EXCERPT repetitions of 108 ///////// the sound of a peacock’s feather caught in the Lancashire mud ///////// flakes of sonic experience ///////// fragments of a work in progress ///////// an (imagined) sonic essay ///////// towards sontology ///////// mnesonic imagination ///////// nomadic material mantras ///////// navigating identity in rasas ///////// ‘India’s greatest writer on the arts, the sage Bharata […] conceived of all art as a whole. There was, for him, an essential unity of all artistic forms. This idea coincides with one of Hinduism’s basic tenets that there is a fundamental unity in diversity’. Within this unity ‘Bharata said that it was the musician-composer’s business—as indeed of every artist—to evoke a particular emotion or mood which he called rasa’. The first of the nine rasas is: Shringar — Love. ‘Om Jai Jagadish Hare’ sung in a bungalow on Warrenside Close in Blackburn, a 1960s bungalow in the first place I ever went which could have been described as a suburb. The front room had a brown and white mottled carpet which tickled and warmed everyone’s bare feet, a furry textured warmth underfoot staving off the belting November winds whipping down from ‘o’er tops’ of the Dean Clough Reservoir. The party was a group of fifteen or so. Kids between five and eleven years of age, with parents from India, people who my mum and dad had met over the years working in the NHS in Blackburn. My mum was the only white person there, flanked by her two mixed-race boys, with complete unity in diversity, closely listening to the Sanskrit mantras.…