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~ of many movements and thresholds ~

Sonic Diary

What are the ways in which a city shapes one’s own practices, perceptions, and preoccupations? The author reflects on this question through his composition that opens up portals into the many memories of his time spent in Delhi, India, through a mix of field recordings, conversations, voices, and sounds from his journal. The piece, for him, becomes a sonic trace of the city that stays on with him as he continues his movement across other locations and experiences.

In this sonic diary, inspired by «Doors of Perception» by Hildegard Westerkamp, I offer portals into the thresholds of my memory from the time I lived in Delhi from 2016 to 2021. During those six years, Delhi in many ways opened «doors of perception» for me, through the many experiences, mentors, and friends who helped me develop an interest and practice with sound and listening. Through this piece, I also want to pay homage to two of my special teachers and friends, Michael Northam and Damon Yaghoobi.

This piece is a record, an audio document of many movements, moving through the city with my field recorder, sometimes restless, sometimes performative, sometimes political, sometimes sublime, sometimes restful, sometimes playful, sometimes with company, sometimes without, but always listening.

continue and slowly lower the volume and pan to a side
while one door opens and the next voice appears

It’s next to impossible to nail down what the essence of a city such as Delhi is, but what is possible is to listen. As I shift continents to study sound professionally for the first time, this piece is a way for me to tie little Delhi knots onto a memory line, to listen to 20 years from now.

These are names that I have given to the audio files from my Delhi field recordings archive. I am sharing them here in the order that they have been used in the piece:

Park-next-to-home-in-vasant-kunj.wav
paper-collector-calls-vasant-kunj.wav
Aryya-hindustani-prodigy.wav
Aditya-nithin-improv at vasant kunj.wav
slicing_vegetables_mom_youtubecookingchannel.wav
improvisation _with_a_dry_branch@professor-aseem’s house.wav
Defence_Colony_Azan.wav
Michael_Northam_Ashoka_On_Sound_Art.wav
Janata_curfew-noise concert.wav
nizamuddin_curious_kids_playing_cricket.wav
Damoon Yaghoobi_playing_the_violin in Gurgaon.wav
thomas:does_it_feel_lonely?.wav

This sonic diary is part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Delhi», curated and edited by Suvani Suri.

Project Assistance: Geetanjali Kalta
Graphics/Visual Design: Upendra Vaddadi, Neelansh Mittra
Audio Production: Abhishek Mathur
Video Production: Ammar

Biography

nithin shamsplays with sound. They are based in Berlin and are re-learning everything they thought they knew about sound, sometimes embarrassingly. They have been nurtured and have nurtured homes in Sharjah, Cochin, Chennai, Sonipat, New Delhi, Bastora, Attapadi and now Neukölln. Their main areas of interest are community building, arts education, residency design, walking, thinking and sharing their love for sounds.Their ears are open and welcome to anyone who wants to say hello. . Follow him on Instagram, Facebook, X, or SoundCloud.

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Delhi Sensate

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This is a collection of songs bringing together myriad voices from the city of Delhi, where multiple realities collide and co-exist.

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Published on September 29, 2023

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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The City at Dawn

Sound Piece

by Pale Blue Dotter,

beatnyk

As a part of a longitudinal inquiry into soundscape ecologies, Pale Blue Dotter (Surbhi) and beatnyk (Padmanabhan) set out to record dawn choruses in different parts of Delhi, weaving the soundscapes into a composition that reveals a city of contradictions just as it wakes up.

Delhi is a city of contrasts – on the one hand, the city is getting denser with highrises that touch the sky, and on the other people are being evicted from their homes in a major demolition drive in preparation for the G20 summit. The river flows through the city, cutting it into two halves; however, water still remains a scarce commodity in many of the residential parts. In some neighborhoods, overhead tanks are overflowing with water, whereas in others, the residents are compelled to trek for kilometers to fetch water for basic needs.

Gradual urbanization of Delhi’s landscape over the last 30 years, giving us a glimpse of the sounds that remain and those that are lost (credits: beatnyk, Google Earth).

