Minor Scale

I’m helping a friend make a demo tape of sorts. Not that I run a shop to help burgeoning artistes, but I happen to be the only one in the area who has the bare-bones equipment to record & reproduce her vocals. Plus, she makes a killer Paav-Bhaaji, which probably tempted me enough to lie about my skills.
We have since ripped a Asha Bhonsle Karaoke CD, and recorded her vocals on top of coupla instrumental tracks (along with that annoying guide track that sounds like Kumar Sanu with a massive cold). I spent some time “mixing & mastering” the tracks. The quotes are there to indicate that I have no idea what I’m talking about. Or maybe I should say, I spent time letting the software do “stuff” to the tracks, while I randomly clicked on ‘Filters’ & ‘Effects’ that I thought sounded cool.
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At the Rahman concert in LA, I saw him working with two columns of stacked synthesizers, one hand on each pile, picking out the chords to his superhit songs. Or atleast that’s what I thought. I now realize that atleast one hand had been composing for Anbe Aaruyire in the middle of that show. And after having watched the trailer for the movie, I’m surprised he even bothered. For what it’s worth, he seems to have given SJ Surya what this impending disaster of a movie deserves.

Also, I’m glad he made this decision.

Link:
A-Aa Trailer (via Tfmpage.com)

Bollywood is lucky that M.M.Kreem pays them a visit once in a while. And lucky for me, he never lets go of Shreya Goshal. After Paheli, he is back with Kasak. And in Saansein Madham Hai, he has Shreya belting out a winner. The arrangement is vaguely Rahmanesque, but having listened to a lot of M.M.Kreem, I realize that the song has his composing style written all over it (or maybe it’s just that he has reused one of his Telugu songs that I might have heard before).
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Thazham flower has got wet!
It’s time to wear in the hair!
Wet breathe which has become hot
Has made a burnt on the shoulder!
There is hundreds of talks with the sight!
Words have become unconscious!
Enough, God of Lust!
Both the souls are breathing hardly!
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“Another Ilaiyaraja symphony? Another monumental masterpiece that mankind will never get to experience?”, sneered the cynics. Their jest was not misplaced. After all, how could a symphony performed by the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra not find a way to be released to the masses? I was equally perplexed, and never usually discussed it with the handful of Ilaiyaraja fans I know. It was not something we liked to talk about. Hype kills, and it was never better demonstrated as with Raja’s unreleased “Symphony #1″.

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Bundle of Greens, Invigorating Embrace
Uproot me, my love

You’ll ask for the greens, and the invigorating embrace
Take a flight into bliss, my dear

Take me to a lonely place
Kiss me and have me
Butt me like in a taming bull game, my dear

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Where I live, a good Indian restaurant is as much of a rarity as a good Kumar Sanu song. And South Indian? Fuggedaboutit! So it was with much fanfare that a local version of Udipi, that brand name synonymous with lip-smacking South Indian food, was opened in the area. I don’t know about lip-smacking, but compared to the sambhar at a local Punjabi place that tasted like Chicken Makhani sans chicken plus sambhar powder, the Udipi version was easily forgiven for its own failure to comply with standards set by its predecessors back home.

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I’ve noticed some visits to the page in search of, what I think, is information on Ilaiyaraja’s “Thiruvaasagam in Symphony”. If anyone is looking for information on where to order the CD in the US, here is the link to the page from where I just placed mine!

Thiruvasakam in Symphony - Order Page.

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Reading about music directors travelling to exotic places to draw inspiration for an album, has always brought to me images of both film-maker & composer exchanging ideas, perched on a tree stump in a forest clearing right out of LOTR, birds chirping in the background and autumn leaves collecting around their feet. I’ll have to redraw that image now.

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I’d been sitting on these Javed Akhtar lyrics for quite some time. Not sure if they’ve been set to tune before, but I kind of liked its flow. And I’d also been thinking about using an instrumental called “Closing Question” by this trip-hop band called Purple Penguin. So yeah, it all came together tonight…Javed Akhtar’s ghazal set to tune - trip-hop style!

(I was too lazy to play any music on the track. I’ll maybe add an instrumental track later. Also, forgive the singing.)

Mp3 Link to the song, Kaisi Aavaaz Hain.

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Related Link:
My other shameless use of an existing track. (Mp3 Link)

Adding to the long list of Tamil-prefixed domains (State, Tricks, Beat etc) is TamilRevolution. Not a lot different from the others in terms of content…DivX, Mp3s, Remixes, Original songs. Wait a minute. Maybe a tad different after all. A composer called Reagan has one of his songs on the site as a free download. Going by the quality of their remixes, I expected a track with beats splintering across my headphones to cause me more distress. Nah. In fact, a very decent composition. I reminded myself that this was some dude in a self-made studio working with limited resources who came up with this. And the reminder helped me appreciate the song more, and ignore the Yuvan Shankar type singing and the quality of the mix (the vocals get drowned in all the music).

Link:
Oru Nathiyin Peyarodu

A perfect mid-June Sunday night, and what better setting to dump a few link-lists (C/C++ freaks…breathe in…breathe out. Different kind of link-list. You know what? Let’s just give the IIT-ians & BITS-ians a reason to hyperventilate).

Warning: May not be suited for the workplace, but then maybe most people who visit this blog do not work in a church.

From the demented mind of Maddox - 5 unintentionally x-ual Comic Book covers
From the mental drippings of Pork Tornado - 10 of the Worst Album Covers
From the comedy bloggings of Arj Barker - #10 in his upcoming list of Worst Book Covers

I lurk around mp3 blogs and acquire all the free music I can (and some of them are awesome!), but ’twas a strange path I took to get to Fredo Viola…via Anil Dash’s blog. But I’m glad I got there and some of you will too. This has got to be the most innovative video I’ve seen in a long time. The song by itself might sound tiresome, but after having seen the video, it’ll be on my next compilation disc.

via. Mobile Jones

The video was created entirely using 15 second jpg movies from my little Nikon Coolpix 775 still camera, reconstructed in AfterEffects.

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ITwoFS has more information about the ‘Black Eyed Peas’ hit single, ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart’ . While I thought it was only the intro that had been borrowed by the Peas, it is now revealed that the rest of the song is lifted from another Kalyanji-Anandji number called Ye Naujawan from Apradh.

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Two stalwarts of South Indian Film Music celebrated their birthdays in the first week of June. While SP.Balsubramanyam reached the cusp of 60-hood on June 4th, Ilaiyaraja turned 62 on the 2nd. Raja’s birthday was all the more cause for celebration with the formal announcement of the release date of his Thiruvaasagam in Symphony project.

Thiruvasagam by Ilaiyaraaja” will be released on June 30, 2005 in a grand event to be held at the Music Academy, Chennai. The CD will be released in the US, at the “Tamizhar Thiruvizha” Annual Tamil Convention during the July 2-4 weekend in Dallas, Texas. More details to follow.

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