Photography by Shantanu Krishnan
It took Sunflower Tape Machine five years to accidentally figure his debut album out. For five years, Chennai-based indie musician Aryaman Singh just made songs, wherever he was, on whatever instrument was around, chasing whatever sound was crawling his ear at the moment. Eventually there were eight tracks, no plan and one connective tissue: noise. Lots of it. Released independently on 21st August 2026, I LIKE NOISE. MATTER OF FACT, I LOVE IT is a loud, maximalist tangle of indie and alt-rock with shoegaze haze thrown in, the kind of record that sounds like it was engineered for chaos. For Aryaman, if the industry tends to chase clean, radio-ready sound, he’d rather want to treat distortion and fuzz as its own organ, one that lets melody and feeling sit together. The story of the album, then, is also the story of learning to trust that instinct.
Becoming Sunflower
Aryaman describes his younger self as ‘super curious’ and, with a laugh, ‘a bit of a brat’. He was the kind of child who asked questions, read billboards and watched video essays simply because he wanted to know more. His musical diet was just as indiscriminate: rock sat alongside dubstep, with no particular need to choose between them. That appetite for whatever caught his attention has followed him into Sunflower Tape Machine. The project can move from Alt-Rock to Hyper-Pop depending on what he happens to be into or feeling at the time; genre, for him, is just another thing to poke at. He found FL Studio in seventh grade and began making what he now remembers as decidedly terrible music, but the process was fun enough to keep him coming back. It was only years later, while playing bass in a band around the twelfth grade, that the possibility of doing music professionally began to feel real.
I LIKE NOISE. MATTER OF FACT, I LOVE IT isn’t really a clean break from his earlier bedroom pop, indie folk and dream-pop music. The heavier Alt-Rock direction is simply where his ears have landed for now in his ongoing musical curiosity. ‘No matter the song, It’s almost always experience-driven.’
Let It Be Loud
Aryaman has never quite understood the music industry’s fixation with making everything as quiet and sterile as possible. ‘I think noise gives a song so much character. If anything, it only emphasises the quiet parts more. The way I use it, its main function is to stop making you single out each element of the track and instead enjoy it as one cohesive experience. I experience music very melody-first, and I think that's how I’d like my listeners to experience my music too!’ That approach is all over the debut album: packed with layers but ultimately driven by melody. His songwriting usually begins with a feeling and an instrumental loop. He hums a vocal melody over it, fits words into the shape and builds the ‘super important’ chorus first.
Interestingly, the album’s cohesion was never planned. These eight tracks were made over different periods of his life, without any intention of eventually placing them on the same record. It was only much later that he recognised noise as the album’s narrative. Even the record’s most painstaking moments came from following that instinct to excess: the final two songs on the album began as one project, with drums recorded in his bedroom and so many separately processed layers that the sheer size of it pushed his computer to its limits.
But time also gave these songs room to become themselves. ‘Writing-wise, I don’t really think you can force an honest song. If your intention is to make art, I think it just comes to you. You live, you experience and then one day it manifests into a song. But of course, over the years I’ve become better at doing what I do, I have a better ear and so I’m definitely glad I let them sit in the vault and breathe because they came out better and more tasteful than I could have ever pumped them out in the past. One song whose recordings I barely touched was ((ISAWU)) though - It was the first track I wrote on this album and one of the first songs I wrote EVER. You might even notice my voice being a slightly higher and lighter one on that. Even the thought of re-recording the vocals felt so wrong to me because of how personal it is and the original recordings have this innocence and conviction that only baby Sunflower would have felt because it was his story to tell not mine.’
Making It Work
Being an indie artist today meets a complicated reality in The Sound of Radio, where he turns his attention to the machinery around music itself. He wrote the song wanting listeners to see how easily art can become secondary to connections, social circles and the business of getting ahead. Releasing the album completely independently was therefore a statement about what he wanted to prioritise. ‘Would I release under a label at some point? Sure - Who knows? I’m not opposed to it for scaling, solely so I can focus more on the art side of things and they can take care of the rest.’
Onward, Aryaman wants to take his debut album on tour across India and internationally. Musically, he is already thinking about markdown. After making a record so deliberately maximalist, he is looking at playing with constraint and seeing what happens when there is less to work with. Having spent years finding out what noise could hold, Sunflower Tape Machine’s next question might be: what's left when you take it away?
Words Nidhi Soni
Date 8.9.2026