Happy Birthday A R Rahman! From the ARRchives - On "Naetru Aval Irundhal" ​It has been a week since this new A. R. Rahman song was released on iTunes. I heard it once. Only once. I couldn’t hear it again. I shouldn’t hear it again. I just can’t let this song play on a loop in the background while I’m doing something else. It is not that kind of song. This one demands a quiet ambience and my undivided attention. I have not been able to give that to this song. The world around me would not allow it. Yet, I thought I’d listen to it now, maybe once, just once, on my way to work. I take a bus and I find myself a window seat. Outside the window is the city of Bangalore—India’s Silicon Valley. A commute by public transport in Bangalore is one through a barrage of sounds: buzzing bus engine; the whoosh of the passing vehicles; the incessant honking in the peak-hour traffic; the chitter-chatter of the fellow passengers; the effervescent voice of the radio jockey booming from the stereo system inside the bus, and a symphony or rather a cacophony of several other indistinct sounds emerging from invisible sources. Noise-cancelling headphone cancels little on Bangalore roads. I relax, recline, wear my headphones, move my fingers over the click-wheel of my classic iPod. Tick, tick, tick. I find the song, press the button at the centre of the wheel, and enter the song’s universe. The song begins. He sings first, then she whispers. Her voice husky, angelic, intimate; there’s moisture everywhere: in her tone and singing, in the dense backing strings and the soundscape. She sings as if she is speaking. Or rather, she speaks as if she is singing. She calls for him. It sounds both a command and a plea. He was kidnapped and is now being held hostage for ransom in a land far away. She wants him to come back. Before she completes singing the first three words, the driver of the bus I’m in applies a shuddering brake. Someone has tried to suddenly cross the road in front of the bus. The high-pitched screech of the tyres fills the deliberate stretches of silence between the three words she just sang. The jolt pushes my body forward and pulls me rudely out of the song and lobs me back into the real world. I switch off my iPod. I shouldn’t listen to this song. I shouldn’t listen to it now. I reach my office, an air-conditioned space insulated from the noise of the world outside. But work has been hectic this week and it is going to be hectic today. I don’t think there will be time or space for music. I did a bit of coding, a bit of gossiping, a few emails, some conference calls and meetings, then I find myself doing nothing for a few minutes post lunch. I disappear from my desk. I grab my iPod and seek refuge in the toilet. And now creeps in the worst of all noises, the voice inside my head: it screams thoughts related to work. I tick the boxes on a virtual checklist in my mind. I think about the status reports I am yet to prepare, time sheets I have to fill, and the piece of code I have to peer-review before the end of the day. Meanwhile, the song’s been playing on loop, with me paying no attention to it. I gather myself. I sit up straight, take a deep breath, and close my eyes. The song calms my mind, slowly takes me in. The cloud of thoughts clear. Finally, in the toilet, I listen of the song, pay attention to some of its sonic details, but only to some of it. I hear these: the orchestration is dense, there are layers upon layers of instruments, and yet the whole somehow feels sparse—instruments floating as cotton clouds around the delicate main melody. The song arrives at that line where the poetry sets a fantastical scene of romance: a sky that has a hundred moons and a flock of bluebirds flying everywhere. It is in here the contour of the melody reaches its romantic summit. The song is pivoted at this peak, and throughout its length, all else in the song ascend and descend towards and away from it. The song smoothly ebbs and flows and I ebb and flow along with it. The man is now singing. He is requesting the vast skies to bring back the past, bring back the time they spent together, bring that time back to here and now. Then there is a pause. Stillness. Silence. A sudden burst of a jarring, comical jazz tune disrupts the silence. It is my mobile ringtone. My project manager is calling. I answer. He wants me to send the weekly status report immediately. I run to my desk. I couldn’t listen to the song again at work. I must wait till this evening, wait until I reach home. A few hours