Dear Faithful Vultures,

I have a new short film score out today, and it was made in the image of my friend Noah Martinez’s project, Collage. Collage (Original Score) is out everywhere, and it lives in the realms of drone/ambient, noise, and musique concréte. I had a beautiful time exploring the inclusion of tape and field recordings here, and I hope you listen to it as an element of the short film, and as a short standalone collection.

In other news, I recently released a music video for “The Altar” off of SAMSARA. I shot footage over a year or so, and gradually processed, edited, and arranged it to exhilarating chaos. A visual love letter to digital and natural decay from me.

I also recently made a live looped a cappella cover of Björk’s “All Is Full Of Love”, which is on YouTube. Björk is an incredibly influential and special artist to me. I happen to own a DVD copy of Dancer in the Dark that I’m waiting for the right time to watch. I’ve also been meaning to watch The Juniper Tree.

I’ve been thinking about minimalism in terms of compositional philosophy a lot more. This was especially important to me during the making of SAMSARA. These days, I’ll sit down to work completely a cappella, or with a single instrument most of the time. The voice is especially unique and fascinating to me — especially linguistically (phonetically and phonologically: e.g. formants, spectral mean, the physiology of the voice, etc) and as a vocalist (e.g. singing as an art form and somatic practice). I think singing might be more of a meditation to me than sitting down to meditate is.

I have also been coming back to making video art more these days, and I’ve really been enjoying this medium of creation, especially when juxtaposed with soundscapes. Otherwise, I’ve been researching (did I mention I study linguistics?), composing, and experimenting with marker drawings. I retroactively moved all Unearthly Machine interviews to Substack a little while ago. All future interviews will be published there, and then linked on my website for ease of access. Lots of wonderful conversations are taking place. Stay tuned by subscribing to the Substack mailing list (and this one, for my Planet Bones blog posts).

There’s a new (& collaborative) single coming your way in April, and I’m thrilled to share more about that soon. A song for tearing through the morning mist of spring.

Thank you always for listening & have a beautiful rest of March.

– Diya