Electronic musician and music critic Abhi Meer was giving finishing touches to his new long-form composition when we spoke to him. He didn’t mind the intrusion. Rather, he happily made space amid the hurly-burly for a chat. Fusing digital synthesis, vintage organs and exploratory 3D worlds, the inspiration for this installation came when his focus shifted from sound creation to sound reproduction. “I wanted to give equal weight to how music could be experienced in large, enclosed settings and utilise some new technologies that would heavily impact the overall listening experience,” he says.
This was furthered by Meer’s chance meeting with Justin Barrington-Higgs of Metro Modular in Berlin last April. Barrington-Higgs, who was developing a series of synthesiser modules that would aid in experimental sound installations, understood what Meer wanted to do.Two months later, Barrington-Higgs implemented one of Meer’s spatial sound distribution ideas in one of his pieces of upcoming hardware. By this time, Meer had also shifted his attention to digital synthesis over analogue and began composing pieces of music on pianos and organs.
Meer is currently waiting for Barrington-Higgs to complete developing his machines and has in the meantime, also reached out to an LA-based animator and VFX artist. Given the current situation he, however, says that any formal announcement about the project may take a while.Meer’s recent show ISOXIA, part installation-part sound art performance, was broadcasted live from Method Art Space in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda.
With the show, the gallery opened its doors for the first time since the lockdown. Primarily inspired by a passage in Volume 12 of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung’s Collected Works, the show was a five-day snapshot of Meer’s life at home as a composer who has interacted with very little of the outside world in more than four months. The show had Meer recreating his living space in the gallery and moving parts of his home production studio there for the duration of the exhibit. The event was also remotely painted by New Delhi based artist Nayana Keswani, also known as The Bayless Ray, and the 20 hours of all-original music will soon be recorded and released.
Previously, Meer’s experimental show, Sunday Service, was a one-time performance at Mumbai’s Control ALT Delete festival in early 2019. The show got Meer to use his modular synthesiser to recreate the sounds of church organs and compose a short live musical score focusing on the organ sounds. Another of his shows, SPEKTRA, which debuted at the 2019 Magnetic Fields Festival in Rajasthan, was informed by the concept of spectralism—a tendency in contemporary art music that takes the material attributes of sound as the point of departure for composition.
Meer’s chosen point of departure for SPEKTRA was the ravanahatha, an ancient Rajasthani string instrument. For the project, he travelled to Rajasthan months beforehand to locate and purchase the instrument, study its characteristics in detail and learn how to play it. Thereafter, he recreated its drone-like sound using several synthesiser modules and also used recorded bits of the actual instrument to create percussive noises by applying a technique called granular synthesis.
Meer says that the near-complete lack of social interaction has profoundly affected how he creates, interacts with and listens to music. During the lockdown, he has been utilising his time to create and develop new musical ideas and concepts. With new music releasing soon and some more towards the end of the year, he hopes that he gets to DJ in a club soon enough.