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Chennai-based independent musician Aryaman Singh, aka Sunflower Tape Machine, channels his love for ’90s and early-2000s rock into his debut album, 'I LIKE NOISE. MATTER OF FACT, I LOVE IT'. The eight-track indie/alt-rock record, with touches of shoegaze, was written, recorded and mixed entirely at home, using distortion, fuzz, guitar noise and deliberate production limitations to recreate the imperfect textures of the music he grew up with. Across songs about romantic failure, loneliness, jealousy, boredom and the anxieties of growing up, Sunflower embraces the idea of “White Boy Music” as a space for being lovelorn, awkward and imperfect, using noise as both a sonic device and a source of comfort.
“I was introduced to rock music by my parents when I was just a toddler. I had no idea what a word was, but I heard the melodies, and I felt the dirt,” shares Sunflower Tape Machine, the pseudonym and brainchild of Aryaman Singh, an independent musician based in Chennai. His mother got him into the more pop side of English music, while his dad opened him up to pretty much everything else like rock, and dance. “That’s probably why I listen to literally anything from Noise performances to Musicals to Dubstep,” he says. When Sunflower first started making music, he was heavily inspired by the 80s. As he and his art matured though, he instinctively gravitated towards the 90s and early 2000s.
In his debut album, ‘I LIKE NOISE. MATTER OF FACT, I LOVE IT,’ an eight-track indie/alt-Rock record with shoegaze elements, the artist returns to the same nostalgia. With noise as the glue tying the record together Sunflower sends out a Bat signal to all the scorned lovers of this generation going through it. Written, recorded and mixed completely by Sunflower at home, the album really emerged from locking himself in his studio and being honest with himself about where he stood musically in the months leading up to the release. “I barely met anyone,” he recalls. “I’d wake up, work, go to bed and repeat. I came out of it looking like a caveman with long hair and a beard!”
“One thing I really understood was that one of the most overlooked elements while trying to achieve a nostalgic sound is limitation,” he says. We now have every possible technology and plugin to make music as polished as it can be, which didn’t exist back then. So while making this record, the artist tried to work within the same limitations. “I practised not going overboard with modern mixing plugins, committing to my guitar patches by recording them with the tones already stamped instead of tweaking tones on my DAW and also trying my best to keep the instrumentation band-oriented,” he notes.
For the guitars, Sunflower mainly worked with a Fender Jaguar and Gretsch 2622t, switching between different amp sounds, plugins and pedals to get the right kind of grit, fuzz and shimmer across the record. He kept coming back to the Boss Blues Driver and Electro-Harmonix Big Muff for distortion, while pedals like the Boss Digital Delay 3 helped shape some of the album’s more spacious, textured moments. On ‘VICTORIA’S SECRET’, the Jaguar’s single-coil pickups running through a particularly dirty amp sim produced a sound that was "extremely distorted but still so controlled and shimmery".
“It was the most welcome mistake and ended up sounding so incredibly Alt-Rock that I had to stick with it!” says the artist. The interlude was even more spontaneous; an improvised stretch of Sunflower messing around with his guitars and pedals and making noise organically. “Everything you hear is so lush because it was 100% analog!”
Sunflower’s philosophy as an artist in to take his audience on a journey with him. It’s why he writes, produces and mixes all of his music. “It's because as a listener you can truly see me evolve through each subsequent release,” he shares. Noise incomparably embodies that imperfection. It’s always been a tool in his music because it brings out both the best and worst parts of a track.
It’s also one of the reasons why I see this album as an heir to the great tradition of White-Boy Music — Weezer-esque distorted guitar-driven songs steeped in romantic failure, loneliness, self-doubt, boredom and the awkward business of growing up. Through his cinematic songwriting that follows novelist and screenwriter Richard Price’s approach to conveying big emotions by ‘writing small’, Sunflower illuminates the sting of jealousy and being replaced by someone, the frustration of wanting a relationship to work when it clearly isn’t, the post-breakup loneliness but being okay with taking some time to get over them; missed calls, missed conenctions and cigarettes at the break of dawn.
Elsewhere, a wider disillusionment with adulthood takes over — chasing money and recognition while wondering whether any of it will actually make life feel better, and the anxiety of waiting for things to finally start making sense. The album feels like a portrait of someone trying to make peace with change, loss, and the fact that just being a person is a messy affair.
And nothing gets that lovelorn angst quite like noise; distortion, grunge, the heavy, fuzzy ‘emo’ riffs that can kiss your broken heart better over a good pair of headphones and perhaps a late night walk. Sunflower finds noise liberating as well, especially the way it engulfs you. “At times when I feel lost I just grab my guitar, crank up the distortion and make unintelligible sounds. And it’s the most cathartic thing ever,” he shares. “I think it just feels like a huge blanket / hug engulfing you when you need it the most. Especially when paired with a big reverb, it’s the most lush, comforting thing ever.”
Sunflower, as per track 5, may not be willing to write another love song, but he’s also just a boy standing infront of a girl, asking her to notice him, even if it takes the 21st century (track 2). In this endearing debut, he reaches out to me, someone who finds being down bad quite embarrassing, as a friend I can confide in — one that wouldn’t shame him for being the emo-werewolf-ripping-his-shirt-off-guy. Ultimately, that’s his outlook towards music too, to make it accessible. “No one wants to talk about getting cheated on,” he shares, “but disguise it in the form of an alt-rock anthem and all of a sudden everyone has a voice!”
Follow Sunflower Tape Machine here and listen to the album below:
