cellcousin

Valentine's Day:-(

Babe wake up, new cellcousin playlist just dropped. Feb 14, 2024

yes, yes, love is everywhere, couples are gripping sweaty limbs extra tight today and my eyes become slits. a natural physical reaction for when you feel disgust. you squirt your eyes and scrunch up your nose to take in less sensory information. i don’t need this sensory reminder that others have already found their half that makes them whole.

i have spent so long enjoying my own company. i have forgotten how it feels to be embarrassing and in love. and then, i am speaking to one of my girls - a long distance boyfriend in another continent. we’re sitting on my living room couch, her body angled toward me, head resting on her hand she’s thinking… looking at me from somewhere far away… “but i wonder i wonder what i’ve missed out, what i will never be able to explore, because i’ve already found my one.”

this is kelvin walkway, the best walk near my house. a meandering path and there is always something new. yesterday i met a man who used to design graphic t shirts for a living. he complimented my hair and said he also used to have crazy spiky hair when he was younger. he said he wanted to stand out but he didn’t want to be seen.

that’s not me. i like to stand out and i like to be seen. who i am makes sense to me. but only because i spend so long hanging out with myself. a crush is beautiful because it’s all-consuming, i think about her all the time. when there is no crush, true, there is an empty space (that feels emptier on a day like this) - but the value of empty (or silence, or unstimulated) is something we are all having to relearn.

no crush no thoughts, i listen to this music when i am a leaf in the wind. while the halves can have this valentine’s day, this playlist is for the wholes 💗🕳️🕯️

click the spotify playlist beside me to listen!

New Age of South Asian Electronica

Electronic Music, Oct 31, 2023

Was galavanting around glasgow necropolis (spooky!) listening to @_slyn___’s RA mix which featured Enayet, Bangladeshi-born New York-based musician. It made me happy to see our artists have reached the glasgow homies, a hopeful new wave of south asain electronica - digging through his discography a bit, found this talvin singh remix of his track “Phiriya” (When I return) which brought me back to this little writing i did on our main man. 🫶🏼

Here you can watch british asian soundsystems, a doc on british south asian electronica scene in the 90s 👾

The clip (13:37) begins with legend bobby friction talking about the shift from bhangra club day parties (brown kids having fun, rebelling, going out in the day bc their parents won’t let them at night) to essentially brown IDM (british asians wanted to consolidate their own identity independent of asia and the uk - the music became more thoughtful, political) i liked what talvin singh said here. art provides a valuable lens to view colonial structures with. as minorities we are conditioned to see ourselves as oppressed. there is always a huge weight on our shoulders. the systems have all this power over us. that is undeniable, but this art provides an alternative perspective; we recede to the essence of indian spirituality, before colonialism, see it for its beauty on modern terms. give the culture back its power. shed the insecurities of not fitting into a white world through realising how much more there is. things that are greater. that your culture has the key to.