An abiding source of inspiration throughout Lala Rukh’s career, Indian classical music was a cornerstone in Rukh’s practice whose father was also the founder of the All Pakistan Music Conference. In several of her drawings and works, references to music and musical notations can be discerned, but her final work Rupak, a stop motion animation, on view in the exhibition, is the culmination of this influence. Lala Rukh collaborated with Sunny Justin who she met at APMC to compose the twelve-second rupak taal tabla solo that forms the basis for her animation. Once the score was completed, Rukh devised her own method of transcribing beats to paper. This took place over a two-month period, during which she would draw and redraw the sounds of the rupak taal in a dot-based system on a grid. The drawings all coalesce into an animation, where a single white dot that moves rhythmically along the screen to each tap of the tabla is heard on the accompanying soundtrack.

Spillage is intentional in the exhibition, and as the beats of Lala Rukh’s Rupak echo in this gallery where Parul Thacker’s work is located, the viewer finds themselves confronted by a series of delicate and elaborately constructed embroidered sculptures. At first sight they resemble abstracted lines of black thread on airy silk, but upon closer examination reveal themselves to be drawings that are based on alchemical and metaphysical representations of ancient philosophies, energy fields that use mathematical definitions and constructions of pure intuition. Adjacently a series of lenticular prints capture transience through smoky renditions of shifting forms that are also reflective in a sculptural installation of gold-leafed crystals. Equally referring to celestial studies of movements of planets and to meditative practices that form the core of Thacker’s world, the works highlight the inner workings of the artist’s mind. Thacker is deeply influenced by the rudra veena musician, Bahauddin Dagar, and loops of staccato sonorous vibrations emitted by his veena often become the starting point of her transcendental aesthetic in space and time. Thacker’s work seeks to acknowledge the existence of ancient philosophies and classical Indian music alongside a technical vocabulary of algorithms, mathematical topology, and material molecularity — straddling registers of both ancient materials and contemporary practice, in ways that represent their rhizomatic circularity instead of a linear progression in time.

In the large space that is adjacent to Superhero Sighting Society are Biraaj Dodiya’s works rooted in personal metaphors, exploring aspects of sound as coded language and as noise. Dodiya’s work often refers to ruination and form through ideas of support, structure, material and surface. A new suite of paintings on metal, represent Dodiya’s ongoing thoughts on support, anchored in the haunting sounds that the memories of medical stretchers evoke. The central form in these works, alludes to the fragile or the absent body. The structure of the works mimic the stretcher of a painting — the physical armature on which paintings are built, nurtured, invented, repaired and rescued. A series of works on paper accompany the metal ‘stretchers’. Dodiya’s works in the exhibition are analogous with the unstoppable buzzing and humming sounds of our inner and outer worlds. One, the siren, a loud alarming sound from our metropolitan world which signals danger, imminent emergencies and alerts ‘all listeners’. Our mortality remains an inevitable reality, pulsing through the ink of newspaper images of warzones and freak accidents. The other sound, characterises the private voice, the constant ringing — a visceral mimesis of the nature of thought.

Sound may also evoke a strong political experience and Samson Young’s video in the exhibition takes the viewer, from a personal space in Dodiya’s work, to a broader political commentary. Young’s video Music for Specific Places, Times, and People #1 lends an experimental gaze to a music, the performance of which is situated in the coordinates of a specific time, place and people, bringing to the fore the political contexts of the former Air Force Command Headquarters and the military band. Young’s composition is based on his interviewing of sixteen former musicians in the Taiwanese military band and the reflections which emerged from sharing the memories of time spent in the armed forces in conjunction with their perspectives on certain ideas such as ‘solidarity’, ‘integrity’ and ‘hope’. Based on what he learned through these interviews and the musical phrases or motifs chosen by the band members that evoked ‘hopeful’ feelings in them, Young composed a new wind ensemble by combining these elements with the anthem of the Republic of China Air Forces, Antonin Dvorak’s ‘Going Home’, and with his own composition ‘Sunrise’ as the leitmotif. The work also taps into the performative potential of images, texts, musical signs and objects through miscellaneous and intriguing conglomerations that summon particular sounds, musical phrases and gestures into being.

In Between the Notes, draws from a wide range of practices and experiments with frequencies. How we hear, see and remember music, sound, noise and our environment, both historical and present, emerges as a medium in the exhibition, acoustically connected with each other. Works in the exhibition explore the auditory phenomena, pausing at silences and reflecting on the absences which remain audible.