2024: My year in music

Another year, another playlist - Spotify | Youtube Music

I start each year with a silly and irrational fear of not discovering enough worthwhile music to fill a playlist of 50 or so tracks. I end the year with a playlist that’s thrice as long and requires careful culling.

It also feels a little surreal to think that this is now the 9th iteration of a ritual I started in 2016. That said, for the past few years, I haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm to compile detailed liner notes like I was doing till 2019.

I am now in the 3rd year of learning Spanish on Duolingo¹ and if I am to trust their grading, about to start approaching CEFR B1 proficiency. This has allowed me to appreciate the lyrical beauty of a lot of Spanish songs I heard this year. And so the 2024 playlist is a tad heavier in music from Spanish speaking parts of the world than the years before.

While algorithmically created playlists by Spotify - both their discovery weekly as well as the newly introduced ‘daylist’, were a big source of new music, I continue to discover new music and artists through other sources, like TV shows² and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts.

Lastly, there are a couple of songs in the playlist that I want to give a special nod to.

1. Ryan Downey’s ‘Running’ (track #1 in the playlist) got plenty of play in our house - what a stunning voice. For some reason, he reminds me of Leonard Cohen.

2. The other one is Plantar un Bosque (track #12 in the playlist) - mostly for the quirky lyrics that could well be an exchange between me and my wife about me bringing in too many plants into the living room:

Yo te voy a plantar un bosque
I am going to plant you a forest

Ay, si lloras, por si lloras
Oh, if you cry, just in case you cry

Tú me lo riegues
You’ll water it for me

Y poco a poco
And little by little

Gota a gota
Drop by drop

Los ruisenores vendrán a cantarte
The nightingales will come to sing to you

January 1, 2025

Ganz kleine Nachtmusik

A previously unknown work by Mozart was discovered in a library at Leipzig last month. Within a couple of weeks, multiple high quality recordings were available on YouTube. Here’s one I enjoyed:

A couple of decades or so ago the news of such a find might still have reached me within a few days, but I am sure I wouldn’t have been able to access a recording in India till months later - if at all.

A somewhat related episode from that time comes to mind.

I was in my twenties and living in Bangalore. I had just begun to recognise my love for reading and western classical music. I remember having particularly enjoyed Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music. This being a book about members of a string quartet¹, was full of references to Western Classical music. At one point in the book, the protagonist struggles to locate the recording of an obscure work by Beethoven. Apparently, there weren’t any easy to find recordings of Beethoven’s Op. 104² - neither in the book nor in real life. Fortunately for me, due to many requests by other readers of the book, Decca had already issued a 2 CD set with a compilation of all the pieces from the book in 2000 - including the elusive Op. 104.

Cover of the CD companion to An Equal Music

For all the toil it took to obtain the recording, I had mostly forgotten about it. I am not sure where I bought the CD. A search of my Amazon order history from those years turned up nothing. Amazon wasn’t in India then but I would routinely get things³ shipped to friends living in the US and pick them up whenever I’d visit them. So the CD might have come from a physical shop. Either one of the many CD/DVD shops at Schiphol⁴ I used to visit during those long layovers on the way to the US from India or the shop on Church Street in Bangalore that specialised in Jazz and Classical recordings. I no longer have the CD with me. I gave it away (like all my other CDs) when we left Bangalore. 1-04 III. Menuetto_ Quasi allegro [String Quintet in C Minor, Op. 104].mp3 dated 06 Feb 2011, is now playing in the background as I write this post.

I don’t think I particularly enjoyed the work or even listened to it more than a couple of times. I did use to enjoy the piano trio the work is derived from. It had certainly been novel to listen to it rearranged for a completely different ensemble. I was also going through a Beethoven phase in my life. I was compiling a playlist of all his works one opus at a time. In 2010, I even registered beethovenfans.com with the intent of featuring my favourite recordings of each opus. Both pursuits remain unfinished.

These days you can just stream the entire CD on Spotify and I am sure on any other streaming music service of your choice. Freeing music distribution from the constraints of physical media might have been one of the best things that the internet did.

