BENGALURU: City-based ambient producer Eashwar Subramanian’s upcoming EP – Random Hues – comes shortly after his third studio album Across the River, which he released in late February this year. As is the case with most ambient music, the idea behind Random Hues is to provide a calming sonic palette that listeners can ease themselves into as they go about their daily chores or retreat to a personal space at the end of a hard day.
“The end goal of the music has always been to help listeners find some kind of balance in the midst of pandemonium and unrest. I feel the album is particularly relevant in today’s reality as people battle with uncertainty every single moment,” says Subramanian, who wanted to fill the listener with goodness and peace through this album.
The EP, which is set to release under city label Subcontinental Records on August 1, offers six tracks. Subramanian states that while work on the EP started around the same time as Across the River, the period of development, however, was much longer. Unlike other albums where he was composing tracks every two days, here Subramanian took as much as a month to put out a new track.
Calling it an iterative process, he explains, “When I started on this album, it was just about three tracks, but then with the pandemic setting in and engagements on other projects, it took as much as a month in some cases to finish some tracks, which had been laid out in December.” Speaking about the songs, he states that for the most part, the tracks would create imagery that resonates with the listener’s state of mind. “Ambient works lend themselves to a story that the listener is playing in their mind at any given point in time.
So my hope with the album is that it serves as a soundtrack for the mindscape of the listener, taking them from a point of abstraction to a certain space that’s their own,” he explains. Unlike his previous works, Subramanian has attempted tweaks with some tones and textures that oscillate between a conventional musical structure to an abstract-like approach.
While the current year has been musically busy for Subramanian, the ongoing pandemic has also shifted his focus on releasing singles every month as a means to support people. This year will see him go live with his material, which he asserts has now taken a back seat. “The idea has been to create a sonic experience over a visually appealing one and I feel that ambient music in the current time is best heard in isolation,” he says.