Himalayan Sounds

Dreamer's Laboratory - Article for Berlin Atonal Annual Newsletter 2025

The world is a stage. And owing to the vast myriad of landscapes on this planet, this world has countless stages. From tall dominating Himalayan peaks, to lush green picture perfect valleys of Kashmir, to vast deserts of Rajasthan, to the tropical forests of Nilgiris and offcourse the dytsopian urban setllements - the artificial landscapes of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore etc. In my country itself the landscape changes if one drives for more than 100 kms in any direction. And with the change in landscape, there is another change - a change in soundscapes. The world is a stage indeed! But for this audio maniac the world is primarily a soundstage.

If you are familiar with my works on this website it should be clear without any reasonable doubt that I am obsessed with two things in this life - Audio & Mountains. My life can be summarised by an ever intensifying feedback loop between myself, audio and mountains. The Himalayan landscape and the soundscape, since my childhood, has been like a balm for my mind and soul. There is nothing that a long walk amongst these majestic peaks can't fix. A feast for the eyes, a massage for my ears and a tonic for my imagination. A trip to the Himalayas for me is a sacred ritual. Transforming electricity into sound waves for a living, like an alchemist, my work leaves me in a constant search for an elixir to recharge my soul. And I feel very blessed to live this life and and with folded hands bow before the cosmic designs that have made this life on this planet possible for me.

I have been working as a sound engineer , sound designer or whatever you may call it - I am still trying to figure out a term for my occupation - A sound synthesist, a sound creationist, a sonic alchemist - I prefer these terms to the industrial titles bestowed upon my tribe by our peers, for 12 years now. 12 years of working on all kinds of music, films, animations, ads, video games and more than 50 trips to the Himalayas. As my understanding of sound synthesis and the mysteries of sound evolve, I am not surprised to find myself infatuated with an idea - A vast ancient Himalayan Landscape - Nubra Valley - Devoid of any flora and fauna - Only wires, capacitors, op -amps, triodes, vacuum tubes and a sound synthesist - For eternity. This massive cosmic sound machine nurturing the raw geological and natural energy of the Nubra Valley and turning into sound waves - its mysterious origin and evolution, the technical workings of this machine, its physical, sonic, mathematical and musical properties - being analysed & harnessed by a single solitary human being - a techno priest as Alejandro Jodorowsky would term it.

There are numerous reasons why I get goosebumps just thinking about this idea. And often I am forced to realign my life goals to fulfill this fantasy of mine. All I need are a billion bucks to buy some 10000 square kilometres of high altitude Himalayan real estate and covert it into a massive analog sound machine. The concept combines two very archaic and primal energies in human beings - 1) Being alone and naked in nature. 2) Analog electric sounds. The opening scene of Stanley Kubrik's 2001 Space odyssey comes to mind - A gang of chimps - our ancient ancestors - being energised by and puzzled by a synthetically crafted 1:2:3 ratio rectangular monolith. I feel a 100 W cranked marshall plexi amplifier with a 4*4 cab blasting out sweet analog sonic juices would have had the same effect - an evolutionary short circuit. I feel like one of those chimps whenever I fantasize about this Himalayan sound machine of mine.

Electricity changed art. And as art changed, the human mind also changed. The earliest music instrument discovered is a 60000 year old flute. I am sure that we will continue to discover even older music instruments. Not to mention that our ancestors might have begun their forays into musical expression using their vocal chords or by banging a stick on some rocks. So it took 60000 years for us to evolve from a flute to an orchestra jamming Rachmaninoff. Then came electricity. Electricity was converted into sounds & noises and these noises were then converted into music. And what is the source of these noises and their musical derivatives? Electrons, Protons, Electromagnetic fields, Magnets, Quantum stuff etc. Quantum electric stuff being harnessed by engineers and musicians to teleport us to new realms? Evoking thoughts and ideas and emotions never evoked before? That's a bold statement. I mean , is an acoustic guitar capable of making us feel what an electric guitar is capable of making us feel? Or vice versa?

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke tells us a story about a spaceship which passes through our solar system in the near future. A group of astronauts are sent to examine this vast ship. In the first book, the group concludes that this ship, now devoid of any organic life is a floating artificial mini planet. Most of its features still remain a mystery to the explorers. The beauty of this book that nothing much happens action wise unlike other sci fi novels. But rather Arthur C Clarke amazes us with the power of the silent mysterious, the majestic unknown, the ancient. These are the feelings that the Himalayas invoke in me. Our planet Earth too, is a spaceship. And there are places on this planet which invoke the same forces and that sense of awe that the astronauts on Rama go through. And if thousands or millions of years from now a bunch of astronauts are here to explore the majestic, raw landscape of Ladakh, I want them to come to a conclusion that this vast landscape is/was a cosmic music instrument - Its musical capabilities harnessed by a member or a bunch of members of a now maybe extinct species.

Expect them to find vacuum amplification tubes - of all varieties and sizes embedded into this earth - at mountain tops, Under the Zanskar river, in the hot water springs of Panamik, under the sand dunes of Nubra valley.. The wires connecting these tubes going deep into the earth - connected to something. They go in too deep. And pulling them out just yields more and more wires. There are some wires on surface. 100s of kilometres long. Emanating from one mountain and connecting it to another. Some just connecting a mountain to some place deep into the earth. Some just connecting various boulders, rivers, dried up trees to each other. And off course there are dusty, rusted PCBs and speakers. Embedded in riverbeds or other random geological surfaces. Some with flickering LEDs and needle based panels, knobs and valves of all kinds. A courageous astronaut might play with these and find out what all this means and if indeed this landscape is a machine - what kind of a machine is this? A culmination of sparsely distributed electronics on this piece vast Earth - The best circuits are the simplest and the most thermodynamically efficient ones.

So as today's world moves towards ever smaller, more compact, more portable, digital music making devices, my serpentine spirits are nudging me to the other extreme. As the loudness wars are taking over the music industry - competing for volume and relevance between a human's two ears, I wish to plant this tiny seed for audio wave generation & propagation at a cosmic scale. I wish Elon Musk Occupies Mars and converts it into a giant music instrument on a planetary scale. A species colonising another planet for survival sake is not a species that I want to be a part of. It's an old & cliched history and does a great disservice to those who sacrificed & were sacrificed to make it so. Seriously, I wish I could get back those many hours I wasted reading the Rendezvous with Rama sequels. The battle between Darwinism and Human Imagination is an old one. Heck, its not even a war. A reactionary expression for the human condition is often broomed away as human imagination. Mother Nature's ultimate trick disguised as a veil to be moved or a mystery to be solved. Forgive my arrogance when I say - I want out. The Himalayan music machine is not going to build itself.

I wrote down some notes for a short story idea I had - A bunch of terrorists take over CERN - the massive super collider machine at Geneva. The whole world is fixated with this real-life Tony Scott film - worried that the terrorists will convert it into a massive nuclear bomb or create a black hole to end or blackmail humanity - motifs of the Darwinian variety. But at CERN, our "terrorists" are busy, re - configuring the machine - to turn it into a music instrument. I am struggling to come up with an appropriate Borges like ending to this story. So I shall now end this blog and focus my energies on this story I wish to complete. Any ideas regarding the same from your end will be highly appreciated! Do share!