Notes from Echoes (vol. ii)
white magic, black magic
Notes from Echoes vol. i was about the generalities of the contemporary music festival and the particularities of Echoes of Earth 2023. It concluded that we may be condemned for having too good a time in an increasingly transactional and commercial enterprise, that nonetheless provides us with music, art, food, liquor and an antechamber to socialize, to be “boisterous and juvenile”. The fact that we find enjoyment despite the commercialization and control, that we find enchantment in that curated slice of spacetime connecting with people, art, music and all the festive human self-expression around has us slip-sliding on the way to becoming condemned.
But the contemporary music festival is a hypersocial environment, perhaps to understand our need for enchantment we ought to look at a more elemental form of self-expression, the one that happens in a conversation, the one you share in the intimacy of a pair. Coincidentally, I shared two distinct sessions of banter, or of chilling or hanging on the second day of Echoes, the first Sunday of December. For the festival was only to resume in the afternoon, I had crashed at my friend’s the night before, and I had to meet another one who’d rolled into town. And then ofc, there was all the mayhem of Echoes.
The second day of Echoes entailed indulgences of all sorts, from wholesome interactions to illicit vice, they can be termed black magic and white. But underlying all of it was the space for self-expression and the external recognition of the self and said expression. These fundamental needs are what the company of another or a carnival of larger numbers provide, something that we are condemned to seek out.
I’m a Lacanian like that. I believe, in his statement that all Desire is a desire of the Other’s desire, and ultimately is a desire for recognition. That’s how conversations go. For imagine talking to somebody with a bullhorn for a head, where you get no inch of space to speak, no courtesy, no recognition; the only desire you have then is to get out of the interaction.
Now, that cool, grey Sunday morning I was at Rudraksh’s and the horizon looked positively packed with expectations. There was time; time for both meeting my out-of-towner friend and for the Echoes to resume. There was time to kill and time for big chill.
No topic is safe from our discursive wrath; artistic ballet-like violence in movies (John Wick’s patrician superiority, Animal’s plebian inferiority) versus gruelling gritty violence in the likes of Green Street Hooligans. The desktop is the hearth and YouTube is the flame, we start sampling different scenes of violence, till we bounce off to check out a 1980s vintage anime on biker gangs in dystopic neon Tokyo, which catalyses a discussion about the prospects and potentials of Indian cities transforming into dystopic neon Tokyo.
An F.D. Signifier thumbnail provokes us two Indians to discuss race relations in America before diving into the more generalized right-wing-left-wing (conservative-progressive) schism. I launch into a tangential spiel about my half-baked ideas of conservatives understanding human psychology better than progressives.
‘How so?’ asks Rudraksh in good faith.
I fumble and mumble through a pastiche of references to the Ancient Greeks, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis. If it were a debate I’d be smoked.
And speaking of smokes, and drinks – I had earlier proclaimed that I’d moderate, borderline abstain, to keep myself clear and crystal for the day. But, somewhere in the excitement of listening to Seedhe Maut or Talha Anjum, I suggest we pour some gin for ourselves while puffing on my third or fourth cigarette, to which Rudraksh reminds my previous declaration. We find ourselves cycling through music, Yung Lean, Teezo Touchdown, Yves Tumor, Soichi Terada and Caroline Polachek, and sipping gin soon enough.
Time flies when you’re having a good time, and you’re having a good time when you can express yourself. For within that self-expression, and the acknowledgement of those in whose company you act, is the momentary fulfilment of our desires. The desire of the other’s desire, the desire for recognition, and there we were – ping-ponging ideas, aesthetic sensibilities, and notes on the human condition.
I’m perhaps four glasses down as I move towards the door, feeling particularly buoyant and sentimental about the time that passed, the time that was supposed to be spent waiting for the other plans of the day to progress. Such is the sentiment that a part of me wishes I could while away more time talking tangents and guzzling gin. I make my way to the door explaining the need for balance in my music platter, the need for my soul to listen to both angelic pop and demonic trap.
Rudraksh concurs, and asks,
‘Do you have Gemini somewhere in your star sign?’
Why? Yes! It’s my rising.
The scene at the Airlines Hotel only reaffirms. I’m catching up with a friend after almost half a decade; so, it’s a different, a distant perhaps even a more delicate dynamic. I don’t remember if it begins smooth or stilted, for the tints only tend to get rosier in recall. But we’re already rambling soon enough. At least I am.
