DAY 34

A new visit to my beloved Jantar Mantar definitely convinced me that shooting a Time Lapse here would have no sense, i'm gonna try in Jaipur instead. I'll be there in two days, hope things will go better there. 

A visit to Connaught Place (say CP if you wanna be cool) and his crazy market and his huge national flag.

DAY 33

New meeting with Amaar photographer and movie director. We checked for buildings around the Jantar Mantar that could be used to shoot a Time Lapse, but we failed. The one tall enough are not situated in the good direction and the location which would be perfect (south of the site) has no building tall enough.

Another way could be to concentrate on only one instrument, the Samrat Yantra, the big sundial and shoot it from the top of one of the Yam Yantra a smaller instrument situated south of him. I'll go tomorrow to check if the angle is good. While we were a little disappointed about that, we consulted some pictures of the Jantar Mantar from Jaipur and it stroked us that we should perhaps do this Time Lapse there. It makes sense as the instruments are in better shape and that the sky is much less darkened by pollution and that there is buildings all around, even a wall surrounding the site, and suddenly lots of new ideas emerged. To be continued..  

Before this meeting i did this track, hope you enjoy the short preview.


Extract of a 60min piece consisting of a field recording of the Lajpat Nagar O-Block in Delhi at night and 6 Bouddha-machines.

DAY 32

A visit to Nizamuddin the muslim neighborhood was a great experience. The Bazaar is a labyrinth of very small streets and as we were friday it was packed with thousands of people heading for the prayer. The colors, the smells, the music, everything was beautiful. 

DAY 31

Ish und Ich

Today I had the great pleasure to play music with Ish and indian musician which is also in charge of the Sound Reasons label http://soundreasons.in

This label is probably the only one in India dealing with experimental electronic music so I am really lucky to have met the guy. Check their website there is a lot of good music on it. 

Please enjoy a short extract of our session : 

DAY 30

Busy day ! I did visit the Planetarium for the second time with my coach Blessy, then we headed to the new exposition in National Museum about the body in indian art and then to Khoj where we met Amaar with whom i hope to achieve a 24 hours time-lapse of the Jantar Mantar. The guy is very talented, i'll show some of his work in a latter post, and very nice. I'm looking forward to work with him. 

After that was a talk "Spanish Conceptual Gastronomy : a curatorial approach"
by Ryan Bromley and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and it was brilliant. The courtyard at Khoj is a beautiful place, perfect to listen to a talk about food. 

DAY 29

A new video for Aeroflot took me the all day to achieve. Hope you like it !

Aeroflot - Somewhere Above
from the last album : Co-Pilots
Available on poorrecords.com

DAY 28

A word about food.

I have decided from Day 1 not to talk about food. This blog would have turned into a food blog as the food here is just incredibly awesome ! I could talk about it for hours on. Everyday is a new delight, every dish a revelation. Let's just say that i have a real passion for Punjabi food and the best of all is the Malai Paneer Tikka. It is a sort of cheese with the softness of a very good tofu (Paneer) marinated in yoghurt, Kashmiri red chilly powder, Ginger garlic paste, Garam masala, curcuma and probably secret ingredients. It is served with grilled tomato, oignons and chillies. It literally melt in your mouth and I can't tell no more, i have to go eat one right now !

DAY 27

A visit to the Nehru Planetarium today. I think that would be a great place to show my project which is now a movie of the jantar mantar filmed for 24 hours and accelerated to last 60min. The movie is just an idea for now, starting tomorrow i'm gonna try to make it real, which means quite a few problems in sight (authorization to shoot, material, safety of the material during the shooting... etc..) but i have now a real vision of what i would like to achieve before leaving India. Thanks Lionel for the brainstorming.

I visited the National Science Center too, it was very funny and guess who i met there...

DAY 26

3 hours of jam-session with Da Saz today. Was a great experience with a lot of very beautiful music, we'll certainly publish it one day, but for now here is a short extract, hope you enjoy !

DAY 25

An Evening at The Embassy

"Building Images: Photography focusing on Swiss architecture" was the name of the expo and it was very good, but not as good as the talk by architect Rahul Mehrotra which was really enlightening. One of his work is a building in Mumbai with this beautiful garden all over it in stead of air conditioning.  

The evening took place in the swiss embassy which is a beautiful building too.

DAY 24

Rikshaws and the Human-GPS

I love rikshaws ! Every day i ride somewhere just for the pleasure of it. It has a very strange quietening power on me, no bad mood can resists it. The moment i sit on one the all world changes. 

