Day Is Night Diaries: Podcast by Starcracker

Starcracker
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Meditations on music and creative process with Doug Carraway and Akhila Ramnarayan. starcracker.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 10/18/2024

    Day Is Night Diaries: Episode Six | The Fold

    Hello there. It’s been a minute, for which a certain someone entrusted with the task of posting Episode Six of Day Is Night Diaries in September is solely to blame. We won’t say who dropped the ball, but if you’d like a hint, the culprit is one of two members of the indie rock duo Starcracker (preferred pronouns: she/her). Anyhow, better late than never and all that jazz. Or should we say rock? For that is the genre we — Akhila Ramnarayan and Doug Carraway — will be talking about most in Episode Six. You’ll hear how we arrived at “The Fold,” the fifth track on Starcracker’s album Day Is Night, a song that commemorates a strange (maybe) first date and somehow also seamlessly braids together the Muslim adhān/azan (call to prayer), driving rock guitars and drums, sound samples/loops evoking the grittiness of east London streets, and a sudden whiff of Carnatic melody at the close. “The Fold” might be our only banger, and deserves a special mention just on that count, but we also talk through how it shares sonic affinities with the rest of the tracks in terms of production. Deceptively simple and straightforward, it’s the dark horse on the record, as we hope you’ll come to see. And if you listen till the end, you’ll notice we arrive at our core philosophy/approach as musicians as we decode our process for this track, which seems fitting. If you’re at all curious, visit Substack to see the photograph taken by Akhila in London on a fine summer evening in 2023 that inspired the song. Another latent influence on the song, discovered in hindsight, is Rosmarie Waldrop’s profoundly stirring and decidedly enigmatic prose poem “Conversation 9: On Varieties of Oblivion,” which you can read here. Other musical artists/acts referenced, glancingly or otherwise, in Episode Six include: * Alanis Morissette (remember when she burst on the scene? The drama…) * Blur (we love this iconic music video for “To the End,” a tribute to the 1961 French new wave classic “Last Year in Marienbad”) * Laura Marling (drop everything you’re doing and listen to “Patterns” now) * The Japanese House (tell us you’re not utterly enchanted and uplifted by Amber Bain’s voice in “Sad to Breathe”) * The White Stripes (it had to be Seven Nation Army, yes, if you’re thinking Meg White drums?) To hear more about her experience of going to the Blur reunion concert at Wembley with Abhinav, check out Akhila’s column in Rolling Stone magazine’s India edition, published August 5, 2023. An announcement of sorts: this will be the last you’ll hear from us in a while on the podcast. We’ve had a lot of fun reconstructing our creative process and musical journey for ourselves and anyone who cares to listen, and are game to do it again when the occasion arises. But we must now crawl into our respective caves in the attempt to write new material, something that requires a bit of distance from the record that went before. We need to clear our heads, in other words. So it’s bye for now, and time for us to make some noise far from the madding crowd. But never fear. We’ll be back! PS. If you liked what you heard on the podcast and want more, feel free to check out the other five episodes of Day Is Night Diaries. In Episode Five, we contemplate “Kintsugi,” a song inspired by the ancient Japanese art of ceramic repair. Episode Four tells the story of “Bismuth,” our tribute to neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2015). Episode Three unpacks “Stuck Record,” the final song on the album, consequently the deepest cut. Episode Two takes us to “Hello Lenore,” a song haunted by Edgar Allan Poe and friends. Episode One features "Question," the opening track on Day Is Night, with which, arguably, we found our sound. Day Is Night Diaries is Starcracker’s attempt to document how we work as an indie rock duo across continents, as much for ourselves as anyone else. If you're a fellow creativity/process geek, performer/writer, or long-suffering friend/family member related to either of us, do subscribe, if willing, for free. Happy listening! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit starcracker.substack.com

    37 min

  2. 08/23/2024

    Day Is Night Diaries: Episode Five | Kintsugi

    Can broken be beautiful? In Episode Five of Day Is Night Diaries, Doug Carraway and Akhila Ramnarayan unpack “Kintsugi,” the sixth song on Starcracker’s first album, a song inspired in theme and form by an ancient Japanese art of ceramic repair. As always, if you’d like to listen to the song “Kintsugi” before tuning into the episode, it's available on all streaming platforms (search for the band Starcracker and our album Day Is Night). The musicians referenced in Episode Five are Tchaikovsky, Billy Joel, Zayn (formerly of One Direction - yes, we kid you not), Billie Holiday, Billie Eilish/Finneas, Fiona Apple, and Jim Keltner (the link takes you to a fantastic Dead Wax interview by Jack Conte and Ryan Lerman, where Keltner talks about his drumming career playing with a pantheon of greats). If this is your first time listening to Day Is Night Diaries, and Episode Five has sufficiently piqued your curiosity, there’s four other episodes on creative process to explore. Episode Four is devoted to “Bismuth,” a song we wrote in honour of legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2015). In Episode Three, we try our best not to sound like a “Stuck Record” while talking about our song of that name. In Episode Two, we reflect on “Hello Lenore,” inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s muse. Episode One is dedicated to "Question," the first track on our album Day Is Night. Day Is Night Diaries is Starcracker’s attempt to document how we work as an indie rock duo across continents, as much for ourselves as anyone else. If you're a fellow creativity/process geek, performer/writer, or long-suffering friend/family member related to either of us, do subscribe, if willing, for free. Happy listening! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit starcracker.substack.com