Rambling about my plans of gonzo journalling Echoes, about the difficulties of being switched on and actively observing, jotting down observations, perhaps even striking conversations with other festival goers. I find an empathetic ear, for she knows a thing or two about the whole business. Not long after, I’m lecturing about my thesis of the contemporary music festival being the authentic collective religious ritual of our (post)modern times, about how bodily, how corporeal it all feels.
‘And how do you feel about that?’, she asks.
I tell her I love it. Once more, I’m on a tangent on physicality and modern society’s contentious relationship with it, and then once again regurgitating the Ancient Greeks and Nietzsche. She’d later tell me, much to my dismay, that I sounded like a right-wing fascist called the Bronze Age Pervert. And much to my dismay, upon looking him up I could see how I’d be coming across like that.
Nevertheless, the half-baked, confused ideas were entertained genially. We exchanged other notes on life; of train rides and airports, and the potential awkwardness in starting a conversation with travel companions and then being stuck in it, or having to endure silence. And other such kaleidoscopic tangents.
When you find the space for self-expression, and find it acknowledged, not accepted or challenged necessarily, nor dismissed, but acknowledged, you may find sufficient conditions for enchantment. For there, the Lacanian desire for recognition finds temporary fulfilment. Again, as with the morning, spacetime was imbibed with too much levity, for it zips past fast. The natural punctuation of finished food and beverages offered us our queue to cut, she said as much, since I had to go Gonzo the events of Echoes.
But she has time to kill before her next tête-à-tête, I tell her I don’t mind going late. I don’t care if I miss Mansur Brown.
If you recall from the previous entry, I was thoroughly unacquainted with any of the music acts at the festival, and thus had a good-humoured indifference towards them. And once again like the morning, I wished to stretch out the time talking tangents. So, I order coffee again, but as it is with enchantment, the bargained time flies by fast. And as departure goosesteps closer, she asks,
‘Do you have a cigarette, or did you stop smoking kya?’
Chris Gabriel’s MemeAnalysis explains the symbolism of smoking, and why it's cool, beautifully. Smoke has always been ritualistic; we derive energy from it, from the spiritual incense stick to industrial fossil fuel, to the cigarette. But I do believe there’s another reason why it’s cool; for between lighting it up and ashing it out you bookend a slice of time. You smoke alone you’ve bookended time for contemplation or meditation; you share a smoke you’ve bookended a conversation; time encapsulated within that ritual, deriving energy. That’s enchanting, that’s magical. Smoking is cool.
But it’s also cruel, for it can become all-consuming. It can become addicting. It does become addicting. It’s the properties of nicotine, but also our own pathological tendency to become obsessive-compulsive. Perhaps that’s why it’s more of a black magic artefact.
All things enchanting consume you; they immerse you, play with your senses and your sense of spacetime. A conversation, a walk, a view, music, or a painting or food, all have it in them, but they don’t provoke the obsessive-compulsive very easily. They are family-friendly, they are white magic. Then there’s liquor, drugs, and smokes; they stoke and provoke the obsessive-compulsive, shortcut our way to enchantment. They must be black magic. But where does sex fall in? Or for that matter, where do music and dance fall given they are haram for the Taliban? Where does food fall if beef and pork are taboo? Why are they starting clinical trials with psychedelics, why are they using black magic on poor unsuspecting patients? Everyone knows freedom of speech (thus conversation) is dangerous; just ask totalitarian to explain it to you.
‘Come to Serpent. Front left corner. All the way to the front.’,
are the instructions I receive from Roshan.
Back in the action of Echoes, I find my way to Serpent, the EDM stage. The air is rambunctious. I was worried about the weather on my way to Echoes becoming increasingly belligerent and cold, the breeze at the expanse of the parking lot was biting. Inside it’s corporeal. Body heat all around.
Of music and divinity, and thus by extension magic, Rudraksh once stated that the physical phenomenon of harmonics and the culmination of the aesthetic sense we call music not just in humans but birds and animals too would be a definite reason one cannot rule out the existence of the divine. Thus, magic.
I take some ludicrous liberties paraphrasing there.
But Serpent was a testament to the fact. The crowd I walk into is under the spell of Takuya Nakamura’s manipulation of harmonics, which unlike yesterday’s deluge of dull monotonous sets has colour and character. The beats are relentless but parsimonious enough to allow the bass to breathe a groove into it. Everyone once in a while Nakamura slices the sound with his trumpet.
