Havelock

Received

Picture via Dhruv
Self timer
Udaipur Old city

Тоска

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

- Nabokov. 

Ambience

What's indispensable is the ambience track, Suresh was telling us two years ago in our sound workshop. Most people overlook it but when you're sitting down to mix your sound, you'll know that if you don't have ambience from the same place where you took your dialogues, then, you're pretty much fucked. 


So, while Shaina and Ashok are still away and all is still here, let me describe to you the ambience of CAMP.


CAMP is dense. The small studio space is occupied by many computers and their subsequently numerous external drives. To fuel the army of machines is an army of extension plugs and to relieve it, fans.  Camputer.org, as you may have noted, has a lot of data in one place constantly being updated. The machines stay awake night and day, humming always their assigned frequency, deviating from them only to include the hungry force of the inverter that supports the air-conditioner. 


There is a hierarchy of hums within the room:
The ceiling fans with one wing looser than the others
The table fan that cools the skeletal CPU structure with many hard disks appended to it
The hard disks themselves
The high-frequency hiss of the plugs
The distant cloud of sea-sand-person-sweat that is Bombay


And the sounds from outside pervade the room like stones of different sizes fill a jar:
The gaps between the occasional airplanes
filled by stronger punctuations of crow calls
filled in by the finer punctuations of sparrow calls



Mix this particular (particle-ar) paste of sounds with the sticky coastal air (into which, as Tanvee pointed out, the fish give up their body-water to become preservable during the upcoming monsoons - more on it later...) and you have the ambient track that settles over my skin and ears. My computer did manage to perceive/record this sound but I'll let the imagination of it be my postcard to you, with love. 

14xzoom - way of seeing