Let it be known, listening to droning modular synths while you are delirious with a fever is not ever, a good call. Let it also be known, that I have hardly ever taken a call that falls within the ambit of good.
I listen to Vettam, one half of Somnium Monkey’s double EP release, half-cognizant. As the sounds of electronic dissipations fill my room, I recognize the distortion of Sharmila Roy’s Ontoro Momo, a part of the 1990 LP for the soundtrack of The Mahabharata by Peter Brook. The sonics are grating, and Toshi Tsuchitori’s vision with the khamanche is spun around in a way that would perhaps intrigue Floating Points.. On അധ്യായം ഒന്ന് The Beginning, the singing dissembles into a kind of fractured chirp of crickets — in cohesion with perhaps the lifecycle of any good Tagore song iteration.
There is a sojourn embedded in the EP, a scraping for brightness, as the press note suggests : “Taking its name from the Malayalam word വെട്ടം (“light”), the record frames illumination as something fleeting”. The track names reflect this pursuit : going from The Beginning, Visions of Light, State of Trance, Toward The Light, and The Light. One can easily surmise the narrative of possession – or perhaps its closer cousin, a failed chase of a high, and its consequent comedown. Its pretty straightforward, a linear journey towards enlightenment.
State of Trance, arguably the mid-point of this record, reminds me of the clattering sounds of a train, before it opens into the khamanche from Ontoro Momo അധ്യായം നാല് Toward The Light, now faint — fading, almost like a memory of sorts. The artist endows the track with the quality of a disembodied chant, which I think is oddly humorous – because the lyrics translate to a prayer (written in Tagore’s phase of acquiring an understanding with/of the Divine) — for the soul to blossom, gain beauty, and become awakened. Thematic, and yet sonically dissonant.
അധ്യായം അഞ്ച് The Light, the last track on this EP — is perhaps the only one I have a bone to pick with. There is a consistent build-up, a progression, that continues up to Toward The Light, — a narrative tension that is unclenched almost too casually. While this could be contextually read as there being no light altogether, it still does not justify this sort of letting go without any establishment. It is also, presumably, the only track that I find sort of plain in comparison to the others, where the granularity is just abandoned for more atmospheric ominosity.
However, this is a good EP – and Ashwin Narayanan, or Somnium Monkey, is certainly one of the more interesting contributors to the narrow scene for left-field music in India. Vettam, in all its droning and drowning, is quite beautiful as a body of work, and Somnium Monkey, for one — knows sound.
