The One AM Radio: “Sunlight”
[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/The-One-AM-Radio-Sunlight.mp3|titles=The One AM Radio: “Sunlight”]LA-based multi-instrumentalist Hrishikesh Hirway is the force behind dream-pop band The One AM Radio. On the day before his new album, Heaven Is Attached By A Slender Thread, is released to the world, Hirway took the chance to get introspective with ALARM. Below, he explores the alignment (or misalignment) of various expectations and realities, including those of his own songwriting process, through the lens of self-portraiture.
On Self-Portraiture
by Hrishikesh Hirway (The One AM Radio)
Everyone confronts this question every day: how do I present myself to the world? This process is so ubiquitous and so fundamental that it often goes unnoticed, a blip in the subconscious. But when dealing with any work that’s declared to be a self-portrait, the process of figuring out who you think you are, and how you want to reveal that to others, becomes paramount.
For my new record, I wanted to make a conscious effort to step away from the adjectives that were often used to describe my music: somber, melancholy, introspective, East Coast. I thought, “I’d like to make something buoyant, happy, fun, LA. Dance music.” When the record was done, I realized that I hadn’t accomplished that at all. There was a huge divide between what I thought I could make and what actually came out.
These are some of my favorite self-portraits. I think about what self-loathing and self-aggrandizement had to go on behind the scenes to create them. The monstrous-ness of Francis Bacon’s. The careful, deliberate fiction of Cindy Sherman’s. John Coplans’ — unflinching. Rineke Dijkstra’s self-portrait could be of anyone at all. With the bathing cap and goggles and hands over her face, she makes herself almost anonymous. And Egon Schiele’s, dissipated and abstracted, but still presenting a picture of someone keen and haughty. But I don’t know — what of himself did he think he was capturing? What did he want to leave out?