‘In The Shadows’— My Latest Single Explores The Bombay Night & Darker Themes

“I dance around the pit, the darkness is beneath…..” — Thom Yorke (Radiohead) on ‘Lotus Flower’

There’s something about the onset of the night, that I’ve always felt comfort in; a longing satisfied, a thirst quenched. The mysterious night that follows the brightness of day. Under moonlight cover, with descending black covering the sky, and star shine, and streets lit up by street lights, winding on, after dark.

The onset of the night brings unbridled comfort which seeps into my soul. And of course it comes after the glorious sunset that signals the oncoming of the dark. I wander the streets of Bombay looking for some chai(tea) and smokes at 3 am under star-lit skies and a moonlit canopy skyline and empty streets.

I’ve never been a morning person, and I usually sleep only after 1 am. I’m more of a child of the night, that’s perhaps why I named by debut poetry book ‘The Indian Night’.

And Bombay City at night is my haven.

Although I usually do see the upside in a lot of things, just hitting play on some music and tracks with darker themes as I travel & traverse my way through my hometown city at night is something that I’ve been doing for years now; it’s a natural setting that echoes what’s my soul desires and feels; that’s perhaps why I resonate with the Blues, just like that song by Lightnin’ Hopkins “Shine on, moon. Shine on, I’m by myself.”

I’m an old Blues man. And I love the night, and grooving to the Blues & other genres of music while wandering around the empty streets of my city, is a ritual, but that’s just something I’ve done for a while.

So when I decided to produce a new single this month, taking a break from my LP, which is really upbeat & relaxing and more like beach music, I found myself only free after midnight after all the work going on, so this track that I produced was very much forged in the midst of the summer nights of May 2022.

I went with some ambient textures, and reversed samples & a dark bassline in G#, after really liking Michael Giachinno’s Batman theme, so I worked around that to create a neat little bassline.

I found some interesting kits on Battery, my drum machine, which were Battery stock, but very interesting nonetheless, I added some release, compression and delay to make the beats air and prolong a bit, and I EQ-ed the lows, so that the mids could really stand out and hit the right spot.

I also added some slight cinematic strings when the first beat nears its end. But the whole essence of the track were the beats and the bassline.

It turned out rather interesting, except for the second drum sequence for which I couldn’t find a smooth beginning, so it’s slightly off and the delay I added makes the beat kick in just after the bass notes, but I felt the off sounding beat would stand out & add its own charm, instead of being a flawless piece of music.

It’s very much like me, a work in progress, although I want to be flawless and aspire to be perfect, in all aspects of life, I’m only human and it’s a process. So that off beat, adds its own little flaw in an otherwise smooth track.

It was a track inspired by the track ‘Truant’ by the artist Burial, which is a brilliant track, and one I found myself re-listening to a lot this month and the nature of the beats were very similar to the artist Amon Tobin who is a surreal producer, like he’s up there with the most intricate & in-depth technique when it comes to production, and also some of my favourite darker sounding tracks by the artists Portishead, DJ Krush, Ghostpoet & Max Cooper.

I felt the need to express and put a soundtrack to the summer nights of 2022 which was pretty apt, because all the music I had produced last year and released over the course of this year, was pretty upbeat and relaxing stuff, with only hints of melancholy like on ‘A Bouquet Of Stars’ & ‘Brooklyn Heart’.

I like to push the genres and styles a lot with my music and always experiment, but this track turned out rather intriguing.

It’s a track I’m very happy with and it was the first darker sounding track theme I explored, which was a nice change to produce. Much like a couple of scores I worked on earlier this year.

This is for the Bombay nights of 2022,

The Indian Night,

Where I walk, ‘In The Shadows’.