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Songs for a Tired City: In Plain Sight

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Artist: Songs for a Tired City (http://shivahuja.com/) (@)
Title: In Plain Sight
Format: Tape + Download
Label: Subcontinental Records (@)
Rated: * * * * *
New Delhi musicians/developers, who get described as devotional fans of Eno's music, Shiv Ahuja (grabbing sounds and making tape loops also via a modular studio celebrity like Eurorack) and Jayant Manchanda (more focused on usage of Cycling '74's Max/DSP) ideally took listener's hands (or ears) to make a tour of their city by station to station of their huge metropolitan network by their first eponymous album, based on the idea of serving the "old" sounds they liked in a Delhi sauce. It's time to get deeper into their journey offered by this second release, title "In Plain Sight", on what sounds like a deeper insight of Delhi's soul, explored mostly through a set of field recordings, hypnotic modular-synth sequences and an intriguing knitting of electronics and sensorial stimuli grabbed in New Delhi. The opening "In" is based on field recordings only, featuring mostly voices of unknown Delhi inhabitants, who are input of a kind of sonic (in)fusion in the following track "11:00", where the modular synths seem to weave a possible sonic representation of the sensorial swarming of a megalopolis. Maybe the highest point of the entire album got reached on "Duphar", where an entrancing raga flowing into one of those electronic buzzes, that many listeners match to TV news theme tunes (!), and distant recorded chattering. The way by which these guys turned what resemble the sound of a helicopter into a kind of sonic mystical experience on "Shah" precedes another peak of the album, "Shaam", where I assume that these guys created a web of analogue percussive hits for the words of "Shaam Da Rang", a poem by Naxalite poet Lal Singh Dil (I tried to find a translation from Punjabi and I have to say that in spite of the limits of English translation, they could match some parts of Delhi). On the second half, the amalgamation of fields recordings, Hindustani vocals and found sounds on Internet evokes even more disquieting tones before reaching the final "Na Sone Hai | Na Sone dete Hai"... it's a shame I didn't know Bengal, Punjabi or Hindi to catch some possibly "hidden" shades of meaning, but speaking in general, they managed to evoke what expressed by their own words to introduce this release, referring to the city they tried to represent: "Longing for a past we never actually experienced and a sense of disquiet for a future we don't want to experience".

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