sometimes reading a really overpowering piece of work jolts you back into the core of being. one such piece I read and re-read after the sad passing of a special music journalist, Neil Kulkarni, early this year. this piece continues to breathe life on his beautiful, personal substack Too Much Music, framed as the feature you’d see up top: The Company Of Friends, The Miracle of BBC Radio 3, I don’t know how much of it I want to break it down here, as it needs to be digested in the ways provided by him. 

the yearning for company, the sense of belonging, the need to fill an overwhelming silence that persists for some of us through one or many of these consumable devices–in his case, a seemingly one sided relationship with a beloved radio station. there is a lot of truth when a person speaks from the heart, factually, and without fabricating or evading the confusion and disruption that can infect a mind, when following a natural direction. 

for careful observers, ones like myself perhaps, the working of the world seems almost lunatic. the illusion of happiness, the pursuit for serious contentment, the avoidance of sympathy, and the pressure for preservation of the self. the suffocation of being happy within the self, being happy for others, being lighter and lighter on the feet, when reality, brutal or not, thoroughly rinses you at every turn and the belief remains that everything is indeed perfect, and everything has turned out exactly as intended. that’s the story we tell each other repeatedly. but has it? 

a small voice within me squeaks “it has.”, I ask again, enunciating ever so clearly, “but has it?.” 

Niel Kulkarni lived 26 July 1972 to 22 January 2024, at the end/ beginning of this new year, The Wire, UK based magazine where he had been a contributing writer for nearly 2 decades, asked him to reflect on life past. this is what he wrote: 

”I was on the last train back from London Euston to Coventry in late September when I got the strangest feeling, a feeling I've never had before in my life. It was a faint sense of belonging. It had been engendered earlier that evening at Iklectik in Waterloo, where Thad conducted a Q&A with Dhangsha, an experimental sound artist and producer who I'd first heard on the Disruptive Frequencies compilation, a collection of experimental noise and electronic music made exclusively by BAME artists. Even at the album's launch night, 'we' were outnumbered by a traditional and overwhelmingly white audience. In Iklectik, strange things happened. I saw Trevor Mathison there, I chatted with hangsha, I felt a genuine sense of finding a home, of belonging. Compliments which I would normally shrink in revulsion from became things I sipped from, enjoyed, because they were being given to me by people who looked like me, people who had lived lives akin to mine. I am a different person as 2023 closes because it genuinely feels as if I've glimpsed a place I can be, a place I can stay. Black noise, brown noise is here and it's only going to get louder. I hope I can be a part of people hearing it.”

- Neil Kulkarni, On finally belonging, The Wire 479/480 January/February 2024

enjoy the lightness of the music (making up for the darkness of my text), wishing you many blissfully balmy summer evenings. back soon with more sound. xx