Dance is a primal form of self-expression; you do it when the vibe is right when you feel it; the sound and space right then and there had slapped the self-consciousness out of everybody. The crowd is in the throes of mass hysteria. I make my way to the “front left corner”, murmuring my “excuse me’s” as I manoeuvre.
‘EXCUSE ME!’,
shouts a woman in my face, before returning to the collective mania. Probably some playful psychosis, I presume.
I find my crew in the middle of the mayhem and jump right into it. Nakamura silences the crescendo he’s been cooking, a fleeting pause before the drop, you can feel the crowd’s expectation overshoot and then return to the space of suspense and silence. It’s brief and all quiet in anticipation, only for a flash. Then flashpoint: all 150+ bmp (or whatever, I wasn’t counting) comes back crashing to puppeteer our spines.
Some of the crew wanted to go off to check out the act on the Tusker stage, but we were all held hostage by the man on stage. Only after the set ended did we leave for Tusker.
I was catching Mansur Brown after all.
Despite my unfamiliarity, I catch up with the hype engulfing Tusker pretty fast. Mansur Brown and Co. make a good case for instrumentalists occupying near pole position in live music, the visceral sounds they create in real time. The percussion and the bass create a tight pocket for Brown’s lead to skateboard around, he launches into long ornate tangents, then abruptly stops, allowing everyone to digest all the jazz, making his guitar moan in flashes during the lull, and then runs off along another tangent.
‘The pauses…they make you drown!’,
Rudraksh to Vishal.
Vijay howls “Mansoooor Braaooon”, in these pauses that submerge the rest of us. He’d been perfecting the shoutout all festival. Even blundering through the very audible shoutout to Takuya Nakamura as “Matsooomoto” – the name of a different group who played yesterday. We conjectured Nakamura must have just found it a little amusing and not too offensive hopefully. All that practice was now paying dividends, the precision and power of his shoutout makes Mansur Brown blush.
The music, the shoutouts and the swaying are all symptoms of enchantment, all magic phenomenologically trapping you in the moment with abandon. It entices you, encourages self-expression, whether a head nod or a hip sway, whether a shoutout or a stank face, a ritual like the contemporary music festival offers up a space to do that with a collective. You see a reflection of your feelings in others; you see the Lacanian playout. You see a momentary fulfilment of your desire for recognition, for in the shared enchantment you see the momentary congruence of your and others’ desire. The desire to vibe.
Towards the end of Mansur Brown and Co. I bump into my friend once again, the one who was an ex-colleague about half a decade back. He introduces me to his crew including the rapper MC Couper, and as we stand conversing my crew trekking out of Tusker bumps into us. And as concentric social circles and Venn diagrams go, I find out that my ex-colleague played football with Vishal.
And ofc, he asks me again,
‘You on something?’
I wasn’t planning to be. In fact, in the weeks leading up to Echoes, I actively eschewed it, with the delusion that I’d keep myself clear-headed to solemnly take my notes on the event. I failed sobriety yesterday. I failed it this morning, and now came the final frontier. For to be “on something” is to industrially validate all the woo-woo I’ve been spilling out in these passages. In the colourblind world of moral myopia, most would term it black magic, should they subscribe to our ad-hoc taxonomy. Biochemical alchemy.
‘I think the four of us will definitely do’,
states Vishal, casually including me in the quartet. Sometimes it’s good to let a friend speak for you.
Operations are hatched to prepare our black magic potions. Along the way Vishal and I find ourselves separated from the rest of the group, amidst the rush and the crowd in the food court area of the festival. We bump into a trio of Vishal’s friends from Delhi, plonked on the ground feeding a stray dog with a napkin around their neck.
We hang around talking, Rudraksh calls to drop the location; I pick up and simultaneously talk to him, and to Vishal and his friends. I also spot and wave to my senior from school and her toddler way down by a momo stall. Juggling multiple avenues of communication, all careless and carefree. Callous too, for Rudraksh hangs up out of annoyance. One of Vishal’s friends tells me he had second-hand anxiety watching me right there. We have to force ourselves to hustle and return to our group; for we were sinking in the desire to while away the seconds, while another thing of excitement awaits; a feeling I’d been accustomed to all day.
We sit on the ground, at another corner of the food court, amidst the pitter-patter of footsteps all around. Some of us are eating dinner; all of us, save for Vinita, are stirring, slurping and sharing cups with that black magic potion. We got our eyes out for boots on the ground, shadily looking all around. I’d observed a security guard dragging a guy in a hoodie very clearly narcoticized earlier on when I arrived at the scene; the poor dude was trying to sweet-talk the fascist and weasel out of his clutches, dismay and an intoxicatedly serene acceptance battling for the control of his facial expression. We just wanted to exercise some caution while we undertook our ritual, be lowkey and relaxed while we partook in the magic.
