After watching so many videos and listening to most songs of Sneha Khanwalkar available online, I am still not sure how to begin talking about the music she produces. Her albums are of course the mere final product of her work, and that is only 10% of the actual story of her music, but what interests me, and perhaps everyone, is the 90% that remains at the background of these songs. This 90% is the real story, or the foreground of her music. Her music practice is foregrounded by multiple factors that are generally remain unrecognized in the music industry, a subset of the Hindi film industry.
I choose to write this essay on Khanwalkar's music for it introduces a practice that makes us aware of the sounds we live in. As mentioned before, I have been observing her interviews to understand how she thinks of music, its creation and her project. She does not confirm to the silent A R Rahman's mystic approach in explaining her music, and neither other musicians in India who are hardly able to describe the process they go through in creating their work. Sneha pulls off by choosing seemingly right adjectives and phrases to talk about her music. Her openness to express her ideas, thoughts and doubts with her music make it real, relate-able. People rejoice even in the ambiguity of the music she produces, because she acknowledges it outrightly. One can find her body language filling up the gap of non-descriptive aspects of her music. Her practice has a clear inspiration from that of UK born Grammy winning multi-instrumentalist Imogen Heap. She takes the title of being a 'female music director' without making a big deal about it - confidently and casually acknowledging Jaddan bai (Nargis's mother), Saraswati Devi and Usha Khanna who preceded her in the industry.
To begin with, the beats, sounds and rhythms of her songs come from everyday lives - what has commonly come to be understood as folk, or popular (eventually pop). It is the music that common people create, engage with I think, therefore, it gets large volume of listening audience. Secondly, her music makes common people feel empowered, it gives legitimacy to what institutionalized channels often reject - hoarse voices, improper pronunciations, tonal quality, voice modulations, ranges and pitches and all such terms we commonly get to hear in music shows, reality singing soaps and from professional singers across the world. The music Sneha produces ignores these canons and comes to appreciate the ethnography of that voice or sound. Her music treats sound as a social product. It thus talks of sound as a product of one's history. This allows a new understanding of music - one that doe snot compare 'a' musical piece to other, but situates it in its own context, thus evaluating the intensity of emotion that it carries. Thirdly, her music interacts with geography and environment, rather it creates an environment that is localized, which one may not easily classify as global. In fact, I believe her music bridges the contrasting ideas of local and global. This I say primarily in the framework of her practice that harnesses the technological resources of the global world in order to channel and concentrate a culture that is extremely local. In other words it can be said that she appropriately appropriates the tools of the electronic world to shape her sound that is able to connect with its audience in ways more abstract than canonical. By abstract I mean to hint to an emotion that can not be easily described as opposed to the objective qualities of evaluating music entailed by canons of classical music.
Her singers are not conventional. Her voice casting includes beggars singing in the trains, women singing in the temples, to neighbourhood singing stars, small children, local performance artists, tribal and folk men and women - all whom she finds on her journeys. Similarly, her recording studios are not permanent. They change places from peoples houses, to open streets, to personal spaces and open grounds. Her field lies outside of the four walls of the recording studio. A lot of her composition happens on the computer - tweaking, mixing, matching, mashing, correcting, looping sounds that she ends up collecting in the geographies she travels.
Her own reflections on the geography of sounds is interesting. Ways in which accents and pronunciations of words change as one moves from place to place become aspects of highlights of her songs. "Womaniya," "Nervousaao nahi moora," and more such regional twists of foreign languages in regional dialects become important anchors for her songs. This adds, along with humor, a satirical statement to her songs. Her compositions are qwerky, and it works for her. I think in this fast post post-colonial vocabulary-changing world, languages morph, like other things in the environment, to become elements of hybridity. I think my interest in such hybridity makes me take a closer look at the music recently created by Sneha Khanwalkar.
The songs she has composed shows a distinct sensitivity in the way sounds interact with each other within them. Through her thoughts on the recording of Womaniya, we come to understand that we do not listen to music in the ideal sound-proof conditions that they are often produced in. The surrounding environment within which we hear music; for example in train compartments, in buses, on the streets or crowded places; all influence the way in which we perceive music. She interestingly induces this contamination right at the stage of creating her music. She refers to the leaking dischordant sounds of the group that she auditioned for Womaniya in Gangs of Wasseypur that gives it its raw flavour. Sounds of everyday objects are forced under a seemingly underplaying rhythm to give rise to a chaos in which encounter music in our quotidian lives.
