Table of Contents

PUBLISHING & EDITORIAL DIRECTION

❶  Brown Alumni Magazine
❷  Desi-gned Magazine
ARTS COMMENTARY & WRITING

❶  Artist Duo Creates Immersive Multimedia Installations Inspired By Bioluminescence
❷  Designers We Love: Alaiia Gujral
❸  Let’s Talk: “Off the Record” ❹  Way Back: Archival Photographs
❺  Ear Candy: Music Reviews
❻  Flights of Fancy 
❼  Dowry of the Dhurrie❽  Combat on the Carpet
❾  Lanka’s Tree Wine
❶X  Pardesi SynagogueX❶  The Quintessential Madhumālti
X❷  Bhutan’s Pillars of Happiness
X❸  Women of the Mughal Harem
X❹  Inherent Vice
X❺  Kashmir // Cashmeer
OPINION EDS

❶  Why Are My Country’s Treasures Sitting In Your Glass Cases?
❷  In Our Focus On Viruses, We Underestimate The Risk Of The Deadly Bacteria
❸  Fast Fashion—Not So Fashionable
❹  Why I Love Art: My Nani’s Tijori

EXHIBITION & MUSEUM WRITING

❶  Journey of the Jamawar
❷  Sensory Silhouettes
❸  (Re)Painting Histories
❹  Art & Design: 1900 to Now ❺  Objects May Shift
EXPERIMENTAL FORM

❶  Conscious Creativity
❷  Contemplative Spaces
❸  The Malabar Mango
❹  Of the Naga
❺  26/11 Terror Attacks

Yukti V. Agarwal
 AB Psychology
AB Contemplative Studies 
BFA Textiles (Minor in Art History) 

Mumbai   |   New Delhi 


Yukti V. Agarwal is a multi-disciplinary creative working at the intersection of curatorial, editorial, and research-driven practice in the art, design, and culture industries.

She bridges physical and digital worlds, using storytelling to surface meaning through form.

Her writing is shaped by her practice as an artist and designer. See her Fine Arts and Design portfolios. 

She holds degrees from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design.

Top Reads: Sea of Poppies (Amitav Ghosh), Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)

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Arts Commentary & Writing, No. ❺
April, 2025 — onwards



Ear Candy: Music Reviews


Brown Alumni in Music Then and Now



Edited by Louise Sloan & Pippa Jack; Produced by Courtney Cheng



Sofi Tukker: Butter Than Before


SCREENSHOT: YOUTUBE

Bread and butter are a classic combo—but in Sofi Tukker’s world, they’re opposites in dialogue. Released a year apart, BREAD and Butter move in different moods, but together, they trace the arc of the duo, Sophie Hawley-Weld ’14 and Tucker Halpern ’14, who met at Brown.
           Butter, the newest release, is the second half of the diptych. BREAD was a return-to-the-club album: loud, fast, maximalist. It was all sweat and strobe lights. Butter is the comedown—acoustic, intimate, and low-flame. It’s the soundtrack to staring at the ceiling after stumbling home from a rave at dawn—when the world is still spinning, but you’ve stopped moving.
           They’re the same songs—just turned way down. Every track from BREAD has been stripped, reworked, and slowed down—melted, even—for Butter. Industrial beats were swapped for samba shakers, nylon-string guitars, and whispery vocals. Three new tracks round out the album’s warm, lightly tropical melancholy. What’s left is a campy, minimal, oddly sincere setlist.
           “Intensity” lingers on the tongue, with hushed vocals by Liniker, an acclaimed Brazilian artist, curling around a gentle batucada pulse. “Brazilian Soul,” by contrast, has a beach-bonfire vibe, weaving English and Portuguese into an ode to the country that shaped Sophie’s sound.
           “Hey Homie” is a standout. It used to strut—now it just sighs. Silva, another award-winning Brazilian artist, floats in with a new Portuguese verse, and the tempo dips until the beat feels like an after-party phone call to an ex, unraveling into a regret-laced confession. 
           Right there with it is “Throw Some Ass” (which was once a thunderclap of bass), now recast in satin R&B. It’s somehow slow and fast, the kind of track that makes you want to dance—for someone—like no one’s watching. You’d swear none of these songs were the same ones from BREAD.

