In Search of Kadipatta Trees

Whenever I’m trying to remember what I was doing at any time in my life, what I was raging about, loving, hating, crying about, I open my voice memos app. The app is a box of musical surprises, in some ways. A 17-minute voice note of my wandering brain trying to find a melody to some lyrics I wrote. A 7-hour-long one to decode how often I grind my teeth in my sleep. Seven minutes to document a cab driver honking non-stop. I spend a lot of my time wondering how no second on earth goes without someone honking on the road, and if we gather all those seconds and make a 2-hour track, it could still sound melodious in a counterintuitive sort of way.

All these soundscapes exist across places; they don’t exist in isolation, and they are part of a universe of sounds that constantly create melodies that people then turn into music. To bring attention to the sounds that accompany us through our days, often without us realising, this audio work titled ‘In Search of Kadipatta Trees’ was conceptualised, so named because I sing under the name ‘kadipatta’ (curry leaves in
English).

There is sound in chaos and dissonance – there is sound in eerie calmness. All the instantiations of music in my audio work intend to reinforce the significance of music as so much more than raving about bands and attending live concerts; that music is always around the corner to surprise us, whenever we’re caught paying attention. And this piece of work is a reminder for myself and for the listener to allow ourselves to be surprised, welcomed, inconvenienced, and ultimately known through these sounds.

Artist Bio