I quickly want to talk about the psychogeography of her music, or the way in which her music psychologically interacts with and creates space. A single piece of music can make different associations for us depending on various factors and circumstances we hear it in. It relates to phases of our lives, people and incidents - and not to forget the spaces which they make to us the most impacts in. Thus the postmodern reception of music is absolutely non-deterministic. In addition, we have always heard more music outside the confined and controlled atmosphere of the cinema halls. Thus the popular reception of music is almost always adulterated. It takes a great amount of risk to project such adulteration confidently. The "Chee Chha Phake Leather" brings in the irritablity of the street through the voice of a train beggar or the "Tu Raja ki Raajdulari" invokes in us a space of an adolescent erupting into an adult. Similarly, she matches the variant pronunciations of the phrase 'Bihar ke lala' by Manoj Tiwari in the song to the imagined self-'glory' of an everyday Bihari goon. Such abstract themes of 'irritability' or 'adolescent' become the only geographic destinations through which imaginations of places can be discussed in the global field of media flows.
On the other hand, the way in which geography affects language also comes through sharply in her songs. The conscious or subconsious decisions through which floating words get twisted and assimilated into local cultures defines a new anomalous geography of a place that is part real, part imagined. Sneha refers to it as the 'grain of voice' or the 'textures of sounds' that she is able to tap into people by being in their own environment instead of pulling them to the recording studio. She offers these non-singers an ease of their geography by recording them outside the intimidating environs of the studio. The connection of a voice to a surrounding becomes more evident through these experiments. The space-sound relationship gains particular currency in her compositions. Lastly, she openly acknowledges that today, technology allows her to carry the recording studio along with her wherever she goes. Thus she is not only able to grasp the feel of the voice in the place, but also some of the most unconventional sounds and mannerisms of cultural instruments through which the energy of sound in a space is tapped.
To end with, Sneha's music introduces to us the vast amount of music that remains within the folds of Indian culture. We have an intrinsic culture of singing and the diversity of the country constantly mutates its aesthetic forms. In this, a composer like Sneha brings to us a new aesthetic of sound - that which enables us to be more confident with the emerging hybridity of sounds, words and musics. Her sound thus doesn't hit the listener's ear as hard as the professionally composed high culture scores. Rather, it makes way through our ear into our mind in an extremely personal way, exciting our vouyeristic cravings, and sometimes our repressed unexplainable thoughts. To me it presents the tumultous global condition, forever fluxed, but charged. But it also becomes exemplary of the global condition by virtue of the practice being constantly on the move. Computer gives homogeneity to disparate flows of ideas. It bring together disparate pieces of sounds creating a new environment that can only be appreciated in its vagueness. Could I call it the gulzar-ization of music? This new environment comprises of fractured languages, tidbits of voices that get strewn into lyrics of songs as slangs and amplified by unconventional choice of singers. We only remain to see how long such practice of music making remains unconventional, and whether it sustains the consumption by a mammoth called the Bollywood.
(this article contains a lot of jargon, and occasional improvisation of this article is but natural)
last updated: 6th June)
I choose to write this essay on Khanwalkar's music for it introduces a practice that makes us aware of the sounds we live in. As mentioned before, I have been observing her interviews to understand how she thinks of music, its creation and her project. She does not confirm to the silent A R Rahman's mystic approach in explaining her music, and neither other musicians in India who are hardly able to describe the process they go through in creating their work. Sneha pulls off by choosing seemingly right adjectives and phrases to talk about her music. Her openness to express her ideas, thoughts and doubts with her music make it real, relate-able. People rejoice even in the ambiguity of the music she produces, because she acknowledges it outrightly. One can find her body language filling up the gap of non-descriptive aspects of her music. Her practice has a clear inspiration from that of UK born Grammy winning multi-instrumentalist Imogen Heap. She takes the title of being a 'female music director' without making a big deal about it - confidently and casually acknowledging Jaddan bai (Nargis's mother), Saraswati Devi and Usha Khanna who preceded her in the industry.
To begin with, the beats, sounds and rhythms of her songs come from everyday lives - what has commonly come to be understood as folk, or popular (eventually pop). It is the music that common people create, engage with I think, therefore, it gets large volume of listening audience. Secondly, her music makes common people feel empowered, it gives legitimacy to what institutionalized channels often reject - hoarse voices, improper pronunciations, tonal quality, voice modulations, ranges and pitches and all such terms we commonly get to hear in music shows, reality singing soaps and from professional singers across the world. The music Sneha produces ignores these canons and comes to appreciate the ethnography of that voice or sound. Her music treats sound as a social product. It thus talks of sound as a product of one's history. This allows a new understanding of music - one that doe snot compare 'a' musical piece to other, but situates it in its own context, thus evaluating the intensity of emotion that it carries. Thirdly, her music interacts with geography and environment, rather it creates an environment that is localized, which one may not easily classify as global. In fact, I believe her music bridges the contrasting ideas of local and global. This I say primarily in the framework of her practice that harnesses the technological resources of the global world in order to channel and concentrate a culture that is extremely local. In other words it can be said that she appropriately appropriates the tools of the electronic world to shape her sound that is able to connect with its audience in ways more abstract than canonical. By abstract I mean to hint to an emotion that can not be easily described as opposed to the objective qualities of evaluating music entailed by canons of classical music.