Listen to the album here

Hyperpop possession


SCREENSHOT: YOUTUBE

Think early 2000s R&B through a fogged mirror: dreamy but aware, smooth but unsettling. Lost in a digital fever dream and coming out the other side, whispering. That’s “Hyper Dai”—Daiela’s hot new single. 

Daiela Simon-Seay ’26 has always been surrounded by sound (her family tree includes producers, singers, and session players). Hyper Dai is equal parts sensual and surreal. It’s not hyperpop in the maximalist sense—it’s more like hyper-feeling: saturated, atmospheric, and emotionally dialed up. The track builds from a spare, almost aquatic synth line into a hypnotic groove. “I told you never to let go / and now you’re leaving me alone, bae,” she sings—half-confession, half-accusation. That tension threads the track: “Didn’t you like it? / Weren’t you so excited?” The beat refuses to sit still. It never drops—it swells and recedes.

The production, which Daiela handled herself, leaves room for texture: echoing synths and underwater percussion. At the core is Daiela’s syrupy, sharp voice. Think the moody atmospherics of Caroline Polachek colliding with the bravado of Charli XCX—but filtered through Daiela’s own warped mirror.

The video, codirected with Dori Walker ’24, leans into the uncanny. Daiela moves through mirrored spaces and dream-lit rooms, multiplied and refracted like she’s glitching between selves. Nothing is quite stable, but nothing’s chaotic either. It’s a slow burn—very Lynchian. 

If you’re looking for a breakup anthem that sidesteps cliché and hits like a punch to the chest, this is it. No histrionics—and unbothered by genre boundaries. She’s not trying to fit in. She’s building a sonic mirror maze and daring you to follow her in.

Listen here.


Riding the Gen Z Retro-Band Wave


PHOTO: SOFIA KASSALOW ’26

Retro isn’t just back—it never really left. From thrifted Levi’s to vinyl pressings of Pet Sounds, Gen Z has a growing appetite for all things analog. And at Brown, among the tie-dye tees and Beatles b-sides, we’ve got the Stowaways. Six-part harmonies. Two keyboards. One fake theremin. And a deep devotion to the funky genius of Brian Wilson. The Stowaways are Brown’s very own Beach Boys cover band—and yes, they’re as delightfully sunny and strange as that sounds.
        Formed in 2022, the nine-person group isn’t here for kitsch or karaoke. They treat ’60s surf rock like sacred text, layering golden-era vocals with a healthy dose of chaotic charm. Seeing them live feels uncanny: purple-red haze, golden tones, and that ooo-ooo-ooo sound from “Good Vibrations,” played on a keyboard patch literally named Sound #404. It’s like stepping into a lost reel from a ’60s variety show—equal parts retro, reverent, and totally unhinged.
        Sure, nostalgia plays a part. These are the songs our parents blasted on car rides and kitchen speakers. But in a world of curated feeds and AI playlists, there’s something radical about watching real humans, in real time, sing their hearts out.  Seeing them live is like spinning a vinyl from start to finish—one band, one album, on repeat. As for the name? According to frontman Linus Lawrence ’25 (also of the popular band Lawrence), “We’re not the captains of this ship. We just snuck on board.” Yeah. That tracks. The band isn’t trying to reinvent the Beach Boys—they’re just riding shotgun, hanging on for the ride. 

Dive into the full story for behind-the-scenes lore, retro-bands trivia, and the secret to sounding like sunshine on vinyl.

Listen to the Stowaways here


Cyberpunk Symphony


SCREENSHOT: YOUTUBE

If Blade Runner had a mixtape, it might sound like this.