There is two kind of rikshaw, the bicycle one and the auto-rikshaw that everybody here call an "auto". The first is for short ride of a block or two, the second can bring you anywhere in the city. A city that is so large that nobody could know it all. So when you go on a rikshaw the driver always agrees with your destination even if he doesn't have a clue of where it is. After a while he's gonna ask the way to another driver at a stop or even while driving, this other driver will show a general direction and the more you get near your destination the more the indications will be precise until you reach exactly the point. This is the human-GPS, everybody uses it, you don't need a map, you can see people everywhere giving direction to others. Very very efficient.

DAY 23

Hauz Khas (the special tank) was my destination today. It was built in the 13th century to collect monsoon water, at a time it even was the capital of the Moghul empire. This is the largest area of open water i've seen in Delhi.  

Hauz Khas Village is a small and trendy block with lot of trendy shop (designer clothes, ancient furniture, modern art, green save-the-planet cosmetics) and a spa who took a wall to make his promotion in a very r'n'r fashion :

The place is called Comfortably Numb (probably the way you feel when you experience it) this explaining the Pink Floyd inspired advert. 

The park is one of the largest in the city and is really nice and cool and peaceful, the first two hours since i arrived without a noise, a very unique experience around here.

House of Blondie ;)

DAY 22

DAY 21

DAY 20

Nothing to report today, I stayed home and start reading this book :

DAY 19

Today i've come to a party ! Lot of nice people from every part of the world with really really great musicians. Here you can see a swiss guy playing indian drum, a french playing jew's harp, an iranian playing indian drum and you don't see another iranian playing cajon.. a peruvian instrument.

I also met a camel down in my street. 

DAY 18

Today my inspiration came from Geneva, thanks to Gilles ! Please enjoy a track of Techno-Hindus. Jugaad is an impossible to translate Indian word. I quote Pavak K. Varma in his book "Being Indian" : 

"Jugaad is creative improvisation, a tool to somehow find a solution, ingenuity, a refusal to accept defeat, initiative, quick thinking, cunning, resolve, and all of the above."

You can experienced it everyday and everywhere in India. 

DAY 17

Amsa means degree in Hindu and here is a small impro on the fly. 

DAY 16

Hauz Kas was the block i visited today, it is sort of trendy in and indian way.

You can fin some tombs there like this one, the Dadi-Poti tomb which means grandmother and granddaughter as there is two side by side and nobody knows who's buried inside.

On my way i found the book that everybody is talking about around me, the best seller of the moment.

I'll tell you more when i read it. 

DAY 15

Some more art galleries on my agenda today. I've seen some beautiful drawings by Picasso and Dali and SH Raza an indian painter. 

A word about swastika : I've heard dozen of time the story that Hitler took the "good" swastika (sinistrogyre, the one looking left) and transformed it into the "bad" one looking right. That's one more of these complete bullshit we are fed in our good old occident ! Even the french wikipedia is reporting this plain lie. Since i'm here i've seen hundred of them and not one is looking left. I don't know what this theory tries to achieve but it is just untrue. 

What is true though is that you can find Mein Kampf in every bookstore even the smallest one on the street, today only i've seen 5 of them. 

DAY 14

Today i met Mehneer. She is a choreographer working on a new project about women. We had a good talk and we agreed on lots of points about the creative process. She is very nice and i'm quite confident that we're gonna collaborate and have fun doing it. Our meeting was an idea from Mandeep from Gatti Studio, thank you Mandeep ! 

DAY 13

Children of the neighborhood attacked me today with a water-ballon ! They didn't hit me but that was very close. Thrown from three story high, i'm quite happy they didn't... It is sunday and the temperature is slowly going up, you can feel that spring is just around the corner.

After reading quite a lot about it, i though it was time to meet again with the Jantar Mantar. I found it in worse shape than two years ago but still impressive.  

The Samrat Yantra is the bigger sundial in the world after the one from Jaipur. It is a big stair (21m high) with two wings on the side. It is oriented north, so at night you should imagine the Polar Star just right on top of the last stair being fixed and all the other stars moving around it in circle counterclockwise.

It served different purpose but the main is telling what time it is. As you can see on the east wing (right side on the previous picture) the shadow hits on the lower part of the wing, so it is some time after midday (it was 14.00). The shadow hits the west wing from 6.00 AM to midday then the east wing from midday till 6.00 PM. Precision is 1 second. 

The Jai Prakash Yantra is used to measure the coordinates of the sun, the moon or other planets. It is a reversed view of the sky.

Two cross-wire are installed on top of the instrument and the shadow projected by their middle point indicates the position of the sun. On this picture it is quite faint but it is there on the white part more or less in the center of the picture. Sure you have to imagine that all this white parts where covered with lines and numbers to mark the position. They have been erased by the time, but we gonna see them in Jaipur where the instruments are in better condition of conservation. 

