Sound Levels

There’s a special animosity in my heart for sound mixers who don’t understand the concept of background music. People so carried away by this music they’ve picked out that they must inflict it onto the situation. They couple up, in my mind, with attention seekers, who simply must have part of the conversation, preferably about themselves. Chaps who don’t get what a mosaic is, even if their work stands out like a badly placed chip.
I remember disagreeing with a video editor I was working with. ‘You can barely hear it!’ he said, of the B/g music track. What you cannot hear are the dialogues, dude. As for the background score, you don’t need to hear it, it just needs to be there!
And then I knew a band once where the leader happened to be the percussionist. You know what happened next. You could barely hear the vocalist, who was way down in the pecking order superseded by the drums, the strings and even the shruti box. And there was no arguing about it. ‘Brightness’, that’s what they said, ‘we need brightness’.
Rubbish fellows.

Jaan phoolan tan laal ni

There, in the rubble, and among the drying, yellowing leaves,
a clearing of a rough sort.
A grey-white shroud lies there,
a tell-tale trickle of smoke winding upwards.
What lies beneath? Is the fire alive? Asphyxiated perhaps by a blanket of its own burning?
The evidence of the slow burn mounts on me. Till I no longer know if I’m the heart of the burning coal or just the ash.
Layers of ash.
Many layers of ash.
One breath-fan from you and the construct falls apart. Blown in the wind, strewn around like wisp, inconsequential, a pack of lies.
One life-breath and I burn red-hot again. A ruby-red chunk of live coal coming up for Grace.

 

 

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Title translates "Burns red-hot wherever He blows"
A line from Shah Hussain's kalaam Maaye ni main kinnu aakhan