The first time I listen to Feeling So Good, a slow-engulfing, metallic, grueling form of dread grips me — tethering me to a kind of feeling that exacerbates throughout the record, never letting go.
The PR material I am sent is simple, briefly revelatory : “Feeling So Good sinks into the hazy world of ’90s self-help and spiritual ephemera – a half-remembered dream of cassette tapes, echoing mantras, and the warm hiss of analog decay. The voices of godmen and gurus dissolve into layers of modular synths, tape loops, and haunting textures.The project began as a one-off live improv set between ambient musician Shiv Ahuja (Songs for a Tired City) and music archivist Nishant Mittal (Digging in India) but it quickly grew into something deeper. With a nudge from Purplish Records and a series of late-night sessions, the project evolved into a full-length album treading a thin line between healing and hallucination.”
I have always been a fan of archival praxis in sound-making. There is a distinct kind of joy in repurposing and reconstructing from something existing in time, building something in and out of context. A good archivist does not believe in waste : everything is material, everything is worth something. Mittal knows this, he has been doing this for ages. So does Ahuja, his compatriot in their construction of the new that accompanies the old — through his modular synth fogs that swallow you whole.There is a kind of delirium in this album, like it is standing on the edge of madness, so completely aware of its position at the precipice of dystopia that all spiritual guidance is almost nauseating. Anytime Anyplace, which spits out a yoga tutorial to unlock your ability to feel good always, over an eerie loop makes you almost reluctant to listen to the record further.
Ahuja and Mittal work well together — and Feeling So Good seems like a thesis on meditation written with a quirked eyebrow. One of my favorite tracks from the entire record is one called The Whole Body, which taps into the transcendental passage that the remainder of the body of work is building up to, the usage of the flute is almost similar to a kind of conch-shell, and the arrangement almost emulates the diasporic ideologue of Hindu spirituality, before it dissembles into Deewana, an almost industrial void, like you have walked out from your devotional chambers into a smogged up metropolis (a callback to Ahuja’s moniker would be topical) paranoid in its habitual functioning.
A lot of the record reminds me of the work of Elori Saxl or Tomas Bednarczyk (ironicized), or the more experimental recent adventure of Ethel Cain on Vacillator. line on the closing Going Into It, “you have gone into it with all of the guilt” before the rest of it is garbled up in the other stream of speech. A hallucinogenic only rehabilitates the human condition into bearability for a few moments, you can only feel so good till you only let yourself be caught unaware, till you are going into it knowing that the comedown is longer than the promise of euphoria. Ahuja and Mittal are enthusiasts of the oxymoron, and Feeling So Good does not offer a shred of respite.
