'Cobblestones and Kitchari' is a sound work about loss, grief, family and love. Writing began in January 2013, the month my father died and was completed in 2020. The work is presented as a continuous narrative exploring places and events from my life, through childhood, his illness and his unexpected death. Each of the works included are produced from sounds connected to my Dad, his immediate UK and extended Indian family. The individual sections are expressions of sonic memory, audio testimony and the shifts in the perceptions of those memories over time.

My Dad arrived in the UK in 1972, from Bombay, and married a woman from Preston, Lancashire, my lovely Mum. They built a life together in the mill town of Blackburn in the North of England. As well as being a portrait of my family, this work also explores transnationalism, and minority identity formation and is in many ways an ethnographic study through the prism of sound.

Each element has meaning and purpose which all reference different times in my life, for example, there are field recordings from numerous places in Blackburn, particularly Larkhill and Ewood, where my Dad worked for over 30 years. In one of the tracks these field recordings are mixed with narration from my Uncle Swaminath, my Dad’s older brother, telling a story of how he helped him in his journey to the UK, how my Dad met my Mum and the reactions of the family to their marriage. This mixing of a recording from Bombay mixed with the sound of Blackburn creates a double exposure. The context of my Dad having the openness, strength and love to lead this mixed heritage family is an important part of the story, the process of mixing as an act of resistance against the constraints of tradition, both Indian and British, and the history of cultural mixing between the two countries is long and intense, and has a mirror here. This is also represented in diversity of audio testimony throughout the work; that of the voice and the memory, but also the complex story of place, movement, diaspora, work, family and technology; all integrated into the process of recording, editing and recordings of objects.
I am proud of the way I have played the idea of movement of memory across space and time, by way of example using historic field recordings from India and the UK, sampling the singing of Indian cousins.

Other compositional tools used to maintain connections with, or at least to translate memories of my Dad into sound, were to write 90% of the pieces at tempos which derived from his birthday: 1.5.46. I have also used ‘cracked media’ techniques to generate sounds. By doing so I created a unique sounding object and indelibly drew together the memories of the record with the memories that my brother and I spoke of in our speeches at his funeral. Here I took an important record from my childhood listening, "The Adventures of the Great King Raam” by The Floating Stones, and carved my brother, my eulogies and the Shanti Mantra, which was read at my Dad's funeral by my Uncle Raju, onto the surface of the album.

Once again and throughout this work I am playing with the complex and multilayered ways in which we hear the world over time and how this coalesces around certain musical and sonic materialities. The playback of the record and the sampling of its subsequent fractured sounds, forms the basis of a couple of the individual sections of the work too.

Experimental turntable practices have been used on records that my Dad liked such as Simply Red, Barbara Dickinson, and 'Please Don't Go' by Them, which is one of the last songs I heard on the radio in the hospital before my Dad died. These records have been used in sonically uncomfortable ways, playing them manually at extremely slow speeds, sticking things to them to make them loop, and warping them to replicate the idea of the way in which our memories of songs and the memories attached to them, can drastically change over the time of our relationship with that piece of music as the years go by.

The technique of melding no-input mixing, hand made tape loops, alongside more traditional digital sampling techniques has resulted in a diverse sonic palette in the work, which is representative of the range of influences of my multicultural background. This is exemplified by the way I have collated samples via whatsapp, instagram posts, or gifted CDs, but all are connected to my family in some way, and so there is an indeterminate nature to the collection of the sounds. Many of the works also feature recordings of household objects from my parents’ house. For example my Dad always had toothpicks on him and the percussion sounds on some tracks were made by manipulating recordings of toothpicks, other percussion sound are made from the bowls and jars he used on his shrine whilst praying. Contact mic recordings of the carpet evoke memories of watching telly, where I would run my fingers through the carpet pile. So everything the listener hears has a connection to a recollection. The narration of poems I have written reflects my experience of his loss, a form of my own sonic testimony, but it also represents the sound as a translation of this journey, in many instances working with these sounds has been my guide helping me understand the my own grief.

This work is an exploration of the transitory points of listening and how they change and change us over time. Acts of listening and creating memory are in constant flux, not fixed. Making memory and identity formation is dynamic, non-generic and a labile process especially through traumatic times. It is the merging of spaces, places and objects, it is skewed repetition, its is voices unremembered, fragile and moving, timbres rather than words, one sided conversation, echoes and the liminal intersections of dreams, perception, reality and emotion, it is not just one song. These memories coalesce around words, move across worlds and drift as people, either absent or present, adding to the layers we accrue over time. They become the threads in the fabric of who we are and the practice of our everyday lives. Movements, re-tellings, gestures, and their concomitant sounds both recorded and transient, rest in these liminal spaces, and maybe that's where this should be heard.