Based on conversations with Steve & Mrityunjay, this booklet reveals how Sunil created his music—its voices, instruments, methods, struggles, & unique sound.
“A keyboard player had become a string player.”
— Mrityunjay Sathyanarayanan
The most defining technical achievement in Sunil’s music was one he developed out of necessity rather than design. Working with an organ — an instrument with a flat, undifferentiated tone, no built-in envelope control — and feeding it through a reverb unit with strong feedback, he faced a problem: without intervention, each note would blur into the next, creating muddy cascades rather than sustained, singing lines.
His solution was to place one hand permanently on the volume control and use it to shape each note’s attack, sustain, and decay manually. Mrityunjay describes what this meant technically:
“Sunil Da began manually controlling the volume envelopes by hand. Those expressive swells we hear in his music — almost vocal in quality, like a cello or violin — were not built into the instrument. He was physically extracting them. Around the early 1970s, he acquired an FX unit — a Dynacord, I believe — which had a built-in tape reverb. He would control the feedback knob on that reverb to create sustained sounds from the organ. Steve pointed out that if you listen to the 1971 music and then the 1972 music, the difference is dramatic. Sunil Da had effectively invented a new voice — a sustained, string-like instrument — out of a simple organ tone, using nothing but a feedback knob as a physical controller. Swell it up, close it, swell again. A keyboard player had become a string player.”
This technique continued, unchanged in principle, even after the synthesisers arrived in the mid-1980s. The instrument changed; the physical act of shaping each note by hand did not.
A direct consequence of this technique was a characteristic single-handed melodic style. With one hand reserved for the volume control, the melody was played entirely with the other — a constraint that became, over decades, a defining feature of Sunil’s sound.
“People who heard his music in the late 1970s often assumed he was already playing a synthesiser, precisely because of that technique. But it was always an organ until the mid-1980s. And that manual envelope control continued right up to the end, even with the synthesisers.”
— Steve
Sunil’s relationship to rhythm evolved over his career from presence to deliberate withdrawal. The early dance compositions for Anuben were rhythmically defined. But at a certain point, he began to feel that rhythmic music was not what he was called to make.
“He has said to those around him, including Patrick, that he was not drawn to rhythm in his music. And from the late 1980s and 1990s onwards, there are these vast expanses of organic sound — no rhythmic pulse, just ebbs and flows of energy. It reflects both his deliberate aesthetic choices and his growth as a musician.”
And yet even within this apparent rhythmlessness, Mrityunjay hears a subtler pulse:
“Even there his mastery of modulating those parameters over time ensures the musical line always feels like a musical line, not a mechanical process. There is an inherent rhythm even within the rhythmlessness — a pulse within each synthetic sound itself, in the oscillation, the envelope.”
It is worth noting that the Farfisa organ did contain a built-in sequencer with preset rhythms — Bossa Nova patterns and similar. Sunil used them occasionally in the Savitri settings. He used what was there. He simply did not allow what was there to dictate his direction.
Trained musicians approaching Sunil’s work are often surprised by the apparent simplicity of his harmonic language. No extended harmonies, no chromaticism, no adventurism in the conventional musical sense. Mrityunjay spent years puzzling over this before arriving at a different understanding:
“As a student I could not understand this, because in my mind music of the future meant ever greater complexity, ever greater pushing of the language of sound.”
“He could have pushed further — microtonality, alternate tuning systems, the influence of contemporaries. A friend of his was apparently going to play one of his tracks to Olivier Messiaen, and they were debating which track to choose. So he was in touch with that world. He simply chose not to go there. Which means his adherence to diatonicism, to scale-degree melodies that are essentially 1-4-5-1, was a conscious expression of his inner direction.”
What looks like simplicity is, in Mrityunjay’s formulation, something more radical: the complete stripping away of cultural containers, leaving only the human experience that underlies both Eastern and Western musical traditions.
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