“The indie scene feels kind of impotent right now,” says Aniruddh Menon from his flat in Dubai, where he now lives after years of moving across his home state of Kerala, a couple of years in Bangalore and a stint in Sharjah.
Last month, the 22-year-old released his solo full-length debut Lovesongs, a high-water mark of the lo-fi electronica movement he has helped to foster in Bangalore. The record was released on Consolidate – the label-turned-music collective he runs along with veteran Bangalore producer and DJ, Rahul Giri. An intimate, rough-around-the-edges journey through snapshots and memories of Menon's scattered life – he's on his 14th house now – Lovesongs sees the artist perfect the left-field lo-fi aesthetic that the Consolidate crew has been championing for half a decade.
But faced with a world that seems intent on repeating all the horrifying mistakes of the 20th century, Menon sometimes wonders if making indie music is an effective response. He tells me he’s been writing lyrics, figuring out ways to make his music more political, while also staying true to himself. “I want to make a beat for [Maharashtra protest singer] Sheetal Sathe,” he says.
“There needs to be an interchange between the [folk protest music] scene and the indie scene in India.”
Menon smiles often and speaks slowly, weighing every thought carefully before putting it into words. The son of a journalist and a writer, he spent much of his childhood jumping from place to place. That early experience of pulling up your roots every couple of years informs much of his music, with its patchwork soundscapes of obscure samples that trace the places he has called home. “I’m kind of an awkward person, so it wasn’t very easy,” he says. “I hated the fact that it was happening when it was happening.”
Another formative experience would be the time Menon spent in Bangalore, studying at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. The institute’s courses encourages students to experiment with different disciplines, even offering a short class on electronic music production. But more important than what he learnt at school is what he learnt out of school.
Since the institute has no student accommodation, a couple of entrepreneurs bought up a cluster of houses nearby and rented them out to the students. Overflowing with art school types operating with almost no supervision, it quickly turned into a bohemian bubble called the SFS Colony that was only occasionally burst by the complaints of their retiree neighbours.
“That was a fantastic creative environment and I really miss it,” says Menon. “One of the things I really miss is that at 5pm you’d step out and you could walk into every second house to find kids making music, working on films or even working on their gardens.”
Bangalore post-rock act Space Behind the Yellow Room would practice down the road, while a few doors away was G.159, a makeshift art gallery operating from a living room. Incidentally, Menon's first solo release is The Effects of Lightning on the Human Body, an album of sound-pieces he created as part of a solo exhibition at G.159. Although it suffers from the typical art world tendency of taking a good tune and turning it into moribund "sound art", you can already hear the basics of his sound here – vaguely familiar samples warped beyond recognition, the melodies gently man-handled, the focus on atmospherics.
It was also at the SFS Colony that he started Machli, a short-lived but heavily influential band that is one of the precursors of the Consolidate sound. Bringing together Srishti alumni Musharraf Shaikh, Maitreya Deepak Mer, and his partner and oldest collaborator Sandhya Visvanathan, the band recorded beautifully-fragile and cinematic songs in Menon's kitchen. "We would argue and write songs. Then we'd clear the kitchen, tell everyone in the house to shut up and record," he says.
After receiving critical acclaim for their EP Obtuse + Divine, whose deep dive into obscure Indian film samples Menon attributes to his cinephilic parents and the fact that one of the band members was a film student, the band's hard-earned momentum dissipated when Menon and some of his bandmates finished school and shifted to different cities. Machli continues to be on hiatus but members of the band still put out music under the Consolidate banner.
The adjustment from Bangalore to Dubai was particularly hard for Menon, as his family struggled with a difficult first year. Menon was also moving away from his girlfriend Sandhya Visvanathan, and his anxieties about home and a long-distance relationship are reflected on the nine tracks on Lovesongs.
The most immediate and heartbreaking is Sunsets, a track he wrote a few days before he left Bangalore. An uncannily melancholic sample anchors the track, which drifts along as if trying to delay the inevitable moment of separation. The lyrics and vocals come courtesy of fellow Consolidate member Shoumik Biswas, known as Disco Puppet. "My lion heart, it can't go to sleep / Drawing pictures, I'm counting sheep," Biswas croons softly, his voice a tiny raft floating on a becalmed sea.
Sunsets also reflects Menon's complicated relationship with Dubai, a city that "constantly impresses upon me that with my brown body and Indian passport, I am entirely replaceable," he says. "I'm just the labour that I produce and the price I produce it for."
His anxiety about separation from Visvanathan intermingles with the pain of Dubai’s millions of migrant labourers from South Asia, who suffer many hardships and separation from their families in order to earn enough in search of a better life.
Another highlight on the album is Giant Robots in the Sky, a jaunty deep-space epic about aliens who come to Earth looking for blood to fuel their fleet, only to find out that humanity was attacking their planet instead.
Some tracks may stand out more than others, but Lovesongs is a consistent record, littered with hidden time capsules and clever little beauty bombs. Menon explores personal identity and geography through the soft-focus lens of melancholy, creating an intimate little world perfect for those evenings when you feel lost, or just can't remember what you were seeking.
It evokes the sizzle of the frying pan in your mother’s kitchen, tea and a newspaper in the morning sunshine, and the tender pain of looking back through adult, world-weary eyes. Early into 2017, it’s already an easy contender for the end-of-the-year lists. I hope Menon’s already started work on his next record, because it’s going to be hard to top this.
Bhanuj Kappal is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai who writes about music, protest culture and politics.
