So I am a Bach person, and not so much a Beethoven (or Brahms even) person. Much like my public self, I like talkative music. Like the Double Violin Concerto. It makes my morning energies pumped up just a bit. Then sometimes I morning-walk to the rhythms of the Cello Suites. And then there is Air in G for the evenings, like a tragic birdsong.
I walk quite a lot, and compulsively, it’s been a practice of over a decade. Walking music, if not Bach, is usually on the Indian side. T M Krishna’s album Nottusvara Sahityas with its chorus of children’s voices singing alongside TMK, is a current walking favourite. Walking is an exercise in rhythmanalysis (to remember Henri Lefebvre’s third book on space) - to which the heaving/dancing body folds into slices of time. I often don’t pay attention to lyrics of songs - but the sonic excitement of MS Subbulaxmi chanting in Sanskrit in the middle of this Bengali song, does something to my spine (listen at 2.13 minutes). In some phases, I listen to Tagore’s baishnab podaboli songs on endless cycles of repeat (listen to the first 40 seconds or so, especially for the deep play of the pekhawaj). Repetition seems the only way to love something ardently. The endless repeat of tropes and rhythms, my personal way.
I was introduced to Ali Farka Toure by a friend who I have now lost touch with. A whole decade went by in knowing a bit of African soundscape. Nigeria, Congo, Uganda. Alien places, but intimate sounds. Don’t get me wrong - I did listen to a bit of popular youthful (at least, popular among bratty city kids) music, this education came to me mostly from lawschool friends. I remember an NLS senior singing White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane in the quad at CulComm events. Her haunting voice was the only one I knew the song in, for years, before I heard the original on the internet. I pretended to care for David Bowie and Phish to people in warm Dilli dinner parties, in 2006 or 2007. The first songs of Ali Sethi had just released as I moved to the US. But we had already accessed the Pakistan soundscape in burnt CDs on rainy nights of Nagarbhavi - Fuzon being my favourite of these. Regina Spektor had broken into the scene in the early 2010s and my heartbreaks were attended to by her voice.
My sonic tastes haven’t changed much. It must be talkative and lively, and yet, it must have interiority. I love the brooding Gurudutt but I don’t like Gurudutt songs that much. I realize now that these two decades have aged me, and in some ways, I still remain the twenty-year-old looking for Rabbi Shergill’s number in internet chatrooms.