This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic. I was reviewing Afternoon Ragas: Bhimpalasri, Multani, a collection of recordings by Nikhil Banerjee.
I usually listen to this album at night or in the early hours of the morning, not in the afternoon. I’m not doing this on purpose to rebel against the conventions of the tradition, but the classification of scales into categories has never struck me as anything other than an arbitrary quirk of a culture that seems to like dividing things up into little bits. British afternoon sunlight isn’t like the Indian stuff anyway, in Britain the very sky appears to despise us.
It is sometimes suggested that evolving to walk upright was a bad move on the part of our ancestors. The spine has to curve into an S shape to not obstruct the birth canal and keep our centre of gravity forwards. This shape shouldn’t really work in an upright stance upon which we balance our massive heads, and so back pain is a ubiquitous part of the human condition.
The text for my review of Jakob Ullmann's Fremde Zeit Addendum 5 reads: A human has a face which means they must necessarily face some direction. This is unlike, for instance, a tree, which has no face or front or back and so points in every direction at once. Yesterday someone pointed out to me that trees actually do face a direction: straight upwards. This is something that they have in common with humans. Plants grow straight up because they need to catch the sunlight. A 2019 paper by astronomers Adrian Melott and Brian Thomas from the University of Kansas points out that our descent from the trees coincides roughly with nearby supernovae bathing the Earth in cosmic rays, leading to atmospheric ionisation and electron cascades that would have increased lightning strikes, causing rampant wildfires and forcing us out onto the savanna. So, it may be that we stand upright because of sunlight, just like the trees do.
As for the music, it’s incredible and I can’t think of anything to say about it other than that. It warms me up, which would make it like sunlight if I happened to ever go outside.