Fascinated by the ever-increasing anthropocentric demands and contradictory narratives that exist in the city, we (Pale Blue Dotter and beatnyk) wanted to embark on a journey to shed light on these contrasts with our trusty field recorders. Even in the face of the noise pollution that has been taking over the city, the birds have found a way to continue singing, thus showcasing one of the most stark contrasts of the city – the coexistence of anthropogenic and biophonic sounds.

The dawn chorus is the outbreak of birdsong at the start of a new day. We began our exploration by listening to the dawn and this coexistence that comes to life every day. Through visiting a range of sites that included areas under urban development, as well as the few remaining natural landscapes within the city, various perspectives began to appear around the way the city sounds at dawn at each location. After several listening sessions, we set out to record dawn choruses at every location and identify patterns that materialized as the soundscape that was eventually stitched together.

«City at Dawn» soundscape mapped and timestamped over the landscape of New Delhi (credits: beatnyk, Google Earth).

During the course of listening to and creating the soundscape, we noticed the myriad ways of coexistence that inform the daily lives of human and more-than-human species. From the birds that score the dawn, to the river that keeps time and the technology that defies it, all forms of existence begin the cycle together and sustain peacefully. There seems to be magic in the symphony of life that awakens the city every day and the dawn chorus zeroes in on this sphere of existence that accounts for all living forms, not just humans.

Voice-Over Credits

01:04. The Indian Express: «Delhi MCD Elections: Taps Of Posh Vasant Kunj Area Run Dry» (YouTube)

07:32. Phone recording of excerpts from «All India Radio Morning News, June 10, 2023» (YouTube)

13:58. Al Jazeera English: «Devotion suffocates India’s sacred Yamuna river» (YouTube)

18:40. Nirantar Trust X The Third Eye: «Paani Ki Katar» (YouTube)

This sound piece is part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Delhi», curated and edited by Suvani Suri.

Project Assistance: Geetanjali Kalta
Graphics/Visual Design: Upendra Vaddadi, Neelansh Mittra
Audio Production: Abhishek Mathur
Video Production: Ammar

Biography

Pale Blue Dotter thrives at the intersection of music and art. Interweaving melody, spoken word, and field recordings with movement-based listening, she interprets philosophical concepts as sound pieces, live performances, and installations. Follow her on Instagram, Spotify, SoundCloud, or on her Website.

Biography

beatnyk is an inert engineer, sporadic musician, and electronic sound artist residing in Delhi, whose work and interest lie in exploring the natural interplay of non-human sound and human noise in a landscape through generative patches and coded algorithms. Follow him on Instagram, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or Linktree.

Published on September 29, 2023

Last updated on February 21, 2024

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When the Sound Listens Back

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Night and Silence

Sound Piece

by Ruhail Qaisar

A sonic transmission by Ruhail Qaisar, an artist and producer who dabbles in field recordings, electronics, drones, noise music, and other experiments with sound. In this experimental composition and accompanying note, Ruhail (de)constructs a soundscape of sonic emissions from New Delhi, India, evoking the all-too-familiar feeling of being entrenched in a simulatory chaos of coalescing and collapsing.

Cities at times seem to be the least conducive spaces for ideas and inspiration. The only advantage that presides over the alternatives present to me is primarily either logistical or access-based. Yet, so far in my practice, I have always had the region of Ladakh1 to go back to, and its bare hinterlands have kept me drawn and fulfilled with vernacular conjunctions that I can always expand upon.

At a time when the neoliberalization of the whole country was already in full motion, I was growing up in the border state of Ladakh and imagining New Delhi as a child. There was evidently an inferiority that most people from lower middle-class families lived with. While the television mediascape and its desire machine were churning out new products every day, due to being in a remote corner of Jammu and Kashmir, these products would usually take either a year or longer to appear in the local markets, whether it be candies, toys, music, or cinema. Even in the unconscious mind, as children, we felt that our land was inferior. Only in a city like New Delhi would one have access to a McDonald’s Happy Meal, an actual pizza from Pizza Hut, non-bootleg Funskool action figures, Mattel Barbies, G.I.Joes, the works.

