Music
Yesnomaybe probes “digital existentialism” in his debut single ‘Ashes’
Marrying his influences and ideologies rather than reinventing the wheel, New Delhi’s Yesnomaybe kickstarts a new audio-visual journey.
We live in endlessly invigorating times for music. For all intents and purposes, it seems the worst excesses from the ‘70s onwards have ceased to repeat themselves. Thanks to technology and the internet, popular music, across styles, is no longer the guarded meritocracy it had once dangerously morphed into. As a result of that, the “I prefer real instruments” purists have (thankfully) been reduced to a detritus, leaving behind a new kind of listener and fan.
It’s now old hat to discuss metal without ratifying the depth and density of visionary acts like Napalm Death and Coil, or the patient, post-metal sonora of Northern Electronics. Or to even fathom pop without the monstrous influence of groundbreaking acts like Ariel Pink and FKA Twigs, or the slap-in-the-face analeptics of SOPHIE, Arca and the PC Music stable.
Dark wave and synth-pop have become impossibly popular in a retrograde effort to scale the heights reached by late-‘70s and early-‘80s British post-punk. And hell, even the enfeebled dredges of industrial music, at least in terms of sonic sensibility, are being peeled off the insides of many a decrepit East German warenhaus to be given new leases of life in other locales of the world.
It isn’t just former Marc Almond fans and teens dressed head to toe in black listening to Bauhaus, Yazoo and Ultravox. Even Nine Inch Nails, who at one time seemed to have spiralled (no pun intended) into relative unimportance, are seeing renewed interest, especially among a younger generation of listeners.
This is partly in thanks to their commitment to both the future and past of electronic sound and their open embrace of music technology. Alessandro Cortini, that rare breed of stage musician who’s a household name on both the Sunset Strip and Berlin’s experimental nightclub circuit, deserves more credit for this revival than is currently meted out to him.
This talk of confluence, of worlds colliding brings us to New Delhi and Yesnomaybe. The brainchild of Akshat Nauriyal, the drummer of garage/noise rock band HOIRONG and erstwhile prog-rockers Another Vertigo Rush, Yesnomaybe has been self-described as a “new-media journey through the human condition. An audio-visual deep dive into digital existentialism.”
If you’re willing to take the word of mathematician-slash-psychologist Elliot Benjamin, his essay on “digital existentialism” ends with this: “The forbidden fruit is electronic and we have already eaten it. The future will not so much shock as absorb us. We, the last remnants of a nature without intention, are becoming aware of a wholly new terrain which also brings with it a terror of its own: digital existentialism, where meaning and purpose are without direction and where we are never alone.”
Make of that what you may, but it sounds like someone, maybe hesitantly, is allowing the future in.
“The idea with Yesnomaybe is to integrate all my creative vices into one project so that they can talk to each other rather than pull me in different directions,” says Akshat. “As an artist, I work a lot with augmented reality, film and motion graphics, and am interested in creating immersive audio-visual experiences.”
Akshat has a few in the chamber already for his upcoming project Pastense that, according to Nauriyal, has enough material to merit something in between an EP or an album’s worth of music. His first single ‘Ashes’ and the video for it dropped towards the end of June.
On ‘Ashes’, Nauriyal finds a pocket common across Cortini projects SONOIO and modwheelmood, plus the kind of shanked-and-ready melancholia fans are used to from the likes of Beach House, and of course, Nine Inch Nails.
“A lot of Trent Reznor’s projects are a heavy inspiration and Cortini has of course been an integral part of those,” Akshat confesses. “The abrasive yet melodic aesthetic and hopeful cynicism that comes through SONOIO’s sound is definitely something I resonate with, though I wouldn’t say it has been a direct influence. But glad you feel that way, it’s a stellar reference to evoke so I’ll take it.”
As for what’s on Akshat’s playlist currently: “It’s quite mixed and ranges from shoegaze to prog so it's a bit all over the place,” he says. “Thom Yorke and Trent Reznor are ever present. Other bands like Grizzly Bear, Deerhunter, DIIV, Washed Out, Karnivool, RTJ have been regulars. But the one that I vibe with the most recently has been Jack Stauber who makes these weird video sketches with songs. Morose and playful. Just how I like it.”
The video for Ashes, that uses a set of custom-built augmented reality filters, fits in with a number of current trends and also calls to mind the work of the recently-deceased experimental filmmaker Thomas McMahan, known for applying his signature visual aesthetic to the works of Drab Majesty, VR Sex and Trentemøller, among others.
With Yesnomaybe, Akshat joins the canon of new, hybridised, genre-be-fucked outfits that are slowly taking the place of past entities that most often outstripped terse genre descriptors. The word “shoegaze” is, after all, evocative of something other than musical form.
At a time when kraut and British bands, arguably the natural heirs to this sound, are instead churning out radio-ready fluff, their American counterparts – the likes of Choir Boy, Youth Code and Drab Majesty – are seeing independent radio plays and album sales stack up. Even Hayley Williams (yes, that Hayley Williams) seems to have gotten the memo.
In a similar vein, ‘Ashes’ cavorts in that playlist-ready space for fans teetering on the edges of traditional music before free-falling into contemporary electronic music’s wholly-democratic abyss. You could hardly complain.