‘Aww! Y’all look so cute sitting there.’
A stray compliment by a girl walking with a group catches us. We are sheepish and startled, we are deer in headlights. Some of us manage to mutter meek “thank you’s”, as she exits our frame.
You feel it in your diaphragm, you feel it levitating, and then you feel lightheaded. We discuss the effects and the onset. It hits us that things are changing. Things start to feel unnecessarily humorous and endearing. On my detour to the restroom, before rejoining the group at Tusker, I find myself smiling like a goof overhearing a conversation of two dudes discussing their fits; I find myself smiling at the organizing staff sitting in the water tanker grooving to the music in the atmosphere; I find it endearing that a couple is bearing the dusty, the scraggly shrubbery and anaemic privacy for hoochie-coochie. I even find a guard clicking a picture of the giant chameleon art installation endearing.
This is voodoo in effect.
Back in Tusker, Jitvam winds down his set, we only catch the dregs of it. Roshan and Esha decide to linger around there and wait for the next act; the rest of us decide to venture back to the Serpent stage and experience the electronica. We find ourselves among the bodies on the marching trail from Tusker to Serpent, two cups of our black magic potion split between the four of us, Vinti not requiring any of it to be on that plane. Our walk is languid and gung-ho.
Vishal and I are at the front of our cabal. Suddenly, a stocky, sleeveless, and goatee-ed guy enters the scene attempting to foster some festival bonhomie. He asks for a “cheer” with his beer can, and I oblige. He lingers indulgently.
‘Aye, what you drinking?’, he asks.
‘Liquor’, I lie.
‘Chug then!’, he raises his beer again.
‘You should be the one chugging.’ Vishal interjects.
‘I’ll chug if you will’, he cackles countering. We cheer again, he chugs, I sip. He cackles some more.
‘What you got in there, huh?! C’mon, tell me.’, he starts reciting the alphabet. ‘What is it? A, M, E, K, L…’
‘L, I think.’, I say, letter-grading his behaviour.
Vishal grabs my shoulder to halt by the restrooms, while the little gnome is carried off by the momentum of the march on the Serpent trail. The rest of the crew behind us think it very thoughtful of us to stop at the bathroom stalls. As they make use of the opportunity, Vishal and I bitch about the recent encounter; he could’ve been a narc, we realize. He just wanted to “bro out”, but in the end, he just made us squeamish, by showing us that he too “knows”, that he too is in on it. Perhaps, it was well-intentioned humour, but it did not make it less cringe, less clumsy, or less annoying.
We change our minds about going to Serpent, for the sound feels too garrulous, and detour into a cove with a light exhibition splattered across the trees. The incessant blare from Serpent and the general noise all around take a more calm, soothing and ambient tone; the green light show dancing around only exacerbates the chill.
We proceed to roll a hash joint to further augment our self-inflicted voodoo. As we come close to sparking it up, two gregarious ladies approach us asking if they can share the one bench table to roll their own joint. We are happy to oblige, they are happy to offer us their smoke, but given the abundance of our own stock, we politely decline.
I disassociate and watch Rudraksh and Vishal put surgical final touches to the joint, and Vijay and Vinita lost in dancing to the leaks from Serpent. I observe the other two visitors chattily chatting away, rolling their own; once in a while they grunt and grin towards us, as we do to them. By the table with only one bench, in the wood, we smoke and they smoke.
They were a contrast to the man on the marching trail. For they were to us, as I hope we were to them, accommodating and genial. The guy on the trail may have “cheered” and exchanged more words, but you do not force connections, nor self-expression; all you can force is an interaction. In our non-conversation, while we chatted on our own, and they joked on their own, all kinds of self-expressions from all sides ensued, and sometimes overlapped.
We exit the thicket, thick in the zone, already lighting up cigarettes for more smoke, more magic, feining a higher degree of pathology. My jaw wants to grind. The walk to Tusker feels airy, we are all smiles to each other. Sheepish, goofy smiles.
A smooth tenor voice is layering the atmosphere. Sid Sriram has begun.
We join Roshan and Esha, also gleeful and goofy, near the stage front. The crowd’s gathering for the closer at Tusker. The sky that held itself overcast and cloudy throughout the day begins to give away. Only through a drizzle though; but the bright stage lights glint off the raindrops. And we love it, for it's childishly marvellous. The stagehands putting makeshift shamianas over the band on account of the rain go to do the same for the frontman, and Sid Sriram speaks pointedly,
‘I don't need that.’