    40 min

  3. 07/09/2024

    Day Is Night Diaries: Episode Four | Bismuth

    In this very special edition of Day Is Night Diaries, we bring you the story of “Bismuth,” the third song on our album Day Is Night. The track is inspired by neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks and his love of the element whose atomic number is 83, the year he did not live to see. We dedicate this episode to the “poet laureate of medicine” and “godfather of neurodiversity” on what would be his 91st birthday (incidentally the atomic number of a silvery grey, radioactive chemical element called protactinium). Originally appearing in The New York Times, the essay “My Periodic Table,” in which Sacks describes his feeling towards bismuth, can be found in a slender, stunning collection called Gratitude (Knopf 2015), with some lovely accompanying photographs by his partner, Bill Hayes. Both of us — and — had previously encountered many of the closely observed, moving, and poetically crafted case histories for which Sacks is famous - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,  Awakenings, Musicophilia, Hallucinations, to name a few. But Gratitude struck a personal chord, as we discuss in the episode. Even though it’s already on our album, we decided to release Bismuth as a single today, July 9, 2024, in honour of Sacks’s birthday. If you’d like to listen to the song before you check out the episode, it's on all streaming platforms. Or, if you’d prefer, you can watch and listen to the minimalist lyric video we made in keeping with the austere simplicity of the song on our YouTube channel. To achieve the elemental/ethereal sound we decided on for the song, we thought a lot about vocal treatment. Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek”  and Bon Iver’s “CR∑∑KS” are not specifically referenced in the episode, but both these songs famously exemplify the “vocoder” effect that helps make “Bismuth” a standout track on our record. On the writing front, if you’re curious about Oliver Sacks, you can visit the author’s website, managed by the foundation in his name. Steve Silberman’s article in Wired magazine is a wonderful introduction to Sacks’s writings. “Swimming with Oliver Sacks” is a moving personal essay in the New Yorker by Henri Cole. And don’t miss this beautiful piece by Bill Hayes in The Guardian, in which he writes of going with Sacks to meet Björk in Iceland (yes, you’re reading that right; we flipped, too)! Cultural artefacts that draw from Sacks’s life and work include the 1972 poem “Talking to Myself” by his close friend WH Auden, recited here by the poet himself, and here by Sacks; Harold Pinter’s one-act play A Kind of Alaska (1982), inspired nine years after the original book’s publication by Sacks’s Awakenings, which was in turn made into a motion picture starring Robin Williams (as Sacks) and Robert de Niro in 1990; Björk’s visionary album Biophilia (2011) for which Musicophilia was an impetus; and Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, an award-winning 2021 documentary by Ric Burns. If you like Episode Four, you might also be interested in our other conversations on creative process in this podcast. In Episode Three, we talk about the last song on our album Day is Night, titled “Stuck Record,” while trying not to be one ourselves (nice, eh?). In Episode Two, we talk “Hello Lenore,” a track inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and sundry other ghosts. "Question," the first track on the record, is the song we look at in Episode One. Day Is Night Diaries is Starcracker’s attempt to document how we work as an indie rock duo across continents, as much for ourselves as anyone else. If you're a fellow creativity/process geek, performer/writer, or long-suffering friend/family member related to either of us, do subscribe, if willing, for free. Happy listening! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit starcracker.substack.com

    31 min
  4. Day Is Night Diaries: Episode Three | Stuck Record

    06/19/2024

    Day Is Night Diaries: Episode Three | Stuck Record

    A musical slugfest with an unlikely lineup that includes grunge, spectral folk, some oh-so-English poets, punk, classic rock, Greg Kinnear, and the Carnatic-tinged blues? In Episode Three of Day Is Night Diaries, we, Doug Carraway and Akhila Ramnarayan of Starcracker, delve into the creative process for “Stuck Record,” the tenth and last track on our debut album, Day Is Night, which dropped on March 1, 2024. What’s in the name, you ask? Listen, and all shall be revealed. If you’d like to experience the full song before or after you check out the episode, here’s a peek. The musicians referenced in Episode Three are Pearl Jam, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, Chris Cornell, The Beatles, The Decemberists, The Crane Wives, and Queen. Four that were left out somehow (how could we?!) are the Arctic Monkeys, Le Tigre, Fleet Foxes, and the Sex Pistols. The writers we mention are Coleridge, Tennyson, and Shakespeare, though the pre-Raphaelites (Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and John Everett Millais, whose 1851-52 painting Ophelia is part of the visual palimpsest below) also have their rightful place in the mix. Glass-ceiling smashers Ada Lovelace (incidentally the daughter of swashbuckling Romantic poet Byron) and Clara Bow get a shoutout towards the end. And last, there’d have been no pep-talk-riddled middle verse in “Stuck Record” without Greg Kinnear’s sidesplitting, heartbreaking portrayal of motivational speaker Richard Hoover in the 2006 motion picture Little Miss Sunshine, and no song whatsoever sans postcolonial studies. Curious about what came before Episode Three? In Episode Two, we discuss “Hello Lenore,” a track haunted by Edgar Allan Poe and other named and unnamed nineteenth-century ghouls at an English tea party. Our inspiration and creative process for "Question," the first track on the record, is the subject of Episode One. Day Is Night Diaries is Starcracker’s attempt to document how we work as an indie rock duo across continents, as much for ourselves as anyone else. If you're a fellow creativity/process geek, performer/writer, or long-suffering friend/family member related to either of us, do subscribe, if willing, for free. Happy listening! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit starcracker.substack.com

