Based on conversations with Steve & Mrityunjay, this booklet reveals how Sunil created his music—its voices, instruments, methods, struggles, & unique sound.
“He was working with reed organs and electric organs — instruments that are, by nature, the least expressive things imaginable. A flat, buzzy tone, no envelope, just the one note. And yet he found ways to make them sing.”
— Mrityunjay Sathyanarayanan
Sunil was trained as a sitar player, not a keyboard player. His move to the organ was not a creative choice but a physical necessity: a wrist broken playing football was never set correctly and caused him pain for the rest of his life. Because of this injury, the sitar became inaccessible.
“He never played the piano as such — his training was as a sitar player. He came to the keyboard because he broke his wrist playing football. It was not set properly at the time and pained him for the rest of his life; you would always see him flexing it after the recordings. Because of that injury he could no longer play the sitar, and so he turned to the organ.”
— Steve
Steve, who documented the studio’s evolution closely, traced three distinct instrumental periods.
The first period centred on the reed organ, which carried through until around 1970. In 1971, a Yamaha electric organ was lent to the Ashram; when the owner wanted it back, André Vioat built a kit organ that served from 1973 to 1977. After that, Clusterman sent a Farfisa organ — the model called the Maharani — from Europe.
“In around 1986 I took the Farfisa completely apart to wire in MIDI, a project that took nearly a month. During that period Sunil had nothing to play, so Patrick set him up on a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser. It was on that instrument that Sunil developed the distinctive sound he used at the close of the next New Year music. After that, the Farfisa became primarily a MIDI controller.”
With each transition, a period of adjustment followed — roughly a year during which traces of the previous instrument could still be heard. Then the new sounds would open up, and the music would change again.
“With each transition between instruments, there was always an adjustment period — roughly a year — during which you could still hear traces of the old instrument in his playing. Then he would begin to explore the new sounds, and the music would open up again.”
Perhaps the single most consequential piece of equipment in Sunil’s history arrived with a man known as Clusterman, around 1971. It was not a sophisticated instrument — merely an amplifier with a built-in mixer and, crucially, a tape-loop echo and reverb unit.
“Something I only fully understood while working on restoring the music is the profound change that occurred between the 1971 and 1972 New Year recordings. Both were made on the same Yamaha electric organ, yet they sound completely different. What I am now fairly sure happened is that this is when Clusterman gave Sunil a crucial piece of equipment.”
The unit gave Sunil something unprecedented: a device he could actually use while composing at home, not just in recording sessions. Around it, he developed an entirely new playing style.
“From that point on — particularly in the single-handed melodies — he would keep one hand on the volume control and use it to shape the envelope of each note. Without that control, with the level of echo he was using, the sound would have blurred into a muddy cascade. By shaping each note manually, he achieved those extraordinarily long, sustained melodic lines that are so characteristic of the 1972 music and everything that followed.”
The effect was transformative: people who heard his music in the late 1970s frequently assumed he was already using a synthesiser. He was not. He was playing a Farfisa organ through a reverb unit, with one hand shaping each note’s envelope by hand.
Synthesisers entered Sunil’s world in the mid-1980s, brought by Patrick, who joined the core studio group around 1984 and remained until the end.
“Patrick joined from around 1984 until the very end, and he brought the first synthesisers. Before that, in roughly 1987, I rewired Sunil’s organ to output MIDI and connected a synthesiser to it, so he could play the synthesiser from his own organ keyboard.”
The shift to synthesisers was gradual. Patrick would audition sounds while Sunil practised in the mornings; Sunil would indicate which he liked.
“In the first year he played just one synthesiser but still mixed in the organ sounds; a couple of years later he stopped using the organ sounds altogether, even though I had rigged things so he could bring them in himself whenever he chose. He never did.”
As equipment improved, Patrick also moved his guitar parts from live performance to a sequencer. Sunil was not immediately comfortable with this. He was an Indian musician and valued the live interaction fundamental to that tradition.
“He told me at the time, ‘I was happier when he was actually playing with me.’ But he grew used to it.”
Long before the synthesisers, Sunil’s experimental instinct expressed itself in more unorthodox ways. Mrityunjay describes learning, as a student, that Sunil was always an experimental composer:
“Even in his early period, the creative mind was already at work. He would open a piano and pluck the strings like a harp. He would record the piano at half speed and play it back at full speed, creating a higher octave and a completely different texture — and the reverse for lower octaves.”
The old upright piano was another site of invention. As Steve recalls:
“It was not a grand piano — it was an old, rather decrepit upright that would no longer hold a tune. They would manage to tune just the keys they needed, but they also experimented with restringing it as a harp. Another experiment was recording at half speed and playing back at normal speed, so everything came out an octave higher.”
Most famously, the kitchen was never off-limits to Sunil’s ear:
“It was well known in the Ashram that he would walk into the kitchen, pick up a pan, and walk out. They would ask what he was doing. He needed it for a piece. He would stand far from the microphone, strike the pan, and let the natural resonance and the reverb he added become part of the composition.”
There was one instrument Sunil never acquired but spoke about with real enthusiasm: the Ondes Martenot, the early French electronic instrument developed in the 1920s, famously used by Messiaen.
“Gambelon gave him a recording of it. It has a keyboard but glides between the notes in a way somewhat like a theremin. Sunil said something to the effect that this was ‘psychic music’ — that it touched something Western music generally did not reach.”
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