Particles of A Cloud - Our First Residency!
Particles of A Cloud - Our First Residency!
A 'sonic exploration' through 5 tracks by A Bhaskar Rao.
Earlier this year, we were able to host our first residency! A Bhaskar Rao is an audio-visual composer, academic, and writer from Bhopal. We have worked together on multiple projects in the past few years, and when Bhaskar and I discussed that he has been wanting to create an experimental album, I was all excited and suggested that he stay in Bir and do it with Buddhijeev Studios.
Hence this album was born. Watching Bhaskar’s process has been incredible, and we are planning to do a longer video on our Youtube channel exploring his process and his mental processes as he went about composing the tracks. He had already written down a writeup before he came to Bir, where he wanted to play with the idea of Nature and its interaction with human beings.
Something that really caught my imagination in our first interaction about what he’s planning/trying to do was his thoughts on how we as human beings perceive time. He spoke about the movement of tectonic plates that are happening under our feet as we spoke, but how our senses as human beings are just not in tune to understand or even comprehend the magnitude of the movement or the expanse of time that it encompasses. The space of this dissonance between what is natural and what our human capacities are able to judge and comprehend is what Particles of a Cloud navigates through its composition.
Bhaskar himself describes his process as:
For 'Particles Of A Cloud', the first step was listening to Bir, the place itself. Listening to Dhauladhar mountain ranges, the surrounding ecosystem, the people, their lives and livelihoods. Countless elements of nature that exist within the landscape. I wrote about the experience of listening and observing. Poems, phrases, words... To me, writing, just like sound, is a slowed down process. The synthesis of text and sound is something I find exciting. Articulating the compositions. A flux of temporal elements.. Simultaneously I made a lot of field recordings. In order to get thematic flow, the sonic palette eventually is a mix of the above processes, spaces, instruments and aesthetics.
The above excerpt is taken from the blog Audio Pervert which covered the album and Bhaskar’s process. You can read the entire blog here.
So the album consists of 5 tracks. As far as my understanding of Bhaskar’s process, I would suggest keeping a few things in mind as you listen to the tracks - and you should listen to all of them in chronological order for the first listening. Think of each track moving from Abstraction towards Melody. In the first track, the sounds and notes that he uses are almost ‘artificial’ in their creation, and the composition feels like an ‘arrangement’ - musical, yet human. As you go down the list, each track then takes a recorded sound piece as its foundation.
A carpenter cutting through a block of wood on a machine - a ‘jatra’ of pilgrims from Himachal taking the idol of their village to a temple for worship - a group of tribal women singing around a fire in a village in Bastar, Chattisgarh - the sounds of crickets in the jungles around Bir. Around each of these, Bhaskar weaves his compositions and music, moving towards a sound that convention dictates is more ‘musical’.
I hope that you take the time to listen to the entire album and get a glimpse of what Bhaskar is trying to explore through it. We are currently working on a visual exploration to go along with this album, for which we have already shot the 5th track, which has the beautiful Mariana Aurélio exploring the same concepts through contemplative dance. Once that video is done we hope to do a longer video on Youtube about the process that we went through while making both the audio and video, as part of a series on ‘Contemplative Listening’! Do subscribe to this blog as well as our Youtube channel to keep yourself posted on any further developments!
You can check out more of A Bhaskar Rao’s aural work on his soundcloud, and an earlier experiment on migration. You can also buy his latest book of poems, Khayal Darzi on amazon, flipkart, and directly from the publisher.