On Dead Channel Sky, Daveed Diggs ’04—actor, rapper, and poet—sounds like he’s transmitting from a crumbling, neon-lit timeline where memory glitches and pirate signals jam the airwaves. With his group clipping. (styled in lowercase and with a period), Diggs teams up with producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes—to fuse hip-hop with cyberpunk, horrorcore, and industrial noise.
           Best known for originating the roles of Jefferson and Lafayette in Hamilton (and winning a Tony for it), Diggs has always been a shapeshifter. But with clipping., he leaves Broadway far behind, diving headfirst into claustrophobic soundscapes layered with static, distortion, and dread. 
           Unlike clipping.’s past high-concept projects, Dead Channel Sky takes a looser, mixtape-style approach, less a single story than a fractured series of transmissions. But each track still feels like a world in itself. “Dominator” opens with pounding techno and sampled echoes from a ’90s Dutch hardcore anthem. “Code” threads in audio from the Afrofuturist documentary The Last Angel of History, layering memory and myth into the machine.
           “Change the Channel” is a full-speed sprint. The track swaps clipping.’s usual industrial palette for breakbeat techno that could soundtrack a futuristic shootout—ferocious, sweaty, unrelenting. “Mirrorshades, pt. 2” with Cartel Madras feels like cyberpunk fan fiction turned dance-floor riot, while “Scams,” featuring Tia Nomore, pulses with synthetic paranoia. And “Malleus,” an outro laced with avant-garde guitar from Nels Cline, dissolves the album into noise and memory.
           Throughout, Diggs’s razor-sharp voice cuts through the chaos like a knife through tinfoil. 
           Dead Channel Sky doesn’t make for the best background music. It does however make for the perfect late-night track—reminiscent of burned-out screens and the feeling that the future already happened… and no one told you.

Don’t change the channel.

Listen to the “Welcome Home Warrior” here.


OK Go, Don’t Stop


SCREENSHOT: YOUTUBE

With OK Go, there’s never a still moment. Fronted by Damian Kulash ’98, the band has built its reputation on turning music videos into kinetic experiments.

Imagine paint-filled explosions timed to drumbeats, zero-gravity flips aboard a parabolic plane, and domino chains that snake through entire warehouses. Every project is a study in movement, timing, and choreography. From treadmill dances to kaleidoscopic illusions made of mirrors and robotic arms, OK Go has turned music videos into something closer to performance engineering. And chances are, you’ve seen one—on TikTok, in a group chat, or flashing by on late-night TV.

“Love,” their latest track, leads their new album, And the Adjacent Possible—a phrase borrowed from evolutionary biology, referring to what becomes possible when new combinations arise. For the video, they teamed up with Universal Robots and codirector Miguel Espada to stage a dizzying performance inside a cavernous Budapest train station. Shot in a single, nail-biting take—after 39 near-misses—it features 26 robotic arms, 60 mirrors, and 60 human performers moving in uncanny synchrony. New combinations, indeed. The tune is a shimmering pop anthem, pulsing with layered synths, syncopated claps, and a gently ascending melody. Kulash’s falsetto stays soft but certain, carrying warmth beneath the candy-gloss production. 

True to form, the track delivers—but it’s the video that takes center stage.

Listen here.


SECOND ACT: A CEO TURNED SINGER


SCREENSHOT: YOUTUBE

Opera singer, club scene regular, or Fortune 25 CEO? 

George Barrett ’77 is all of the above. 

You don’t often find a corporate heavyweight trading the boardroom for a recording studio—but Barrett, who served as CEO of Cardinal Health Inc., a multinational corporation that’s currently number 15 on the Fortune 500, for nearly a decade—has never been easy to pin down. A former varsity athlete, classically trained opera singer, and a regular at Greenwich Village haunts like the Bitter End, Barrett took a long detour through healthcare leadership before returning to his first love: music. Now, at 68, he’s making his official debut with Not Alone, a genre-spanning album produced by Grammy winner Brian Keane.
           But this isn’t a CEO’s vanity project—it’s the real deal. The record features a star-studded lineup, including jazz legends like Cyrus Chestnut and Eddie Gomez and backup singers who’ve toured with Bruce Springsteen. It flows effortlessly between gospel, Americana, blues, and funk. His lyrics are warm and searching, full of quiet grief, hope, and connection.
           The standout single, You’re Not Alone, is both a personal anthem and a call to community. What begins as a gentle piano ballad grows into a soaring gospel anthem, echoing the emotional crescendos of artists like Marvin Gaye or Carole King. Gentle piano and Barrett’s steady, soulful vocals give way to a full gospel choir, building a sense of collective uplift that never veers into cliché.
           In the accompanying music video, Barrett performs alongside clips of everyday moments—people holding hands, waiting for the bus, crossing the street, moving through the world together. The video also features footage from the Harmony Project, a nonprofit that builds community through music, whose mission echoes Barrett’s own. It’s a reminder that even in life’s loneliest moments, we’re still part of something larger. —Yukti V. Agarwal ’24.5

Listen to the “Welcome Home Warrior” here.


More Ear Candies coming soon.