people were looking at each other with fear; my anxiety about my future suddenly became a global anxiety about the future, we all started staying indoors and avoiding the big bad wolves outside on the streets.

As a result, I no longer saw anxiety as just the little devil on my shoulder. While my own work started to get unbearable, and while I found myself plunged into a total isolation that continues to this day, India entered one of the world's strictest lockdowns, and the most vulnerable suffered the most for it. The themes that had started to play on my mind towards the end of 2019 blew up: the personal and the societal, and where the two intersect, anxiety, both clinical and situational, and the meaning of home and identity.

In a contracting world, the repetitive, post-punk influenced, instrumental electronic music I had been creating for the two years prior just did not work: it did not, as I think good art should, even attempt to comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable. But another musical voice started to take shape, and with it, the musical choices I would make on this album. First, the already mentioned influence of Indian music. And second, the use of the human voice as an instrument, as opposed to a vehicle for words; I saw the use of the human voice to convey emotions, but say little by way of words as an artistic choice to emote freely rather than to be restricted to saying something banal.

In this album, I’ve taken all my anxieties and fears, and hip-hops and classicals, and happies and sads, and made a little less than forty minutes worth of music that feels like home, while also realising that home is a place in time that can no longer be. In many ways, I think I never really said goodbye to the city I love. And even when I return to Mumbai, be it for a while, or for good, I won't return to the Mumbai I left. Like the old question about the ship of Theseus, how many friends have to leave for home to change irrevocably? How much do your people need to transmogrify for home to no longer be recognisably the same?