Five Years of Voice Memos: What My Unfinished Demos Taught Me About Making Music in Bangalore
There's a folder on my phone called 'DO NOT DELETE' and it has 400-something files in it. Voice memos recorded in auto-rickshaws. GarageBand sketches hummed into my pillow at 3 a.m. Session notes from studios in Indiranagar where I cried in the bathroom twice. I've been sitting on this archive for five years, and last month I finally pressed play on all of it.
What follows is basically my diary, annotated. And because I refuse to tell you a story about sound without letting you hear it, there's a playlist of unreleased sketches at the end. Yes, they're rough. That's the point.
Memo #1: The One That Got Me Rejected
File 0047, recorded November 2020. It's 40 seconds of me singing a melody into my phone during a power cut, inverter humming in the background. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever written. I sent it to a label contact in Mumbai.
The reply: "Interesting, but who's the reference track?"
I didn't have one. That was the whole point. I spent the next six months trying to sand my songs into something that sounded like whatever was already charting, and — memo #0089 confirms this — it was lifeless. You can literally hear me sigh at the 12-second mark. Every artist I know in this city has a file like this. The moment you tried to be someone else and the tape caught you.
The Studio in Indiranagar That Changed Everything
By 2022 I'd saved up enough to book real hours at a small studio between an idli joint and a tattoo parlor. My session notes from that stretch read like a fever dream: "tune the tanpura pad DOWN," "engineer says my reverb is 'sentimental,' take as compliment??"
What I learned there wasn't technical. It was that Bangalore's studio culture runs on a kind of improvisational generosity you don't find in a lot of US studios I've heard about. The tabla player next door wanders in. The engineer plays you a Carnatic record from 1974 because it has 'the drone you're looking for.' My biggest track started as a throwaway groove during someone else's session.
Memo #214: The Breakup Demo
This one's hard to talk about. It's a demo I recorded two days after a band I'd poured two years into quietly dissolved over a WhatsApp group nobody uses anymore. The melody is good. The lyrics are unsalvageable. But that sketch is the reason every honest song I've written since exists — because it was the first time I recorded something true instead of something impressive.
If you're a young artist reading this from Ohio or Oregon: keep the bad files. The rejection memos, the crying-in-the-bathroom session notes. That's the curriculum nobody sells you.
Why I'm Sharing This With Americans Specifically
Because the version of Bangalore music that reaches the US is usually polished, packaged, and pre-approved. What almost never crosses over is the process — the unglamorous middle. And the middle is where the interesting stuff lives. The city sounds different when you hear it through a cracked phone speaker in a memo than through a mastered single. Rougher. More honest. More like how the city actually feels at 11 p.m. on 100 Feet Road.
The Playlist
At the bottom of this article you'll find eight unreleased sketches spanning 2020 to now, unedited except for volume. Power-cut hum included. Listen in order if you want the arc; skip around if you'd rather. Either way, you're hearing five years of a Bangalore artist figuring it out — one 3 a.m. memo at a time.
If one of them grabs you, tell me. Some of these might actually become real songs this year. And honestly? Knowing someone in Chicago or Austin is listening is exactly the kind of weird, wonderful thing that keeps the memos coming.