October 26, 2024

Mallorca April 2024, days 0 and 1

March in Amsterdam this year was quite rainy. In order to get some reprieve from the oppressive weather, we booked a vacation to Mallorca. I caught a flu few days before we were due to fly, but I managed to recover enough for us to not have to cancel the trip.

Mallorca is a popular tourist destination so there are several direct flights from Amsterdam. Upon landing at the Palma de Mallorca airport we realised that while Ubers are not banned outright, there is a 30 minute cool off period before you can order one. The wife quickly spotted a bus that’d go close to our hotel and ordered me to use my newly acquired Spanish¹ skills to get us the tickets. I ran, assembled Spanish words into some semblance of a coherent sentence, repeated it twice in my head and blurted:

Me : Boletos para dos adultos por favor. (tickets for two adults)
Bus Driver : Si. Paga en efectivo. (yes, pay in cash)
Me (thrilled at having been understood and having understood what the driver said): ¿Cuanto? ¿Diez euros?
Bus Driver : Takes my money and hands me two tickets.

Now I am sure a driver assigned to a route that busses hapless tourists from the airport into the city would have managed that interaction in English just fine. But still, a frisson of excitement ran through me at having pulled my first real-world task off in a new language. The wife had already boarded the bus and found us a spot to stand with our suitcases. I walked to her - tickets proudly in hand, beaming cheek to cheek.

Mallorca has some picturesque beaches but we are not beach people. As in we don’t fancy lying in the sand and taking a dip in the sea. We were staying at a hotel in the beach-y neighbourhood (Playa de Palma) for the first three days only to be able to take long walks along the coast and catch some sun.

We were at our hotel by 5 pm. The sun wouldn’t set till around 8:30 pm. This left us ample time to grab a quick bite and go for a walk along the beach. The sunset that evening was beautiful.

We woke up next morning to the sort of clear, sunny day on which they hoist a green flag over the boxy, yellow lifeguard stations at the beach in Mallorca to signal that the sea is safe for a swim.

After the breakfast at our hotel, we followed the beach south - always keeping left to the short perimeter wall along the beach built probaby to keep the sand from blowing over onto the footpath. When the beach ended at a marina, a road took us to higher, rockier ground. Several pine trees were growing here. The view of the Balearic sea from here was stunning. Many sailboats lingered here simply enjoying the day.

Lunch was at an Italian restaurant the wife looked up. We sat outdoors enjoying the sun. After all the cold, rainy days that had led up to this trip, it was a novel feeling. The houses in the neighbourhood were painted in earthly shades of ochre and peach. Their slanting terracotta tiled roofs, window overhangs and arched entryways created a mesmerising effect that reminded me of the Monument Valley games I was so taken in with several years ago.

On our way back the sun was shining brightly and this small church on the way to our hotel looked made it look a little other-worldly. But then churches do cocern themselves with all things other-wordly.

This was all the exertion my body could take so it was time for a siesta. We slept a couple of hours and woke up feeling rested. We stepped out for another walk along the beach, this time in a north-westerly direction. Not surprisingly, most of Mallorca’s main beach - Playa de Palma, is lined with beach resorts and hotels. Their architecture is more or less similar. It is all about maximising the view of the ocean and parcelling it into tiny lots you can rent to tourists from sun-starved countries such as ours.

There were also these semi-permanent numbered structures spaced along the entire stretch of the beach that would turn into popup bars serving juices, cocktails, beer and coffee during the day. They definitely add a festive feel to the beach.

The air was a little hazier than yesterday so we were expecting the sunset to be less spectacular than yesterday but when the moment arrived, it still left us stunned.

September 16, 2024

Cycling to Marken

Given how much Marken is part of my personal cycling lore, I am surprised that I never managed to bike there all the way from Amsterdam. The distance (a 40km round-trip) must’ve had something to do with it. With my recent e-bike purchase, that was no longer a plausible excuse. My wife and I cycled there a month ago.

Our ride took us through open fields, along stately farmhouses, over quaint wooden bridges, and even on dykes.

A drawbridge

This must surely be the narrowest two-way cycling lane we’ve ever ridden on:

A narrow cycling path and a wooden bridge

We saw no one for miles at end - so for the kind of traffic these bike paths were serving, they were plenty.

