Lullaby

I wrote this song when I was 19. There wasn't too much to 'write' really - just the repeating guitar part and a couple of lines of lyrics. Added a second (and a bit of a third) guitar to it, and re-recorded it, 5 years hence.

Apparition

Here's my latest recording -  a demo for a tune I had been mulling over for a while. By demo I mean parts of it a slightly off, but the overall quality is pretty good - now that I have (borrowed) some good recording equipment.
This blog's been dead for a while, and, in a manner of speaking, so have I. This may be a resurrection, or it may not, but here's something for the moment. The lyrics were conjured up on the fly - I had the tune in my head, and fit in words that sounded appropriate, so in spite of the fact that they look all abstract and Steven Wislon-ey, they're really not:

Pink moon rising, then colliding,
Into fireflies, vaporizing.
Raining stardust, gold and glowing,
Spiral embers ebbing, flowing.

Rising, falling,
Dreaming, sighing,
Sleeping, screaming,
Living, dying.

Sunrise, sunset, moonshine, starlight,
Dawn and dusk and day and night,
A moment here, a premonition,
A wispy ghost, an apparition.

Divinorum

Music in my head: Kaneda- Forgive me first father (our blood shall free the earth)

Today's weather: Cold and Sunny.

It’s been entirely too long. My days are melting into each other, the cycle repeats, and repeats, and repeats. And then all of a sudden, just for ten little minutes, it stops.

I was sucked into an alternate reality by an unstoppable force, and that force was me. I watched myself walk through a tropical jungle in my living room. Sunlight trickled down to the forest bed through the branches of colossal white sheet metal trees. Three giant faces spanned my sky, illuminated by the soft light, the faces of the gods. I cowered in worship. I spoke to them in a strange tongue, and I understood everything I said. They did not, and they laughed. Man’s glossolalia, God’s gibberish.

I walked into a temple through the sheet metal trees. As I strolled in, an ancient device whirred to life. It broke the absolute silence that preceded, and commanded my complete attention. It was a conveyer belt made of stone, and it went round and round and round. As if guided by voices, I climbed on it, sat down, and waited in eager anticipation.

Sitting on the living room floor, I saw myself move forward on the conveyer belt. I sat frozen to the floor when I saw my body being cleaved in two. I felt my insides being split apart, but when I looked at myself, I was whole. But I knew I was not. I was on the conveyer belt, split longitudinally, joined at the top of my head. Sunlight entered me, and energized by the millions of photons that hit my insides, I started spinning. I was like the hands of a clock in fast forward, conjoined at my head. I went round and round for seconds, minutes, hours. The belt inched forward, and I was on it, spinning like a CD.

I did not know how much time had passed. Gradually, I stopped spinning. I had reached the end of the conveyer belt. And in the most intense moment of my life, my body was rejoined. I walked out of the temple. The forest was fading away. I walked into the living room and sat down next to myself. I looked at me, and acknowledged my presence for a fleeting second. And then I was gone, only I remained.

The gods had descended from the heavens, they were merely human now. A faint afterglow lit up the place. The only remnants of my sojourn in the jungle were cold sweat that had completely drenched me, and a feeling of euphoria, mixed with slight bewilderment, mellowed down by drowsiness. The dream had passed, but reality was still a haze.

My sweat evaporated as I lay under the draft from an over-enthusiastic Air Conditioner, and soon, I was cold. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and curled up again.

Now, the cycle repeats, and repeats, and repeats.

We lost the sky

Music in my head: Iron& Wine - The Trapeze Swinger
Today's weather: Warm and fuzzy

Thick sheets of yellow light

Once fell to the ground

Through thick sheets of glistening air.

A painted sky on a starry night

Now lost, then found.

Cold was not death, cold was not despair.

The storm winds that once roared

Into wrapped woollen ears

Is now but a whisper, but a sigh.

We sing for her a solemn ode

And tread on her tears.

We have the sun, we lost the sky.

Midterm Crisis

Music in my head: Ef - Två
Today's weather: Snow predicted on Friday.

I'm freezing. I'm studying. I'm chopping vegetables. I'm scanning books. I'm sleeping. I'm eating cheap pizza. I'm bitching about life. I'm counting costs. The preceding is the basis for the vector space that my life has now become. Everything I do is a linear combination of all these things.

Grad school has thus made me a nerd. However, I am told (by many reliable sources) that a nerd who plays the guitar is chick fodder. So to keep my spirits up, I still play the guitar occasionally and try to conjure up a smoking hot audience in my head. But when I close my eyes, all I can think of is Orthogonal vectors and Canonical forms. I have been infected.