Fast forward to my teenage years, when Ladakh had its socio-economic lag reduced to two or at the most three months in terms of access to new products. As cable TV and dial-up internet had already made their way there post-2000s, my tryst with punk and metal music began slowly through neighbors who were studying in the mainland. Now, with a new desire machine in place again, I found no traces of that in Ladakh. While I got three-month-old issues of RSJ (Rock Street Journal) magazines from a local stationery shop, I slowly became aware that there was a growing scene in the mainland and that I needed to make my way there. Since I didn’t have any financial means to do that, the only guise or subterfuge that would work was education, as Ladakh until then still didn’t have enough schools that went beyond the 10th grade.

By the time I arrived in Delhi, which was in 2012, heavy guitar music was not en-vogue anymore – all the clubs were either playing indie bands or dance-based electronic acts. I saw that all the local bands had the privilege of access to studio time as well as expensive equipment, with an emphasis on expensive. I had recently discovered that these imports are levied with heavy custom taxes, and hence their prices become two-fold steeper.

Regardless of these obstacles, I formed numerous bands and performed with them around the city, never compromising on the performance and the delivery no matter how janky our equipment or how miserable the artist fee was. Eventually, market logistics again trumped passion as promoters and venues started diminishing and dance music took over. Nobody wanted to hire a band and pay fees to five people when one person with a USB stick could sell out a bar. After this, I lost the will to see any potential in forming a band in Delhi or even imagining a strong community or a scene here. I lowered my expectations and started working by myself.

So my relationship with Delhi has many bitter seams to be traced. What I still find appalling in my ten years of being here is the extent of the chaos and the impinging sense of being overstimulated as soon as you exit your house – the marriages, the demolitions and constructions, the traffic jams that never cease but rather accelerate, the only breather sadly being the pandemic.

It certainly seems at times that one cannot ever escape a new construction project in the neighborhood. Irrespective of where anyone moves, abrasive swirls of drilling, the thump of hammering, loud exchanges of instructions, blaring automobile horns, late-night pick-up trucks dumping pebbles and cement—all of it finds a way to seep into a dwelling with no regard to time.

The principles at play in the experimental composition «Night and Silence» almost draw a parallel to David Dunn’s track «Chaos & the Emergent Mind of the Pond», where simultaneous cycles work out of phase. Like observing the global behavior of hyperchaotic analog circuits, whether from a small perspective of its myriad micro-localities or as an entire city, the sonic circuitry rather spreads open in chaotic magnitude. This is what listening to the city often feels like – a perturbation to daily existence in the form of overstimulating spectacles, dust, smog, river foam, cockroaches, Teflon, asbestos, traffic, waterlogging, and dengue singing in hyperchaotic unison.

1. Ladakh is a high-altitude plateau region extending from the Himalayan to the Kunlun mountain ranges. In 1947, with the end of British rule and the Partition of India, Ladakh came under Indian administrative control as a region in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. In 2019, after the central government abrogated Article 370 of the Indian constitution that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh was separated from the state of Jammu and Kashmir and turned into a federally governed territory.

This composition is part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Delhi», curated and edited by Suvani Suri.

Project Assistance: Geetanjali Kalta
Graphics/Visual Design: Upendra Vaddadi, Neelansh Mittra
Audio Production: Abhishek Mathur
Video Production: Ammar

Biography

Ruhail Qaisar is a self-taught artist from the Himalayan region of Ladakh. As a musician, he explores the confines of memory, the dry rot of intergenerational trauma, and the eerie swarms of the human unconscious, incorporating vernacular concepts, poetic gestures, and improvisational chaos. His practice serves to transmit sub-zero sound-collage excavations based on real-life events and local mythos, as developed through his recollections of growing up in the frontier villages of the Ladakh region located in the high-altitude Himalayas, drones of hauntology disgracefully disturbed with spastic tremors of post-industrial delirium and cruel power-electronics. His debut full-length Fatima is out on Danse Noire. Follow him on Instagram, Facebook, X, SoundCloud, Spotify, Bandcamp, or Youtube.

Published on September 29, 2023

Last updated on February 21, 2024

Topics

Affect

Belonging

City

Soundscape

All Topics

Special

Norient City Sounds: Delhi

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