The crowd roars with emotion, for it's like daddy has seen us, and chosen to joined us in our sorry soggy situation out of solidarity. The music continues. He croons, we swoon. A lot could be said about his vocalizing, the passion, the inflexion and the cadence, or a lot could be said about the inebriation and awe I was in throughout all of it. But suffice to say, it all got over too fast. That damned levity of spacetime. The damned enchantment.
I go to fill water in the empty cup, with faith in the science of half-life and residues. A guy among the throngs of bodies moving past the water tank looks to me with a drunken smirk. We start talking on autopilot.
‘Fuck water man.’, he says
‘Fuck water? No man, water is life’, I say
‘No man...music is life … what do you think?’, he counters.
‘Ya man… we're all one’, I say grasping for a truism we can both conclude on.
His parting smile and fist bump suggest reasonable success.
The events come to a close but unlike yesterday night's bottleneck traffic-jammed rush of bodies, this time people dawdle their way out, the organizers and security forces are empathetic, allowing the laconic pace. We go check out more of the art exhibitions and flea market; my jaw really wishes to grind itself industrially; we all talk and comment, sometimes just saying things as a physically compulsive reflex; without really registering or over-registering all that’s being said waves upon waves of biochemical and hormonal alchemy inducing euphoria. Every comment we make to each other follows a lagged registration and response from the other, while we get distracted by some other marvel.
Vijay gets the incendiary impulse to spend all the money still left in his wristband, he picks up food, artefacts and all he can. “Burn money, burn money”, is his declaration, he vanishes with Vinita and Vishal into the ether, while the rest of us bovinely stand around. It’s not even midnight, there’s a whole lot of night, a whole lot of intoxication and self-expression yet to unfold.
Having gone hyperbolic on an unassuming music festival, on the interactions with all the people I met over that weekend, ascertains that nothing and nobody is safe from the pontifications of someone with ambitions to do the writing. However, inherently there is a deep conviction about the magic of things, especially when the more ordinary routine of calendar days carries you away from such high-spirited times.
The more Dionysian of the magics, the music, the dance, and the substances encourage the juvenile and the infantile in everybody, we look for pure self-expression, identification and satiation. Adults are supposed to be serious, reserved, and measured; yet, often it’s just not true, for adults exist in humour and enjoyment even as real life continues its crusade of sobriety. Of things like conversation and food, perhaps you need to be particularly sentimental in the moment to see their enchantment; of a sunrise, or a thunderstorm perhaps it’s easier; of music, art and dance nobody not fundamentally insecure, repressed or indoctrinated can deny their marvel; but of the substance – of smokes, liquor and drugs finding exaltation in these passages, one can say they are true black magic.
Magic that’s dark because of their powerful psychoactive and addictive properties, but also because of the mirror they hold of our propensity for pathology. No doubt they are dangerous, only insofar as we don’t properly know how to use them, thus, we abuse them.
Of that black magic addiction that’s demonized, the renowned psychiatrist Gabor Mate has this to say (once more in paraphrase): that most often it is [childhood] trauma that leads to the obsessive-compulsive chase of the high. A multidimensional dysfunction leads people losing themselves to the darkness, for they internalize their need for self-expression, their desire for recognition, finding no acknowledgement and or encouragement outside. For the magic of the substances ultimately is to transport you lightspeed to some kind of childlike wonder, one ultimately hollow if it isn’t backed up by real life; it traps you in a cycle of escapism, sucks you into a life-denying infantilism divorced from universal spacetime.
I must take care in exalting them therefore; explicitly say, it’s all the enchantment found in everything else – the music, the cool weather, the social festivities, and of course (badgering the point some more) all the interactions, the self-identification and self-expression with all the unassuming people across the day (even the little gnome had something valuable to offer in hindsight). The tobacco, the liquor and the “black magic potion” serve only as icing to the enchantment.
The contemporary music festival is a site of Dionysian human rituals, vital magical artefacts of life like music, dance and social communion brew alongside artefacts eschewed by square societies of control; things vital yet taboo like primal heat and sexual suggestion, and things supplementary but potent like drugs; magic both white and black have always are been part of their DNA of the music festival, the ones tracing their lineage through Woodstock. If the music festival is condemned to be commercialized, we are condemned to seek out self-expression, recognition and good times.
