This past Saturday, the first volume of Nishcom Music Service was released on Bandcamp. The release coincided with the first Nishcom Music Service live performance, at Hangar in Barcelona as part of Anòmia Acció #20.
Nishcom Music Service is a project that has its roots in the mid-winter confinement of late 2020. I had bought a Yamaha DX7 with the plan of remembering how to play the keyboard and perhaps adding some synthesizer sounds to my Unchained recordings. I soon found that the DX7 was leading me in musical directions that didn’t necessarily fit with the guitar-centered scope of Unchained. Around this time I was also getting deep into Vedanta and yoga, reading Swami Sivananda, Eknath Easwaran, Ram Dass, and others. From this spiritual perspective, playing the synthesizer seemed to allow me to break out of certain ego-oriented creative habits that I had developed with Unchained. At first I was just recording things played on the synth direct to tape, and writing little chord patterns and melodies without any very specific musical end in mind.
On a hike in the Buëch in February 2021—it was sunny, blue sky, the snow and ice melting and sending little trickles of water down the path—the idea that would become Nishcom Music Service came to me in what I assume was a moment of divine inspiration. I would create a new collaborative project that would allow any number of musicians to work together towards a common goal. In this formation, music would become less about personal expression, and more about providing a service, and would bypass the personal interests that make most musical endeavors ego-oriented. Certain stipulations made themselves clear in this inspired flash and were developed over the next few weeks:
The music will be distributed free of cost, so that the possibility of making money from playing music never becomes an issue. Even though, in these days, the risk of actually making money from music is rather limited, this stipulation makes it clear from the outset, before a single note is played, that material profit will not result. Any donations or fees received will be reinvested in producing and distributing the music (paying hosting fees, mastering, etc.) and any leftover profits given to charity.
The music should ideally be produced in collaboration with others, so that the music is not the reflection of a single ego. I considered whether the performers should be anonymous or not, but I felt that anonymity was an inverted expression of ego. Instead, the performers on a release will be listed by name, but not credited for individual performances or compositions. (I should note here that I have so far failed terribly with this stipulation, but I hope to change that with Volume 2.)
The music should be harmonious and should contribute to the listener’s well-being. Like sattvic food, the music should nourish and leave no ill aftereffects. This goes against certain imperatives of “serious” modern music, wherein music should challenge, disturb, or disrupt.
The music should be plentiful—i.e., the songs should be very long. If the music is being provided as a service, the listener should always have enough. The goal is not to make a perfect four-minute song that leaves the listener wanting more. The music should not be a snack or an amuse-bouche, but should be a copious serving that guarantees satiety. In my initial flash of inspiration, I decided that the songs should be a minimum of about fifteen minutes (ideally longer), and that each volume of music released should be at least three hours long. (In this I was also influenced by Hindu devotional bhajans, which often repeat the same basic form for thirty minutes or more, and in doing so allow the listener to enter more deeply into a devotional mood; this is also inspiring as a form of musical minimalism that has nothing to do with white intellectuals from New York.)
Following one of the basic lessons of the Bhagavad Gita, the performer of this music should not be concerned with the end result while playing (with “the fruits of your actions”). The performer should be in a physical and mental state of relaxation while playing, and to this end they cannot be concerned about making a mistake or attaining perfection. Following from this, the performer must not desire to impress with their playing. This effectively separates the egocentric interest of displaying one’s own technical mastery or talent from the service of providing pleasure to the listener.
The general aim of the project is to develop an approach to music production as “disinterested action,” separating the process of making music from the various egocentric interests: material gain, emotional expression, desire for recognition, esteem, or admiration. In this, the project is bound to fail, but in resisting the natural ego-centrism of music-making, I believe some progress can be made. (It should also be made clear that this is not intended to criticize other ways of making music, or to establish of the only acceptable way to make music, but is simply an attempt to develop different ways of approaching music-making.)
The first volume of Nishcom Music Service was released on Bandcamp as a free download and is 182 minutes long. It features eight songs performed with the DX7 over the past ten months or so. The shortest track is fourteen minutes and the longest forty minutes. I have tried to include interesting and complex melodic and harmonic elements that go beyond the basic pentatonic forms used in much new-age and ambient music. I want the music to borrow from the complex modes of jazz and raga, as I think an overwhelming pentatonic focus can have a numbing, tamasic effect.
For the first NMS concert, in Barcelona last week, I played three songs from Volume 1: “Siddhi,” “Tyaga,” and ”Mudra.” I was playing the DX7 standing up, accompanied at times by a tape machine playing backing tracks. The concert was in a large black-box theatre space (the Sala Ricson at Hangar), and the audience was seated in socially distanced chairs throughout the room. My main goal was to remain relaxed while playing, and to achieve a kind of meditative trance similar to what Shivkumar Sharma describes in this interview:
[W]hen I play my music, let me tell you what happens. I come on the stage. I’m conscious of the fact that I am playing for certain people who have come from near and far places. They have got certain expectations from this concert, and [I] have got to finish my music within a certain period of time. But once I start playing, and everything is OK—there is no distraction, sound system is perfect, not distracting me, and everything goes well—then after a while I forget that I am on the stage. And music for me is meditation. And I don’t go on the stage, and I don’t make an effort that I’m an entertainer, I’m there to entertain people. I feel music for me is a kind of meditation, is a kind of prayer which gives me a spiritual high. It gives me a kind of bliss which I am sharing with the audience.
In this I was partly successful, as I felt relaxed when playing, and I succeeded in entering a trance where I was about seventy-five percent oblivious of the audience’s presence. However, the concert lasted one hour, and as I stood there playing with my head bent down towards my keyboard, my neck and upper back began to ache from not moving. So I was in a kind of painful meditative trance, rather than bliss, and I wonder if the audience could feel this through the music. Afterwards I felt physically exhausted and mentally discombobulated and had to go sit down in the corner of the room and bring myself back to normal. But overall I was happy with how it turned out. People came and went during the show, and many stayed for the whole hour. One friend gave me the best compliment I could have hoped for: he said that before the concert he wasn’t feeling great, and after the concert he felt much better.
My most obvious failure has been to do everything by myself so far with NMS, and I realize that fixing this will be the biggest challenge for me. With the second volume I will be gathering contributions from people—a rhythm track, a chord progression, some loops or samples—that I will piece together and combine in something that reflects a communal Nishcom aesthetic (i.e., something more than just my own personal idea of what Nishcom is or should be). Navigating this tension between my own aesthetic vision and the contributions of others will be a difficult but productive test.
If anyone wishes to contribute to NMS, please contact me directly. I hope to release Volume 2 before the end of the year. I will also eventually be putting NMS recordings on streaming services, and I would like to start an online radio station playing a constant stream of Nishcom Music.