later, I’m home. I rush to my room. Change my clothes. I’m getting ready to sit with the song for a while. I have big Bose speakers in my room, but I can’t play the song aloud on those. The windows are open, and the landlord is living downstairs. They may not like the loudness. But I can’t close the windows either. It’s summer. It’s too hot inside. I need some fresh air. The Apple earphones too are of no use, because the sound of the ceiling fan sneaks through the gap between my ears and the earpiece; it is an unwelcome accompaniment to the song. So, I go to the terrace. There is no one here. There are a few stinging mosquitoes, but that is only a small inconvenience I must bear to listen to this song in solitude for a few minutes before I go to bed. It is still warm outside. I hear the rustle of the leaves; a slight breeze, but it has no effect on the sweat pearling on my forehead. I return to music; the vroom of the vehicles on the street whizzing past our house stabs the silences in the song a few times. I settle for a corner far from the street and sit on the rough, corrugated terrace floor. I play the song on my iPod, plug in my earpiece and focus hard. I hear the celestial chorus. I hear those thin, sparkling bell strokes. A quiet piano riff is omnipresent and is pecking at the cheeks of the vocal melody. The sprinklings of accordion pieces around the melody evoke a dreamy, languid aura. The man sings. Her voice is sweet as honey, he says, and the strings of sarangi respond and agree with him. The strings section whirl and stir, soar and fall, flutter and float underneath throughout the song. I hear them. I hear them all. However, something’s amiss. It doesn’t seem enough. I want to go further and deeper. I want to absorb the absolute silence pregnant with all the varied sounds. I want to hear those nanoseconds of silences whence many little worlds of the universe of the song are born. I can’t wait to watch the film this song features in in a controlled environment of a cinema theatre. The entire space will be filled only with the sounds and silences of the song. To quash the noise of the song’s visuals, I will close my eyes the moment the song starts to play. I don’t want my mind to process any new data apart from that of the sound of music and the music of silence. The film’s release, however, is a few months away. I can’t wait that long. I decide to go home the following weekend, to my parents, to Salem, which is five hours by bus from Bangalore. In Salem, I could get the space and time the song deserves. Friday night. I board a semi-sleeper air-conditioned bus from Bangalore to Salem. The in-bus entertainment is already on; a Tamil film is playing on a large LCD television screen dangling from the roof next to the driver’s seat. The television is connected to multiple speakers placed in the overhead baggage space that runs on both sides along the length of the bus. The atonal voice of the film’s hero espousing his ideologies is echoing inside the bus; it is the worst sonic accompaniment the song could ever have. I wear the earpiece and try to listen to the song, but I couldn’t. It feels disrespectful to hear the song in this environment; I switch off. I reach home at around midnight. My mother insists that I eat something. I eat something. I go to bed. I remove the batteries from the wall clock in the room so that its ticking sound doesn’t become a dissonant metronome to the song. At last, I get to hear the song in an ambience I wanted. The neighbourhood is quiet and asleep, except for the chirp of a little lizard crawling on the walls of my room. I switch off the ceiling fan and turn on the air-conditioner; AC’s hum, a constant, unwavering buzz, much quieter and less harsh compared to the fan’s whirr. I push the earpiece as tight as possible into my ears. I play the song and listen mindfully for an hour and listen more in a quasi-sleep state for another hour. I hear at once all the intricate instrumental layers of the song I gathered in parts over the past week. I don’t know when I fell asleep. I wake up. I find the earphone cable wound around my neck. I scratch my left cheek to find a sleep mark the size of the thickness of the earphone cable. The song is still playing on my iPod. I have heard the song. Or have I? I wish I could mute this universe once, just once for five minutes, so I could listen to those sharp nodes of silence that precedes the sound. Or, better yet, someone fit me into a space suit with this song and toss me into the cosmos.

