Okay so I should start this by saying that I’m really just this odd sort of man, at least within the context of the sum total of commonly perceived human presumptions regarding what it means to have opposable thumbs and to stand upright and only have hair in certain designated areas of the body and stuff. If considering such things as normalcy and all things of that sordid sort. But on some level I’m actually made to feel more human than people who are just one of the crowd, numbed by mass media and other emanations of that anti-aesthetic variety of aesthetic sensibilities. My own individuality defines my humanity and when that factor of a being is undernourished, the element that defines the being as an entity within a larger sphere of existence in the first place then our respective compact and individual beings will of their own accord, through their own natural predisposition to do so extend themselves to a collective being which at the moment is a severely undernourished individual, the parameters of that state of being as defined by our common understanding of what being human means and the implications of the same on larger scale. That projection suffers since one is always one’s first point of reference, the understanding of the self is the mode through which we reach a collective state being and cognition as homo-sapians, but it can only be reached through a very intimate and personal relationship with what it means to You to be human. No one should be fearful of that space because without it we couldn’t reach a collective understanding of what being human means in any real terms. As humans when we are as we are ourselves, which on the other pole of the personal self through which it is realised makes sense of ‘you’ the other, then only the one may make sense of the many that it is a part of and exists in tandem with collectively because before knowing where you are there is no way for you to know where the rest of the people around you are or where they’re going and this is what my work is really about, blindly following the first person in front of me doesn’t do anything for me. For me it’s all about exploring the notion that you can do something so seemingly inhuman while reaching a core that is more human than most of us even try to remember. I try and deconstruct this average mean of human expectations, designations and determinations to arrive at a destination I can never really speak of. I try and just be as a person and any way that I may have been taught to fashion my own personality is eventually put through a process of deconstruction and subversion through my work, the goal of which is quite simply to become a human who’s just being.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a pop star, with a stadium packed with hundreds of people cheering for me to sing my heart out and all that. The whole phenomena of fame really fascinated and I might even say while trying not to up-chuck, inspired me then. The way one person could be known by everyone, or at least to everyone. How the individual is transformed in to this seemingly all-pervasive persona; the whole process fascinated me and I wanted to be a part of it. Then during my late childhood I started to find myself slightly disillusioned by the world of pop music for obvious reasons, lack of originality and soul, manufactured monotony and mediocrity and the rest of it. So I opted for the more raw and unadulterated sounds of Bjork around the ‘Post’ album sort of time and Tricky who at around the same time released the ‘Maxinquaye’ album, who later became far too self indulgent for me to entertain, Massive Attack with their ‘Protection’ album and Towa Tei with ‘Future Listening’. What I found was that many of these artists didn’t lay claim to the kind of reach and record sales that their contemporaries in more mainstream pop music may have enjoyed but they still had a part in that world of being a person who is not branded by the world but is instead a brand in and of themselves. Taking that inadequacy most people feel because they imagine they aren’t artists and bringing it on themselves and dealing with it actively in their art without ever truly accepting it. Most importantly I found that artists like this were given the freedom to set their own parameters and to develop their own aesthetic and that those who were the recognized ‘stars’ were actually just as branded as their listeners, their only responsibility was to provide the merchandise that their record companies required of them. Their vision didn’t constitute their own brand identity, so to speak. Then I subsequently got more deeply in to underground dance music, so called ‘idm’ and ambient music and am still deeply influenced by all of the aforementioned stuff. I also found that many independent labels functioned in such a way that they were the anti-thesis of the corporate label that I began to despise.