Her singers are not conventional. Her voice casting includes beggars singing in the trains, women singing in the temples, to neighbourhood singing stars, small children, local performance artists, tribal and folk men and women - all whom she finds on her journeys. Similarly, her recording studios are not permanent. They change places from peoples houses, to open streets, to personal spaces and open grounds. Her field lies outside of the four walls of the recording studio. A lot of her composition happens on the computer - tweaking, mixing, matching, mashing, correcting, looping sounds that she ends up collecting in the geographies she travels.
Her own reflections on the geography of sounds is interesting. Ways in which accents and pronunciations of words change as one moves from place to place become aspects of highlights of her songs. "Womaniya," "Nervousaao nahi moora," and more such regional twists of foreign languages in regional dialects become important anchors for her songs. This adds, along with humor, a satirical statement to her songs. Her compositions are qwerky, and it works for her. I think in this fast post post-colonial vocabulary-changing world, languages morph, like other things in the environment, to become elements of hybridity. I think my interest in such hybridity makes me take a closer look at the music recently created by Sneha Khanwalkar.
The songs she has composed shows a distinct sensitivity in the way sounds interact with each other within them. Through her thoughts on the recording of Womaniya, we come to understand that we do not listen to music in the ideal sound-proof conditions that they are often produced in. The surrounding environment within which we hear music; for example in train compartments, in buses, on the streets or crowded places; all influence the way in which we perceive music. She interestingly induces this contamination right at the stage of creating her music. She refers to the leaking dischordant sounds of the group that she auditioned for Womaniya in Gangs of Wasseypur that gives it its raw flavour. Sounds of everyday objects are forced under a seemingly underplaying rhythm to give rise to a chaos in which encounter music in our quotidian lives.
I quickly want to talk about the psychogeography of her music, or the way in which her music psychologically interacts with and creates space. A single piece of music can make different associations for us depending on various factors and circumstances we hear it in. It relates to phases of our lives, people and incidents - and not to forget the spaces which they make to us the most impacts in. Thus the postmodern reception of music is absolutely non-deterministic. In addition, we have always heard more music outside the confined and controlled atmosphere of the cinema halls. Thus the popular reception of music is almost always adulterated. It takes a great amount of risk to project such adulteration confidently. The "Chee Chha Phake Leather" brings in the irritablity of the street through the voice of a train beggar or the "Tu Raja ki Raajdulari" invokes in us a space of an adolescent erupting into an adult. Similarly, she matches the variant pronunciations of the phrase 'Bihar ke lala' by Manoj Tiwari in the song to the imagined self-'glory' of an everyday Bihari goon. Such abstract themes of 'irritability' or 'adolescent' become the only geographic destinations through which imaginations of places can be discussed in the global field of media flows.
On the other hand, the way in which geography affects language also comes through sharply in her songs. The conscious or subconsious decisions through which floating words get twisted and assimilated into local cultures defines a new anomalous geography of a place that is part real, part imagined. Sneha refers to it as the 'grain of voice' or the 'textures of sounds' that she is able to tap into people by being in their own environment instead of pulling them to the recording studio. She offers these non-singers an ease of their geography by recording them outside the intimidating environs of the studio. The connection of a voice to a surrounding becomes more evident through these experiments. The space-sound relationship gains particular currency in her compositions. Lastly, she openly acknowledges that today, technology allows her to carry the recording studio along with her wherever she goes. Thus she is not only able to grasp the feel of the voice in the place, but also some of the most unconventional sounds and mannerisms of cultural instruments through which the energy of sound in a space is tapped.
To end with, Sneha's music introduces to us the vast amount of music that remains within the folds of Indian culture. We have an intrinsic culture of singing and the diversity of the country constantly mutates its aesthetic forms. In this, a composer like Sneha brings to us a new aesthetic of sound - that which enables us to be more confident with the emerging hybridity of sounds, words and musics. Her sound thus doesn't hit the listener's ear as hard as the professionally composed high culture scores. Rather, it makes way through our ear into our mind in an extremely personal way, exciting our vouyeristic cravings, and sometimes our repressed unexplainable thoughts. To me it presents the tumultous global condition, forever fluxed, but charged. But it also becomes exemplary of the global condition by virtue of the practice being constantly on the move. Computer gives homogeneity to disparate flows of ideas. It bring together disparate pieces of sounds creating a new environment that can only be appreciated in its vagueness. Could I call it the gulzar-ization of music? This new environment comprises of fractured languages, tidbits of voices that get strewn into lyrics of songs as slangs and amplified by unconventional choice of singers. We only remain to see how long such practice of music making remains unconventional, and whether it sustains the consumption by a mammoth called the Bollywood.
(this article contains a lot of jargon, and occasional improvisation of this article is but natural)
last updated: 6th June)
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