Welcome to Stranger Fiction.
A magazine on the art of storytelling in music and media.
My experiments with Sonic Pi: Radiohead — No Surprises.
My latest album: Akhil Srivatsan — my people are…
The Music Box: Ichiko Aoba — Windswept Adan
Hi! I’m Akhil Srivatsan and I run Stranger Fiction. I started this magazine because I love stories. Our daily lives are governed by our narratives. There’s a strong case to be made that the reason H. sapiens sapiens developed to be the predominant hominin species is because of our ability to tell stories. It’s because we could tell each other stories that we could point to the land behind the big rock and say there’s danger there, I know because I just saw the craziest thing.
Music Playlists: A Story — Back When I Was Younger
Stories of Music Discovery: The Music of Mali — Part 3
Stories to Watch: A review — i’m thinking of ending things
Every storyteller is carrying on a rich tradition that ensured the survival of this species. Every story is a vestige of the original story of human survival against the odds. Everything I do at Stranger Fiction will be an effort to share music and media that tell stories that move me. And I hope that every day, even if just for a moment, I can have you sitting in front of your screen, even if it’s at the end of a year as wretched as 2020, and forget any of it ever happened.
Here are some things you can find on Stranger Fiction.
Music of the Week
Very short pieces on interesting music.
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The Music Box
Album recommendations from across genres, geographies, languages, and styles.
Teeth of the Sea’s 2023 record, Hive, is one of my favourite records of the year. It’s a tightly produced alt-psych rock record. It’s low on lyrics, high on sonic exploration. And it manages to occupy this fairly unique space without sounding like a prog record (thank goodness).
I have yet to hear an underwhelming Thou record. A decade after Heathen, Thou’s 2024 release, Umbilical, is just as fantastic a representation of Thou’s brand of sludgy doom. Or is it doomy sludge?
Stories of Music Discovery
Articles, lists, non-album music recommendations, and general chatter about music.
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Music Playlists
Curated playlists for every mood, season, and reason.
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The Future of Media
Features on intersections between tech & media and ruminations on the future of these intersections.
Home is a ghost of our own creation: the cave – its lowly ancestor – recreated from some lost memory. Our predators are now nebulous, our prey has come to be served on china. Is it any surprise that our idea of home has become just as nebulous? Is it any wonder that home is no longer just somewhere to lay down our weapons, lick our wounds, share a quiet dinner with family?
The Boat approaches a story we’ve heard before in a way that both refrains from fetishising human suffering, and narrates it in a meaningful and unique way. A large part of this comes down to its craft: the writing, the music, the illustrations. But a large part of it also comes to its choice of medium – interactive multimedia storytelling.
With this Sonic Pi experiment, the idea was to a. see if I could compose an entire track on Sonic Pi, and b. see how easy or difficult such composition was. I set out to compose a minimal house track, now tentatively called Are Microwaves Friends? I used 808 and 909 samples to build the percussive spine of the track. For the bass and melodies, I used the preloaded synths.
To see how easy it was to arrange No Surprises by Radiohead on Sonic Pi. Every exploration has to start somewhere and my exploration of Sonic Pi has started with what I would classify as a successful attempt at coding a cover of No Surprises. Why No Surprises? Because I like it. And Sonic Pi’s default keys reminded me of the keys on the intro of the song.
Ever since I've known about live coding music, I've wanted to do it. And ever since I’ve wanted to do it, I’ve wanted to do it on Sonic Pi. But fact is, ‘ever since’ has been three laptops, eight years, zero code. Until now, that is. The prospects, I must say, are really exciting.
This a browser-based virtual room in which you can generate instrumental lo-fi hip-hop tracks that’s powered by machine learning models from magenta.js. A room loads with multiple items in it: a guitar, a keyboard, a bass guitar, a TV, a radio, view outside, etc. You tinker with each of these to either change the way the room looks or the music that’s being played.
Releases
My singles and albums.
Wonder what the point of music is on the sixth of March, twenty twenty two. Wonder if it serves the same purpose it served fifty, eighty, one hundred, one thousand years ago. Maybe six thousand years ago, that age’s Leonard Cohen wrote wryly of the migration patterns of wildebeest. I’ve been working on new music over the past half year. Here’s a pleasant house cover of the Cure’s Just Like Heaven.
Fly Me There is the first peek into the music I’ve been making. It’s brisker than the music on my people are… This is a 120 bpm minimal house and techno inspired electronic exploration. Apart from various subgenres of electronic music, you will also find the obvious influence of Indian folk and classical music. The Nadaswaram features heavily.
The latest album from the curator of this mag: a mix of electronic music, trip-hop, downtempo, and Indian classical.
The fifth (and final) single from my album is a reworking of the first demo I released from what was in April just a ‘bunch of tracks’.
The fourth single from my upcoming album, my people… I derived inspiration from a particular memory of listening to Cody from the album on an evening alone in my hostel room more than a decade ago.
descent is a track about anxiety, and I, like many people, have had mental health on my mind for the past few days, because of the tragic death of Sushant Singh Rajput. The track (and the rest of my upcoming album) is about dealing with anxiety and trying to overcome it.
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