    32 min

  5. 05/19/2024

    Day Is Night Diaries: Episode Two | Hello Lenore

    In Episode Two of Day Is Night Diaries, we -- Doug Carraway and Akhila Ramnarayan -- talk about “Hello Lenore” (think Victorian tea party, Edgar Allan Poe, attendant guests+ghost, cucumber sandwiches, and big storms brewing), the ninth track on our recent album Day Is Night, reflecting on the song’s inspiration, writing, arrangement, and production. If you’d like to check out the song before or after listening this episode, here’s a link. Artists mentioned in Episode Two include Jacob Collier, Joanna Newsom, Madison Cunningham, and Sting. And, of course, the song wouldn’t exist without Poe’s poems Lenore and The Raven. In Episode One, we talked about our inspiration and creative process for "Question," the first track on the record. Day Is Night Diaries is our attempt to document how we work as an indie rock duo across continents, as much for ourselves as anyone else. If you're a fellow creativity/process geek, performer/writer, or long-suffering friend/family member related to either of us, and willing to give our podcast a try, do subscribe on Substack for free. Happy listening! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit starcracker.substack.com

    38 min

  6. 04/18/2024

    Day is Night Diaries: Episode One | Question

    Hi there. It’s the eighteenth of April, the perfect day to drop the first episode of Starcracker's first ever podcast, Day Is Night Diaries. Be warned, this is a longish note, one that’s launching the podcast. We promise to keep the ones that follow succinct. But first, introductions. Starcracker is an intercontinental indie music duo comprised of and , friends since 1997 and collaborators since 2019, based in Columbus, Ohio (US), and Chennai, Tamilnadu (India), respectively. On March 1, 2024, we released our first ever full-length record called Day is Night. It’s an eclectic mix of genres — indie pop, rock, folk, singer-songwriter — with lyrics that reflect a literary bent; vocal melodies subtly inflected with the Carnatic classical tradition of southern India (among many other things); and organic, driving instrumentation layered with modern pop production. In Episode One, we talk about our inspiration for "Question," the first track on Day is Night. We revisit how we built the song (Doug's favourite on the record), taking it from an initial idea to the production finish line. Feel free to check out the mixed and mastered audio track above and/or lyric video below, either before or after you listen to the podcast episode. We think maybe our back-and-forth about the song -- every "um," "uh," "ah," "you know," "kinda," "sorta," and "feel like" intact! -- could be useful to others who work collaboratively, on music and otherwise. But we're doing this just as much for ourselves, to learn, as for anyone who's remotely interested.  Seriously, though. Why a podcast? We’re two odd birds who’ve lived and breathed music pretty much all our lives, trying ourselves to understand how on earth we dreamed up Day is Night, an entire ten-song album, across time zones, without ever meeting, and with such relentless focus in the space of roughly a year and a half. With more songs in the pipeline, our musical obsession/partnership feels like it’s here to stay. The podcast format seems ideal for us to recall and break down our creative process. We’d like to figure out what to keep, what to discard, what to build on, and how we can do better as songwriters, performers, and producers. Plus, since we’re each genuinely curious about the other’s journey with every song, recording ourselves discussing them doesn’t have to feel awkward or forced. We can be our usual goofy selves, talking — and occasionally bickering — like always. As of now, we're planning on one episode every month, featuring different songs from the record. So stay tuned. Oh, and happy birthday, Doug! We’re keeping up what has quickly become a tradition of starting a new music-related adventure on each of our birthdays. Today is Doug’s, and we couldn’t be happier launching Day Is Night Diaries to celebrate. Now we're talking (get it?). We’d love to hear from you. If you're a fellow creativity/process geek, performer/writer, or long-suffering friend/family member related to either of us, and willing to give DIN Diaries (had to do it) a try, do check out Episode One and tell us what you think. Comments? Questions? Talk to us. We’re excited to join conversations, and to share ideas across genres and idioms, through this podcast and other channels. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit starcracker.substack.com

    37 min
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Meditations on music and creative process with Doug Carraway and Akhila Ramnarayan. starcracker.substack.com

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