Digging In India & Songs for a Tired City Combine Modular Synthesis With Quirky Self-Help Tapes On ‘Feeling So Good’

I am generally wary of spoken word samples being thrown into musical work, as if the producer included a literal message because they failed to express it and maintain interest musically. That is, however, not the case on 'Feeling So Good' by synthesist Shiv Ahuja aka Songs for a Tired City and record collector and archivist Nishant Mittal aka Digging In India.

When Mittal combines his assortment of clips from guided meditations, self-help tapes and discourses by religious or spiritual gurus, along with the ambience of the hiss and artefacts from the vintage tapes, with the slowly evolving timbres of Ahuja's modular synth passages – melodic and atonal, serene and chaotic –, it isn't to make up for a lack in the other's effort but to bring an equal and complementary emotion to the assembly. It is a palpably 50-50 collaboration born out of a one-off live improv set and after New York's Purplish Records, who also release the music as part of their cassette batches, nudged them to develop it further.

When the visualisation guide attempts to induce a meditative state on 'Whole Body', the musical assembly of Ahuja's modular washes and Mittal's snippets of Hindustani music passages does not simply provide a placating bed, but offers an evolving journey akin to the meditation itself. It deepens and momentarily passes through some uncomfortable places. 'Going Into It' too tackles meditation, but instead of the common attempt of expressing the serenity, it just as much expresses the mess of distractions one encounters in it. Meanwhile, the discourse on relaxation techniques on 'Anytime Anyplace' is supplemented by a hip-hop styled loop contextualised within evolving pads, as if reflecting how hip-hop's swagger can get you as laidback as the sombre, serious advice of the yoga guru.

It is neither an ambient work nor a typical musique concrete (though 'Deewana' is purely built by a combination of the two) and is very intentionally musical to be left out in the blanket category of "sonic art". If anything, 'Feeling So Good' is a concept album where, just like individual contributions by the two musicians, the tracks create a listening experience more than their sum. All the calm outings get punctuated by the intense chaos and dissonance of 'Doobay' and 'Kabootar' so we are never left in one sonic territory for too long. For a variety, the lead single 'Kishori' even brings us near more contemporary musicality as the melodic alaaps of legendary classical vocalist Kishori Amonkar are pitched down to assume the heavy quality of the rest of the semi-downtempo cut.

Listen to 'Feeling So Good' above or order its cassette here. Follow Songs for a Tired City and Digging In India for more information.