This could be an interesting discussion on what a genre is, how it emerges and evolves. But, no, we will only use this opportunity to proudly exhibit our bigotry. Eppidiyo naasama ponga.. (Mangal Rang).

Oh Saindhavi is brilliant in the Tamil version of Mangal Rang. Perfectly cast.

Ah… Shreya singing a baby Shreya song triggers severe college Topaz hostel nostalgia where I would tirelessly rewind the cassette tape again and again and again to hear the song in an analog loop…

Background score in Dorothy is loud. Background score in Baththa is loud. Background score in Modha Rathiri is loud (“too much thavil,” a critic said). I see such comments often in reviews. Who is all this criticism directed at? The composer, and the composer alone? I do not think that is fair. Gone are the days when directors left it entirely to the composer to spot and score the film on their own. It is evident from the interviews that before Karthik Subbaraj approached Ilaiyaraaja, he had already done the spotting, that is, decided the moments where he wanted background score and even what kind of music he wanted to hear in these moments. The film he showed Ilaiyaraaja already had a temp score, with pre-existing music, much of it Ilaiyaraaja’s own compositions. In a recent interview, Karthik Subbaraj spoke about the discussions he had with Ilaiyaraaja about each cue in the film’s background score. There is a moment in the film where Karthik wanted silence and Ilaiyaraaja wanted to add music instead—the hill-top scene where Karthi (Rishikanth) confesses. I like the music in this moment: soothing, melodic and yet minimal and unintrusive. Karthik said that, in the final sound mix, the opening strings in this cue were mixed in such a way that they blend with the ambient sound (of the wind). In this case, Ilaiyaraaja too was involved in the mixing process. This, however, does not happen all the time; a director and the sound designer can entirely change, without consulting the composer, how loud or low the score is mixed in a film. Still, I felt there were some moments in Dorothy, that could have been left without music, or with minimal music; for example, the red sand action sequence (track “Sambavam” in the OST plays here). The orchestral score, the brass and the chilling urumi melam felt a bit too loud/intense for the moment. But why didn’t a similar orchestral score in the final action sequence in Pithamagan feel loud? When we saw Siththan smashing the villain to a pulp, we'd already lived with all the characters for nearly two hours; we knew what the villain did, we knew that Siththan is avenging his friend’s death, we understood his fury, and we felt all the emotions as intensely as the characters in the film did. In the red sand sequence in Dorothy, however, I barely know this villain who briefly appears in this episode, I do not know how this altercation will end, and I cannot even predict how it might end. Hence, I felt the loudness/intensity of the score is not fully earned. I enjoy the cue as a standalone piece of orchestral music, though. I am someone who listens to Ilaiyaraaja’s "A Beautiful Breakup" soundtrack on loop, despite knowing nothing about the film. It is a gorgeous hour-long orchestral work. Is it a great “film” score? I do not know. I cannot say until I watch the film. It may or may not be. The Baththa phenomenon is also interesting. Many felt Ilaiyaraaja should have scored this film. They felt so because they had recently experienced in Dorothy how Ilaiyaraaja’s score could turn a film into an intense emotional, and even spiritual, experience, and also because many heard Balaji Tharaneetharan say in the promotional interviews that he wanted Ilaiyaraaja for this film but was asked (by Atlee, the film’s producer) to consider Sai Abhyankkar as the composer. There is also a general perception that Sai Abhyankkar does not deserve the projects he gets. These paratextual, extra-musical, and extra-filmic ideas do influence the way we perceive and experience a film. What if Baththa had released months before Dorothy? What if Balaji had never revealed that he wanted Ilaiyaraaja? Would you still have said the same about the score? It is fascinating that in the reviews of Baththa that came from outside Tamil Nadu (from reviewers who may not have any knowledge about this discourse about Sai Abhyankkar) there was no criticism about the score, and some even said that the score blends neatly with the narrative. What did people feel about the score in Kadaisi Vivasayi when the film was released? It was widely known that Manikandan, the director, replaced Ilaiyaraaja’s score and worked with another composer. Is it a lesser film because Manikandan replaced Ilaiyaraaja’s score? I am not saying that all the criticism of the Baththa background score is entirely invalid. I am only trying to understand the various factors—factors beyond the music itself—that could make the score in a film seem loud, bad, incongruent, and ill-fitting. I do not know which specific musical cues people have in mind when they say that the background score in Baththa is loud or incongruent. I am guessing that the orchestral score in the final episode that leads to the intermission could be one. I have a theory about how the score in this scene (track "Baththa Lacrimosa" in the OST) might seem incongruent or loud to some. The main reason is that, though the narrative is not entirely from the boy’s perspective, the score entirely is. The boy is going through so many intense emotions; the guilt he carries is immense, he is terrified of the consequences of his action. As Balaji said, if the film was made entirely from the boy’s perspective, it would be a horror film. In this version, we still do empathise with the boy, we understand why he is terrified to open the door, but we adults would never be able to feel this fear as intensely as the boy does (we know that Baththa will not hurt the boy), we are always observing him from a distance. Hence the intensity of the orchestral score, which is fully in sync with the intensity of the boy’s emotions in the moment, feels a bit much for some of us. And again, all these decisions—which of the character’s emotions the score must closely align with, or should it remain at a distance as an omniscient observer and annotator of the unfolding narrative—are not entirely Sai Abhyankkar’s. Balaji said that he worked closely with Sai on the score; he too, like Karthik, did not leave it entirely to the composer. When asked about the score and the mix, Balaji clearly said: “It is entirely my call”. All this is to say that critiquing the composer and the composer alone for the perceived loudness of the score in a film is like critiquing an editor alone for the so-called “lag” in a film—crude and ill-informed.

Why everything about this Ramayana film is such a weird mess? Strange promotional events like the one with Mr. Beast; official soundtrack is released without three beautiful songs that were performed in the music launch event; a song by someone else is in the soundtrack while they have A R Rahman and Hans Zimmer as composers; some Sitar player is saying he is also composing music for the film; there was some news about James Newton Howard too being a part of the composing team (exciting if true, prefer Howard to Zimmer); T-Series keeps releasing two-minute butchered versions of the song as “the song” with incongruent visuals on their YouTube channel.

RIP Krishnaraj. I was thinking about him just recently while listening to Vellarikka. He is just brilliant in this only song he sang for A R Rahman. youtu.be/7Q-uUd_a9BU?is=XBTz…

My favourite Deva soundtrack is Kadhal Kottai (Aasai, Nerukku Ner etc. are up there but still) Wholesome. On loop today

Such a beautiful, beautiful charanam.. semma romantic Deva

One of my most favourite Deva songs youtu.be/mWFdv306LQg?is=J62r…