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Su Real Recommends
The five albums that turned Suhrid Manchanda into Su Real. Also watch the video below to know about the craziest gig he ever performed.
Written by Su Real
5 min readPublished on
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The capital city’s Suhrid ‘Su Real’ Manchanda has been known for dropping only the finest genre bombs on unsuspecting audiences, whether it’s a festival, a club gig, or at your average sweat-soaked grinds. Here he recommends five seminal albums that you need to check out.

Ice Cube – “The Predator”

Its dark and foreboding cover with Ice Cube smoking from a skull-face pipe just leapt out at me from the supermarket cassette racks. The perfect mirror of my pre-teen angst as an outcast in isolation starting to question the nature of the world - every word, every phrase weighed heavily on my psyche and I memorized every lyric, every nuance on the album. I walked around with a constant frown on my face. The world was messed up and this guy was telling it how it really is – with music. It was truly my first taste of how the personal is political, and how the arts can both reflect and shape the world around us. Notwithstanding later Hollywood comedy blockbuster era Ice Cube, “The Predator” remains a conceptual sonic masterpiece and lyrical tour-de-force that in my honest opinion ranks up there with The Beatles’ “Sgt Peppers” and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”.

Sonic Youth – “Daydream Nation”

When I first heard Sonic Youth at the age of 13 it was like some sort of epic déjà vu… With every extended screechy feedback breakdown came a feeling of “I always knew this music existed… finally, here it is...”. I’d fallen in love with the grunge fad of the period, and as I’m usually inclined to do, I started digging deeper into my favorite artists’ influences. In the nineties grunge pantheon you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting someone citing “Sonic Youth” as a major influence. Aspiring to collect all their albums – which wasn’t so easy then without the Internet – I asked my mum to bring back a cassette of “Daydream Nation” from her trip to the U.S. When I finally got to listen to it, at first I couldn’t really understand it – as it was so much more raw, wild and live than their major label releases I was familiar with. Still it grew on me quite easily – getting into my mid-teens, apathy was kicking in – it did indeed “take a teenage riot to get me out of bed”.

Sun Ra – “Space Is The Place”

Tracing the path of Sonic Youth’s influences led me to Sun Ra, possibly the greatest gift that the universe ever bestowed upon mankind. Although he shall probably remain ignored and neglected by the mainstream and even many music critics and historians might dismiss him as an oddity, across his prolific career from the ‘30s to the ‘90s he released hundreds of albums – many of them hand-pressed and hand-printed and some forever lost to the great abyss of the past tense. “Space is the Place” is the undeniable masterpiece, conceptually and technically, of the expansive Sun Ra catalog – even though it’s actually the soundtrack to the feature film Sun Ra directed, produced and acted in of the same name! For me this album, with its 20-minutes-plus title track, gets all my nerve cells firing in all kinds of crazy directions in one long acid trip of a sonic journey.

New Order – “Substance 1987”

The moment I heard “Blue Monday” I was mesmerized. Despite the song’s somewhat cliché’d status now as ‘80s throwback club anthem, when I heard it for the first time I was just beginning to discover dance music and rave culture. Growing up on all kinds of different “live” traditionally-performed music, New Order was the perfect entry point to the world of electronic – as a live band (Joy Division) that overcame tragedy (suicide of their lead singer) by donning a new guise, a cyber-ized robotic musical outfit that coaxed tremendous waves of emotion from essentially stoic sources of digital and analog sound. “Blue Monday” was originally released only as a 12” maxi-single, but I got a hold of it as part of the re-mastered “Substance 1987” collection of singles. Hit after smashing hit, New Order was laying down the blueprints for modern day pop driven by electronic music.

Basement Jaxx – “Kish Kash”

In the early 2000’s America, where I was situated, there was a slow but sweeping sea change starting off in the essence of the popular music of the day. Rock bands were embracing the “post-punk” rhythms of the ‘70s – ‘80s and rock music was becoming danceable again. Similarly rockers were embracing electronic sounds in droves, especially Daft Punk, who oddly enough with its consistent, and fairly minimalist “robot-disco” formula had become an inspiration for many fueling the evolution of rock and pop music of the time. On the other hand, many of us were infatuated with Basement Jaxx and their maximalist and organic-sounding music as potentially defining the new format of modern pop music. The debut album “Rooty” with its smash worldwide hits “Where’s Your Head At” and “Romeo” was commercially appealing but panned by critics for falling back on tame formulae. “Kish Kash” in that case seemed specifically designed to slap the critics into dancing with high energy hits too like “Good Luck”, “Lucky Star” and “Right Here’s The Spot” that still bore the Jaxx trademarks of surprise and wonder.
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