kushkuli box competition
a Forcefield feeling in India
OK I don't have a lot of info on this one... we're somewhere in India, and it appears the whole village is hosting some kind of soundsystem shoot-out???
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txI89kCbfRM
Loudspeakers hang in the trees like hibiscus blossoms and imposing speaker arrays heave out of the ground like brutalist monuments, their black tolex repainted in brilliant yellow, neon green, and royal blue. The music issues forth like a chemical trigger, formless and overwhelming. The bass jars the camera sensor— it seems so loud that it isn't even sound any more, but at the same time, people are having conversations not far away. It's like something new that's like sound, but different.
The crowd is mostly jazzed, but no one is really gathered together and it's unclear to me if anything is going to happen or if what's happening is the main thing. Only one person appears to be in pain, he briefly passes in front of the camera on the back of a motorbike and you can see him wince and turn his face away from the speaker. He's also the only person we see not embracing the phenomenon. Maybe embracing it renders the listener immune to it's evident harms.
Behind the speakers are tin shacks full of dozens of power amps, where sweaty young men watch the dials or incredibly, take naps. All throughout the village rubber cables carry power or sound over thick gnarly tree roots carrying water or nutrients to their leaves. Our heroic camera man takes a few minutes in front of each outcrop, wordlessly points out a few details, then moves us to the next location.
On the one hand, this is pretty wild, and it's fun to pretend that this is like some kind of alien fungus slowly terraforming the subcontinent. But on the other hand, I've been in situations not too dissimilar to this, on purpose, and I loved it. Probably any alien intelligence looking at this would think of it as "classic Earth shit". The Milky Way Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization recognizes "jamming tunes way loud" as Representative of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Earth.
There's a lot of vids like this on the channel and I found some related stuff on Instagram, but I can't figure out what the scene is called, what this music is, how the battle culture works (if it is in fact a battle), or even any search terms. If you're up for a sleuth and you find out anything please leave a comment!
Peace everyone :)
If someone forwarded this to you because you love jamming your tunes loud, or your artistic practice includes garishly painted boxes and cones, you may enjoy other things I write about. This is Pleasant Realms, an email newsletter for mostly unstressful YouTube videos.