But this infection is good for me. I have a midterm tomorrow, and I hope that this one, like the one last week, goes well. So I'm trying to do everything I did the night before the last midterm tonight. And that was when I wrote the previous post.

But I was not blessed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster with a brilliant inspiration today. I tried to come up with some nice riffs, but nothing sounded good. Maybe I'm not supposed to do well tomorrow. Or maybe I'm supposed to do even better than I did last time. Only FSM knows.

But I'll be damned if I give up without a fight. I had a bunch of recordings of stuff from happier, better days in Trichy, a place that seems almost idyllic in my head. Shame on me. So I took those recordings, cleaned them up on audacity and uploaded them. Here they are.

If I don't do well in the midterm tomorrow, the first thing I'll do is come back and delete this post. The second thing I'll do is shake my fist (Homer Simpson style) at humanity.

Four Stages edit by krishnac


Valley of Flowers by krishnac


Sleep project by krishnac



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Grad School Therapy

Music in my head: Steven Wilson - Home in Negative
Today's weather: Getting colder

It's been a long time. Why? Grad life sucks.
I've been doing homework after homework, and after a point, it just seems an exercise in futility. What's the point? So I decided to mix things up a little. It had been a long, long time since I really did something with my guitar, so I decided to record some shit, to relax, maybe reduce the rate of brain cell death.
And I found that just closing your eyes and playing whatever comes to your mind is extremely relaxing, therapeutic even. I accidentally played this riff with a nice ring to it, and decided to set one of my old poems to tune over it. What do you know, it actually sounded half decent. Then I decide to become really pretentious, so I add a little slide guitar bit in, using a small bottle of mouth-freshener as my slide. Add some echo on audacity, and voila. Here it is. Listen to it, ignore the crappiness of the recording, and tell me how it is. You'll be contributing to my therapy!

Moondust by krishnac

Inception Inspection : Nolan's dirty secret

Music in my head: Balmorhea - Settler
Today's weather: Barsaat.

This post is to set the record straight with the entire world (its not another 1 Night in Paris, as the title may suggest to some of you pervs). It is to claim the recognition that we truly deserve. You talk about the awesomeness of Inception, and I agree with that. But when you heap praises on Chris Nolan for the concept, you automatically incur the collective wrath of the makers of revolutionary (short) movie 'Voyage35'.

The brains behind the film, a couple of my friends and me, had a series of discussions- ranging from spiritual to gastronomic - on all matters related to dreams, especially exploring lucid dreaming and astral projection. And we actually downloaded this pdf, which gives you pointers on how to induce lucid dreaming. We worked on those pointers for a while, and one fateful day, locked ourselves in a room, ate a modified Haldiram's Bhel Puri (our sedative. Eat your hat, Yusuf), and fell asleep to Riceboy Sleeps by Jonsi and Alex, the most sleep-inducing album we could find. And then, we shared a dream, the likes of which would've turned Martin Luther King pink. Our kick was the 2 pm power-cut. No elaborate 'kick'ing mechanism involved (that's the difference between the movies and real life, isn't it?).

Although we don't remember what the dream was (except that it involved induction motors, Tricia Helfer and Bovonto), what's important here, is that we shared a dream before even before Cobb was in his frigging limbo, claiming to have built the city (who's he trying to fool, by the way? You're stuck in a dream for eternity with your wife, who is called 'Mal' for God's sake, and you expect us to believe that you're building a city with her). I could point out a hundred other loopholes in the plot, but who has the time?

I realise, at this point, most of you will have, in your heart of hearts, developed such a feeling of ill-will towards Nolan, that if Facebook pages had 'dislike' buttons, you would've clicked the hell out of it through your own account and ten other proxy accounts. But we are classy people. We urge you to desist. Come on, give the man credit for directing the movie. He's carried the idea satisfactorily enough. We admit that although we came up with the concept, if you watch our movie and then watch Inception, you'll notice that Inception has better camera angles at certain times, and better sets. That's the big bucks doing their work.

Now, a plea to Mr. Nolan. We won't go all Chetan Bhagat on you and demand that you give us all your money and put our names on the credits. We want only some of your money, a million each for the three of us would be nice. A small mention somewhere in the credits wouldn't hurt either, but you could replace the honourable mention with half a mil. No one reads the credits anyway. We know that you, like us, are a classy guy, and will do the right thing. Just comment on this post and we'll tell you how to send us the money. You should know that the money would go into paying for my Masters' Degree, and buying books. After all, education is the most important thing in the world (next to 'building cities', that is).


P.S: Inception was brilliant beyond words. I'm watching it again today.
P.P.S: The next post will deal with how the Wachowski brothers stole our idea for the original Matrix movie, and then wrote the sequels themselves.


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