The Sound
Glass Beams is a Melbourne project by Rajan Silva, who performs masked — anonymity by design, so the music carries all the weight. And it does. The sound is a fusion of Indian classical scales and microtonal bends (Bollywood soundtracks, Ravi Shankar, his father’s record collection), 1970s cosmic funk and psychedelia, Middle Eastern and North African motifs, and analog synths processed into meditative loops.
It is wholly instrumental. The bass pulses. The drums syncopate without ever rushing. Guitar lines flutter like incantations. Synths swirl at the edges like heat off tarmac.
Angine de Poitrine
There is a specific aesthetic feeling that Glass Beams reliably produces — what you might call an angine de poitrine: a tightening in the chest, a beautiful ache. Not sadness, not nostalgia exactly, but that physical register where music stops being sound and starts being sensation. It happens when the hypnotic groove locks in and the Indian scales drift over it — ancient tonalities over a groove that belongs to no era in particular.
“Easy listening” is usually a dismissive label. With Glass Beams it describes something precise: the music demands nothing and gives everything. You don’t follow it. You enter it and let it carry you.
Terrace, Lunch, Midday Light
Glass Beams is a perfect terrace playlist — the kind of music that works when there’s food on the table, sun overhead, and conversation happening around it. The instrumental nature means it never interrupts. The groove is present enough to feel alive. The Indian scales and swirling synths add an exotic warmth without ever becoming demanding or strange. It disappears into the afternoon in the best way.
There’s a specific slot in a listening library where this kind of music lives: not background noise, not foreground listening, but something in between — music that rewards attention if you give it, and rewards letting go if you don’t. That’s the terrace register.
In the Context of the Library
“Mahal” sits at the top of the recent plays — and it makes sense when you look at the broader library. The taste runs across Arctic Monkeys, The Cure, R.E.M., Gorillaz, Tame Impala, Justice, The Smiths — artists that share a quality of texture and atmosphere even when their genres are far apart. Glass Beams plugs into the same circuit: the groove of Justice, the haze of Tame Impala, the melancholy drift of The Cure, the hypnotic repetition of Gorillaz at their most meditative. But without any of the song structure, the vocals, the narrative weight. Just the feel, distilled.
It’s what happens when a listening history built on groove and atmosphere finally reaches something that is only groove and atmosphere.
Entry point: “Mahal” (2023) — a psychedelic funk odyssey that barely changes over its runtime and is never boring for a second.