The Ram Yantra looks a little bit like a small version of the Coliseum in Roma. It is the most beautiful of the instruments. Access is not authorized as it was two years ago. It is certainly better for the conservation of it but not for taking pictures...

Once again, the shadow hits different parts of it where you can read the altitude and azimuth of the sun or the moon when she's very bright.

The Misra Yantra is five different instrument in one. It is a latter adjonction by the son of Jai Singh. The inner circle is supposed to tell when it is midday in Zürich... that's quite strange as the observatory in Zurich was built years after. The outer circle is supposed to do it for a small town in Japan that never had an observatory.. so this is even stranger. The other two (that you don't see on the picture) give the midday time for Greenwich and a place in Russia. Both had observatories at the time so that make sense. 

Both wings work as a smaller replica of the Samrat Yantra. Here on the east wing you can see the shadow hitting more or less the half of the white plaster which indicates that we are around 3.00 PM.

This place is still stunning and i can't help but think it looks a little bit like a skatepark...

In the metro that is ... everywhere else there is no problem at all. Here a lot of guys are chewing tobacco and the pollution can be quite hard on your lungs.

DAY 12

Today i learned that there is different Raga (melodic modes used in Indian music) for different time in the day, that could probably relate to my project, i just have to find how...

Now for something completely different : i composed a small piece inspired by the music of Dracula 3D, just for the fun of it. 

DAY 11

A day dedicated to learn the new iVCS3 app. Here is a small sample. Enjoy !

DAY 10

Today was an art gallery tour. First with the National Gallery of Modern Art and an exhibition from Subodh Gupta whom you have already seen a picture in the last post. Here is some more : 

The picture is taken from inside a small house made of cow dunk !! and on this movie you can see what's on the next room.

Then was Gigi Scaria a south india artist doing video installations. 

Andreas Volwahsen is a German artist who took pictures of indian architecture in the 70's and a lot of them where.... the Jantar Mantar. 

This tour finished with Sonia Khurana with a beautiful exhibition in a small house due to be demolished soon. 

A great day full of great indian artists. 

DAY 9

My book chasing brought me today to The National Museum where i could read and take some picture of "Cosmic Architecture in India" a beautiful book around the Jantar Mantar. I couldn't buy it but they told me to come back as they could have an hint to where i could find it. 

This museum is very very interesting i stayed there for 4 hours. One of the highlights was the miniature paintings with what i consider as early comics : 

200 years before Toëpffer..

I hit my first art gallery on the advice of Blessy (i have a list of 20 that i intend to visit) and here is a piece by indian artist Arunkumar H.G. called Dropping On The Dam(n).

These are thousands of plastic bottles tops. Beautiful and disturbing. 

Tomorrow i'll be here : 

More about that soon..

The next picture is for my friends back in Geneva. It is the rickshaw driver that brought me to the museum. His rickshaw was as new and that's a strange sight in Delhi, but what you have to know is that most of the rickshaw drivers wore a special trouser which is exactly the same as the TPG one ! (for my indian friends : TPG is the public transportation in my hometown). Watch out for drivers not wearing them, they are more inclined to up the price. 

Hello from the Pink Ganesha ! 

DAY 8

Red Fort was on my map today and what can I say ? It is a huge fort made of red stones..

DAY 7

Back on the tourist track ! Today i visited the Humayun's Tomb with his magnificent garden.

I also composed a short piece for the project "Meanwhile in Fukushima"

http://fukushima-open-sounds.net

My own sonic protest. Please don't forget that everyday since 3 years billions of liters of radioactive water are pulled in the ocean. There is strong evidence that in 20 years from now, not a single fish will have survived in the ocean (not only because of Fukushima, the ocean are getting acid from way before the accident). Can you imagine a world without fish ? You better start to try now because there is no way back. 

DAY 6

Thanks to Ivan I know now what Indian music was like 3 centuries ago. It was as it is today, the tradition goes that deep. So here is a little experiment with sitar and voice.

DAY 5

Ginger Day

Today is Ginger Day. I probably should have not been under the rain yesterday. I was so afraid of the heat that a catch a cold ! Nothing serious but i stayed home and cooked some ginger, which is the best medicine i now. 

I had time to go deeper in the Stellarium software and i realized that i was wrong 2 days ago about the sky being the same every year at the same date. It is true for distant stars but not for the planets of our galaxy.

Sure the Sun will be at the same place but all the others will not. And as the Mantar is not interested in distant stars i have to rethink the all thing again.