Rishabh Iyer recalls the time he was in Kechla, Odisha. “It was this really weird monsoon, where the clouds had turned brown, and that gave everything around a brown hue,” he says.
It’s an image that’s stuck with him, making its way to his new album, Standing Feathers . The song in question is called, ‘Brown Clouds That Hold Rain’.
There’s another song called, ‘Blue Clouds That Hold Stars’, but there’s no story behind it; he just thought it sounded cool. Iyer functions under the slightly incongruous name Worms’ Cottage, writing mostly down-tempo, off-the-cuff electronic music that falls in that floating, melody-driven space of melancholia and contemplation. “I just had a déjà vu ,” he says in the middle of our conversation about his new album.
New approachStanding Feathers , which releases on Thursday, is the second full-length album by Worms’ Cottage. It releases under the Bengaluru-based independent label and artist collective Consolidate, and is available for pre-order from their Bandcamp page. A music video for one single, ‘Intransient Love’, is already out.
While his previous work — the album Tour Guide Imposter — had erratic, abrupt structural movement, often bursting at the seams with unexpected transitions lending the music a welcome twitch, here Iyer presents 12 new songs with a far more streamlined approach.
It’s still aberrant in its spirit, but Standing Feathers seems to evoke a smooth, molten rhythm. The clear sense of melody with hazy, often heavily-treated, mumbled vocals, and the far more relaxed atmosphere, is a deliberate attempt by Iyer to craft something more “homogenous” in its vision.
“I wouldn’t call it ‘growth’,” he says. “It’s just the kind of feel I was going for; this is more like background music, which is what the album was supposed to be, with very little vocals. Of course, that slowly changed when I got into it.”
Textural uneaseHis inspirations for this set of songs include James Blake, Earl Fletcher, and Great Dane, while he cites Bengaluru’s Machli as a big influence as well.
Further, Iyer speculates on how Deftones, a band he’s heard a lot in the past, and his love for metal — which is what he first started off with — could possibly be contributing factors to the feeling of textural unease that creeps in to the music from time to time. That eerie element is something other people have pointed out to him. He himself, however, often doesn’t hear it, attributing the thematic characteristic to subliminal musical influences entering the fray.
But for the most part, Iyer likes to keep his cards close to his chest, pleasantly but categorically sidestepping all my appeals to explain his process and the themes he’s shaping through the music. Most questions are met with a self-deprecating laugh and an “I don’t know”.
If I may hazard a guess, it’s probably to allow personal interpretations of his work, instead of explication.
The lyrics are often hard to decipher, and he tells me how he usually gets to them late in the process, once the music is already in place. The vague responses about the material, in a way, mirror the abstract, wafting cadence of the music itself.
Mountain loveIyer has composed (using the software Ableton on his computer), produced, and mixed the album himself, with Bengaluru’s Rahul Giri (aka _RHL and one half of Sulk Station) giving him notes for the mix and master. The songs, he says, really came into place last summer, when he was visiting Mcleod Ganj. By that time he had accumulated a bunch of tracks and began whittling them down, before getting to the lyrics.
Previously as well, Iyer has spoken of a fascination with the hills, but it’s not something that actively makes its way into the songs. “It’s more like a subconscious thing,” he says. “Not even a single track is about the hills and such. But when I’m picturing a song in my head, whatever’s happening is happening in the hills. Even if it’s about… even if I’m just talking about a feeling or an emotion. I guess I just romanticise it. It’s imagery that I like.”
Iyer, 22, is studying film at Bengaluru’s Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, and he’s originally from Delhi (or Gurgaon, as he clarifies). He’s also made the music video for the first single, ‘Intransient Love’. He started mucking about with electronic music when he was studying in Pune (for a year, before moving to Bengaluru), using the software Logic Pro on a Mac at his college after classes. “I’d stay there and play around with sounds. I play a little bit of drums, a little guitar and a little tabla. I wanted to start a band, and this was just supposed to be a side thing,” he says. That’s not quite how it panned out though, and he continued writing electronic music after getting plenty of encouragement from his brother’s friends.
He hasn’t planned anything special for the album launch, with no real blueprint to promote or market Standing Feathers beyond the music video, which is already out. The underground electronic music scene in Bengaluru has grown considerably, and most producers tend to perform live often. But Iyer isn’t sure of taking that leap just yet. “I don’t know; I don’t play live that often, because I don’t have the equipment to practice on. Plus, in general, I’m not very comfortable with playing live. I get really nervous.” He concedes that he’s comfortable playing gigs with artists he knows and likes — mostly from the Consolidate roster — and his college schedule keeps him quite busy, but performing regularly is something he’d consider in due course of time.
The author is a freelance writer
Standing Feathersis available at Bandcamp.com on pre-order at $4 (approximately Rs. 269)