Pictures from Marken:

The colourful wooden houses of Marken

The colourful wooden houses of Marken

View of Markermeer

Views of Markermeer

Sparrows

I was really happy¹ to see sparrows in Marken. While you occasionally hear a sparrow or two chirping in our neighbourhood on a quiet afternoon, I hadn’t seen so many of them together in a long time.

On our way to Marken, we had taken a couple of lengthy detours as we were feeling a little adventurous - though a couple of times our hands were also forced by ongoing repairs to the dykes in the area. It was also very windy on our way back. I struggled to hit 25 kmph even with the maximum assist my e-bike had to offer. The result was that the wife ran out of battery some time before she reached home and I barely scraped by. As someone who has never driven and is on his first vehicle powered by an external energy source, range anxiety is certainly a new feeling I am having to welcome.

August 31, 2024

On getting an electric bike…

I learned to bike in my 30s. It was my wife’s help and encouragement that made it possible. The excellent¹ cycling infrastructure of Amsterdam played its part too - I could actually get somewhere I wanted to be on a bicycle here. Had we still been living in Bangalore, I don’t think I’d have learned to bike. I don’t see myself as someone who would’ve mustered sufficient motivation to overcome not just the non-existent cycling infrastructure but also the terrible traffic. And in some alternate timeline, had I still made it to Amsterdam without meeting my wife, I would’ve been quite content to use public transport or walk about².

Within a few days of learning to bike, it became an act as natural as walking. But I still had a mental block that kept me from biking to work every day. That my commute involved cutting through the picturesque, historic canal ring of Amsterdam didn’t help. The route was meant to be savoured each day on foot, not rushed through on a bike.

A few years ago I landed a job that finally got me biking seriously. Fourteen kilometres a day - to my office and back. This was before the pandemic, so five days at office were still the norm. It was the fastest and cheapest way to get to work. Barring inclement weather or the occasional bouts of laziness, biking became my preferred way to commute. This was the first time the thought of getting an e-bike crossed my mind. Vanmoof had just started to rise in popularity here. We both knew friends who had purchased Vanmoof’s latest models and spoke favourably of their purchase. The wife and I even took test rides. But the clunky gear change mechanism of their then state of the art model didn’t sit well with either of us³. The lack of a detachable battery which would necessitate bringing the entire bike to our tiny apartment for charging was another factor that put us off. The other e-bikes of that time, especially from the staple Dutch brands (Batavus, Gazelle etc.) had felt clunky and heavy and so we did without one for the next few years.

All those days of working from home during the pandemic broke my cycling habit. My next jobs have again been a lot closer to our home. While biking is still the fastest way to get to the office, biking just 3-4 km somehow feels cheating. I do bike on some days but walking is my preferred way to get to work. It’s a 30-35 minute commute on foot and I get to take pictures, listen to a podcast or generally wool-gather.

Thanks to global warming, there is now at least a 6 month window (I’d say May-Oct) when cycling in Amsterdam is very pleasant. There are several small towns 15-20 kms from Amsterdam that make for great day trip destinations on your bike. We’d do one or two of these trips each summer but our legs would be so sore the next day that our resolution at the start of the summer to do these biking trips more regularly would fizzle out.

The wife again started considering getting an e-bike seriously a couple of years ago. I spotted a billboard⁴ for an up and coming direct to consumer Belgian e-bike brand called Cowboy and told her about it. Shortly after seeing the ad, we started spotting Cowboy bikes more regularly on the road. They weren’t available in bike shops but you could book a test ride on their website and someone would come to your home with one. Many people at the wife’s workplace already owned one. They spoke highly of the bike’s quality and Cowboy’s service. The wife booked a test ride and knew that she was getting one the moment it ended. The bike checked all the boxes for her - it was light, had a detachable battery and the step-through frame was the right size for her height - in a country where the average height is 182 cm (~6ft) that’s not a given. We ordered it online. It arrived a few days later and after minimal assembly, she was all set.

I took a ride too but hadn’t fully bought into the idea of an e-bike just yet. Besides, we didn’t want to put both our eggs in one basket - I’d keep looking for another brand.