I discovered that there were a number of artists who would either produce and write their own music without a vocal component or they would hire various vocalists to work on different tracks, which would be a part of the same album that would be theirs by right of production and co-writing. There was also a number of vocalists who would hire many different producers to work on different tracks the way most other pop singers would operate but I also observed a higher level of cohesion in their albums and their involvement would always be felt even if the production was left to someone else as far as the album notes were concerned. In other words I found out that there were many other permutations of that formula available to someone with similar aspirations as I than many of us are lead to believe. I sang other people’s songs reasonably well until I was about fourteen. I mean, parallel to all of this exploration I was dealing with quite a few situations that most people my age wouldn’t have had to have dealt with. But the culmination of that particular exploratory phase ended with a traumatic experience around that time, being repeatedly gay bashed for not being gay, or not straight, or whatever, queer bashed I guess you could call it. After which I no longer felt inspired to sing. Then about four or five years later I started to study Carnatic percussion which I still practice but am not actively studying for the moment, since I think it’s important that I focus on my voice for a time before I go back to that. My work is also quite a re-action to the time that I spent trying to master the mridangam and my time trying to be a singer/song writer. My work is actually about exploring the opposite end of the spectrum when considering the traditional conception of repertoire, rhythm, melody and song etc. It’s a subversion of these concepts and an effort to break the boxes that separate each component from one another. Which on some level makes it a lot more volatile and unpredictable, which I try not to be scared of but my initial fear or at least trepidation in regard to what I discover through my work is as important as what’s being discovered at the end of it as far as I’m concerned. My work is also about exploring the opposite end of the spectrum in regard of the sort of emotions that are traditionally associated with song and music, in that when you sing a sad song you’re expected to sing it with a specific sort of melancholy and possibly anger or whatever other feeling maybe associated with the lyrics of the song but when you are simply vocalizing I find that it is more of an abstraction of emotion as we most commonly recognize it and I often can’t identify which particular emotion is flowing through me at any given time. In fact I find my voice becomes a conflux of sorts in that respect. Listening was my retreat from the world, be it Carnatic music or mid 90’s Drum and Bass and it equipped me to deal with the world too but subsequently I actually craved a space that would subvert the values imbued in me through the understanding I had of music as a listener and from a more broad perspective, sonic art so that I may make my art mine, to free it from it’s contextual limitations and open it to a space of free cognition. It was therapy and it was also about a certain element of catharsis that is still a very central aspect of my work.
This phase started as a young adult, when I felt ready to start singing again and found that when I tried to use my voice again I would instinctually reach for registers that weren’t as readily accessible to me with my new voice as they were at one point in my youth. It had already broken when I stopped singing but naturally it wasn’t anywhere near as deep as it is now. I then went through another exploratory phase that would eventually result in the first stones being paved on the path that I find myself walking now. It was basically something I underwent so that I could find out how my new voice worked so that I may sing songs again but something completely different emerged in the process. In trying to find out how to resonate using my adult body I inadvertently started to teach myself how to resonate in ways that were uniquely my own. I also considered the process as possessing a very strong sensual character to it since I was effectively exploring my body from the inside by sending my voice out in to whichever pit I could and feeling out each crevice internally. Many seemingly disparate influences were also excavated and actualized through my effort to wake my singing voice up again. One being Tuvan throat singing where the singer resonates two lines at the same time by singing in your normal voice in such a way that it echoes through the hollow spaces in your skull, by that I mean your nasal cavity and the space just behind it. At the risk of sounding trite and tokenistically Indian, my own recitation of mostly Shakta Tantrika, a few Shaiv Tantrika and Vajrayana mantras also deeply influences my work.
