Music reviews

To and fro, Mohan Kumar ,Snakeland Music

An exciting driving force
Music for driving has become a genre by itself. There are songs on the automobile theme like ‘Baby you can drive my car’ by Beatles and ‘Fast car’ by Tracy Chapman. There are songs on the theme of driving like Tom Petty’s ‘Life is a highway’. Then there the are songs for long drives, fast driving, late night driving and truck driving. There are entire albums of ‘driving’ music (‘Uptown girl’ by Billy Joel qualifies as one).

Top Gear, a BBC television series about motor vehicles, primarily cars, has released several collections of “driving songs” on CD. There are also ambient/instrumental music to calm the nerves for nerve-wrecking city driving.

The album To and Fro, as the name suggests, is instrumental/ambient music for driving. But it could also be ambient music for the lounge, lobby or elevator. The eight tracks hope to complement various moods and emotions as the songs proceed. The album starts with ‘Country side drive’, an even-paced composition designed to evoke moods and memories of the countryside. The second track, ‘One with the grass’ has slow-paced melody on a bed of staccato beats and rhythm to make you think of pastoral grandeur.

If you think the track ‘Go carts’ is irritatingly slow and too simplistic, the composer has an explanation: “It is common to get stuck behind a line of bullock carts moving ahead on the narrow village roads making you follow them patiently, till a chance is got to get ahead of them. This song is for them.”

Other tracks in the album include ‘Coffee calls’, ‘Smoking flue’, ‘Stoned circle’, ‘Rain song’ and ‘Wake up, why the silence’. All songs are created, composed, programmed and mixed by Bangalore-based Mohan Kumar S of Snakeland Music. The instruments used are not real but are sounds generated by computers (virtual instruments).