Hindustan Times
My trainer is an ogre and I’m his guinea-pig. Or, his lab rat at the gym. What else could explain the torture he subjects me to every morning? Pull-ups, push-ups, presses of different kinds, squats, deadlifts…. till everything becomes a blurry haze and my body feels as if someone’s put it through a sugarcane juice maker. Of course, I willingly do his bidding—in what you could call a valiant attempt at postponing the sag of age with the help of a quotidian dose of extreme physical discomfort. It would be unfair to blame my trainer for what I go through every morning because the poor chap is only trying to help me do what I’ve signed up for. But it is a tough proposition: he is an insistent coach, firm and no-nonsense, but that alone is not nearly enough to see me through my workouts. For that I have to reach out for music. Read more
(3 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by Sanjoy Narayan on Friday, October 22, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Filed under Download Central · Tagged About Face, Actor Out of Work, All Things Go, Antenna, argus48, Barbara Streisand, Black Keys, Crystalised, Dear Science, Download Central, Duck Sauce, Fables of The Reconstruction, Genius, Grizzly Bear, Horehound, I Saw The Light, Indrajit Hazra, iTune, iTunes music library, Jack White, Kid Cudi, Ludacris, Modest Mouse, Murmur, R.E.M., Reckoning, Sanjoy Narayan, So Far From Your Weapon, Sonic Youth, Spoon, St. Vincent, Surkin, Temper Trap, The Dead Weather, The Eternal, The Radio’s Crying, The XX, Transference, Twitter, Veckatimest, White Knight Two
“But let’s talk about you for a minute, with the vomit at your gullet, from a half bottle of vodka that we’d stolen from the optic. On the back seat of your car because it wasn’t safe to start it, you were ‘far too f***ed to drive’ were the words that you imparted. And the woolen dress that clung so tight, to the contours of your body. And the dead grass stuck to fibers from us rolling in the layby, were passed to dog-hair blankets that protected the bench seat covers, and a crucifix was hung from rear-view mirror by your mother.” Read more
(3 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ...Posted by Hindustan Times on Saturday, May 29, 2010 at 6:34 pm
Filed under Download Central · Tagged A Passion Play, argus48, Craig Finn, Daft Punk, Download Central, Gareth, Ian Anderson, In Media Res, Is Love Forever?, Jethro Tull, Los Campesinos!, Morrissey, Moullinex, old on Now, Plan A, Romance is Boring, Sanjoy Narayan, Spoon, The Hold Steady, The Hype Machine, The Lover in Me, Transference, Twitter, We are Beautiful, We are Doomed, Youngster...
As I write this (and roughly a week before you read it), the mother of all music festivals is underway at Austin, Texas. It’s the South by South-West festival, commonly referred to as SXSW, and has been on for the past 23 years. In 1994, in addition to music, SXSW included film and interactive media conferences and has now become an important fixture on the world’s film festival circuit. But it is the music that is at the core of SXSW and what really excites me about this annual festival that happens in March. Read more
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...Posted by Sanjoy Narayan on Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Filed under Download Central · Tagged 100 Days, 100 Nights, BlueDisguise Records, Bob Dylan, Britt Daniel, Dark Eyes, David Greenwald, Dirty Projectors, Download Central, Free Energy, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Gimme Fiction, Holy Fuck, I Learned the Hard Way, Jim Eno, Latin, Local 638, menwhopause, Message to Garcia, National Public Radio, NPR, Rachel Flotard, Rawkblog, Sanjoy Narayan, Sharon Jones, Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, South by South-West festival, Spoon, SXSW, Tom Ridge, Transference, Twitter, Visqueen, When The Saints Go Marching In
The first Sigur Rós album I heard was Ágætis byrjun, which means ‘an all right start’ in Icelandic. Sigur Rós are an Icelandic band that plays a genre of music that is classified (by those who love to classify such things) as post-rock, minimalist, ethereal music. I found Sigur Rós’s music mainly downtempo and soothing but also sad at times. I heard several of their albums, including the curiously named () (released in 2002), Takk (in 2005) and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (2008). That last title translates into ‘with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly’. Nice, isn’t it? I don’t know why, but the band’s music sometimes reminded me of a huge, widescreen film where the camera is static and the visual is of a wide open landscape.
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(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ...Posted by Sanjoy Narayan on Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 8:03 pm
Filed under Download Central · Tagged (), Ágætis byrjun, All Songs Considered, Audience of One, Behave Yourself, Bobby Charles, Boy Lilikoi, Britt Daniel, Cold War Kids, Contra, Daniel and Eno, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, David Edwards, ethereal, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Gimme Fiction, Go, Hospital Beds, Jim Eno, Jónsi Birgisson, Loyalty to Loyalty, Martin Scorcese, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, minimalist, NPR, Pitchfork, post-rock, Radiohead, Roamin' and Ramblin Blues', Sigur Rós, Sonic Youth, Spoon, Street People, Takk, The Band, The Last Waltz, Thom Yorke, Transference, Vampire Weekend