Urban India also really inspires me because I find that the sonic environment here, as far as technology is concerned is a lot richer than that of the ‘developed world’. They tend to build machines to be as efficient and silent as possible and that really annoys the hell out of me. When you’re in an auto-rickshaw you would know where you were immediately even if your hearing was the only sense you could rely on. Over there you would too, but definitely not as quickly. I’m not saying their machines don’t make noises; they just do so apologetically while ours don’t really give a fuck. I also find that we make instruments so that they may mimic the human voice in some way. I try to mimic instruments with my voice because I wanted to take things full circle, so to speak. I also think that this notion that machines are un-human is utter bollocks. We’ve evolved in such a way that we’ve stopped growing fur, even the human races that live in cold climates don’t grow fur. It’s because we’ve been making ourselves clothes for such a long time that it registered in the intelligence behind our collective evolutionary momentum that we didn’t need to grow that stuff any more. Even other primate species build tools to get ants out of their hills. We as a species are defined by what we build and again I wanted to bring chrome and metal and plastic back to the visceral reality of the flesh, bone, humours and cartilage. Bringing things full circle is important to me and my work is really about that since balance is the only true inevitability but it’s also about drawing new lines, being the impetus and the catalyst at the same time is important to me. Living many different processes simultaneously is also very important. Being a medium really, for latent forces that are waiting to find a space through which they may manifest and to let myself become the conduit within that process of reification. I also choose to record in analogue studios because you hear the technology more that way and what you compromise in clarity you gain in richness and warmth of sound. My work isn’t about being clear on any level any way.
History doesn’t inspire me the way that pre-history does. There’s a theory that the singing voice is much older than the speaking voice. It resonates further and in a world where we were an active part of a larger eco-system within which we would be one in many other species who have as much right to the land and resources as we did our singing voice would serve our collective purpose to communicate as a species in ways that our speaking voice couldn’t. The problem came when we found out that we decided the most important things when we were speaking since we could communicate many different ideas in a shorter amount of time but with only one layer of emotion and meaning per expression, which later became words. Then we separated ourselves from an active involvement with the eco-system and became the dominant agrarian, slaughterhouse and tannery owning species. I mean I have no problems with us being the dominant species, in fact if any of the people that were running our shit understood that being the dominant species didn’t necessarily entail the subjugation and in many cases utter obliteration of practically every other life form on the planet then I think that it would be a good thing that we were in charge. But any way, I attribute the shift from our singing voice to the speaking voice as our primary mode of communication as one of the fundamental downfalls of the human who is just being, meaning our ability to be as humans. All of the evils that come with it such as patriarchy and the nation as we know it, the centralized government are all related to this shift from my perspective. Even today our speaking voice grows closer to our singing voice when we’re speaking about something that moves us, whether it’s the hushed, meandering resonances of our communications with the beloved or if we start to talk about something that makes us want to scream, it’s something closer to the more primal and something more basic to our existence that only the singing voice can communicate. Babies don’t speak at first but almost immediately they communicate with their singing voice. A lot of my work isn’t really about singing in the traditional sense as much as it is about communicating with my singing voice. The fact that you can hold a note for much longer means you can do a lot more with it and the emotive layers that can unfold through that resonant field and the ascents, descents and oscillations within it are manifold where as a word is a word. The Intonations etc. make a difference but the word is an irrefutable entity and its identity remains sacrosanct. The sound is what it is and that’s all it is and that makes it so much more liberating to work with sound more than I do with words. Though I do work with words at this point in my career I primarily work with sound in its more primal state.
My work is also about embracing the so-called ‘imperfections’ in my voice and incorporating them in to my modus operandi, which is constantly undergoing a state of transmogrification and evolution because I don’t need to be perfect, nor do I need stability at any juncture of this mission. Nature isn’t perfect, things that could be construed as mistakes happen in nature but as far as I’m concerned that doesn’t compromise the beauty of it, it’s actually one aspect of the very same. From my perspective the only way that I may seek a certain level of expansion as an artist is to take the imperfections as one aspect of the over all soundscape that would actually not be as beautiful if it weren’t for those bits that would traditionally be ironed out. What I’m trying to say is that if I were to seek perfection then I would create a repertoire since those who belong to a repertoire do what they know and are trained to do. I do what I don’t consciously know how to do and if I were to focus on one thing that I knew how to do properly then I would be forsaking my need to express what I don’t know how to and sometimes, what I don’t even know that I want to express. This is another central aspect of my work as an experimental vocalist.
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