Getting an e-bike really opened up distances for her. On weekends she’d casually ride down to Haarlem (a 40 km round trip) or Monnickendam (that’s another 32 km for a round trip) and still have energy to go to work the next day. On the handful of occasions I accompanied her, we’d either cut the ride short or I’d follow her from a great distance, out of breath and knees creaking from trying to keep up with her against 50 kmph wind.

Yes, the Netherlands is a flat country but even on a fine summer day, the wind can easily overcompensate for the lack of a climb uphill. But let’s not use the wind as an excuse here. Riding a manual bike for distances of 70-80 km over a weekend, even on a perfectly still weekend, would easily divest me of any delusions about my physical fitness. Paradoxically, I also worried about losing whatever fitness levels I did have by depending on e-bike - the mind saw an e-bike as a fancy crutch.

And so I held back for two more years. Perhaps because I have been ripe for a full-blown midlife crisis, a part of my brain started entertaining this fantasy where instead of an e-bike, I would get one of those light, carbon-fibre racing bikes. Surely, through this marriage of precision engineering and my brute force I would then be able to easily keep up with (and even fly past) my wife on her e-bike.

For the past three weeks we’ve been getting days that have been so perfect and idyllic that I’ve felt as if we are living inside an advertisement for summers. Naturally, the wife has been making the most of her e-bike and I’ve been accompanying trailing her on my manual bike. A ride back from one long trip where the wind knocked a good 5 km/h from my average speed, I finally opened up to the idea of getting an e-bike.

The wife who has been scouting the right e-bike for me ever since she got hers, couldn’t stand the thought of frittering another beautiful summer away and insisted that I go for another test ride. She even located a shop really close to our home that I could visit on a random Monday I had taken off from work. I opted to give Tenways CGO800S a shot. I took it along my office route which cuts through Amsterdam’s canal belt, has uneven traffic and the bridges over the canals present a short but decent incline. My test ride felt effortless, even joyful. I knew right then that this was it.

I have now had it for two weeks and we’ve already clocked over 120 kilometres. I had read that e-bike riders cover longer distances and so get same or more exercise as those riding manual bikes. This certainly rings true so far.

At 23 kg (including the battery) the bike is not much heavier than my current manual one of 19 kg. It also rides smoothly when the battery assistance is off. I’ve covered long stretches without battery assistance - only summoning it during periods of strong winds, when I need to catch a break after a particularly long stretch. Or when I’ve needed a little extra acceleration - for example when the traffic light turns green just as you have braked. Not ever having driven anything where an external force propels me (I don’t know how to drive or ride a scooter), I was worried I’d get addicted to speed. And while I admit it is thrilling to go from 0 to 25 km/h in under 10 seconds of light pedalling, it actually makes me lot less annoyed at having to stop for tourists crossing the bike paths heedlessly⁵. Say goodbye to road rage, say hello to traffic tranquillity?

Anyway, I hope to use the battery sparingly. I think of it like Mario stumbling upon a super star - a rare thing, makes you invincible for a short time and you are still liable to getting destroyed if you act rashly⁶.

I’ll leave you with a picture of the giant statue of the famous delftware kissing couple near the Zaandam ferry station. A 13 km round trip taken casually after a full day of work. When you have an e-bike, you are always looking to squeeze a ride in.

A giant statue of the Kissing Couple

July 28, 2024

Old posts reappeared in this blog’s RSS feed

Those of you reading this blog on an RSS reader, might have noticed that several old posts reappeared in your feed yesterday. My apologies! Here’s what happened:

I’ve been restoring many past posts from my old wordpress blog. While looking at posts from 2011/12, I realised that the permalinks didn’t have any dates in the url. For example from looking at just this url:

https://www.deepakg.com/rough-draft-house-hunting-in-amsterdam

you might think I am looking for a house in Amsterdam, while actually this is a post from 2011 when we first moved here. I changed the blog’s settings so that permalinks include the date component. The link above should now show up (e.g. in Google’s search result) as:

https://www.deepakg.com/2011/06/4/rough-draft-house-hunting-in-amsterdam

One side effect of making this change was that it caused the platform I use for blogging to regenerate the RSS feed with the new urls. This might’ve led your RSS reader to think that these are new posts. Mine certainly did.

May 27, 2024