Saby’s sprawling metacognitive, metaphysical journalistic style syncs perfectly with his latest subject matter: the astral dimensions of Andre 3000’s New Blue Sun album

By Rajesh Barnabas

This is a sort of a review of a review. Saby Reyes-Kulkarni has been writing about music professionally for two decades. The descriptor for FeedbackDef (short for feedback deficiency), one of his many media projects is this: “Longtime music journalist Saby Reyes-Kulkarni riffs on music / culture / sports and talks to a bunch of people.” Saby does not really need to talk to anyone though, he forms point and counterpoint all within himself. His virtuosity and versatility as an in-the-moment thinker/poet cannot be contained in the simple title of ‘music critique.’ His spontaneous delivery is so layered and without cuts, that you might believe that it is rehearsed, but the producer is too busy for that. This believe it or not is a side project of Saby’s, not yet his money-maker. But maybe that is all the better and lucky for us, his audience, that capitalism has not distorted his artform – this is a hobby/habit/outpouring of love, that appears very organic to Saby. Love in the sense of an amateur – someone still in love with what they are doing, yet agile enough in the crowded sea of media producers to be on the cusp of a new genre unto himself – vanguardish in a surrealist metacognitive, metaphysical journalistic venture.

Saby is a one-man dialectical machine, that frequently gets off the track of what were digressions already, to argue with hypothetical opponents or himself. It kind of reminds me of the tennis great John McEnroe, where they say his opponent was never the guy on the other side of the court, but rather himself and something more existential than sport. One day in the future, they may have an AI mode where you can simulate the style of Saby Reyes-Kulkarni, but for now, you certainly can tell his work was not spewed out of chatgpt. Saby’s stream-of-consciousness delivery matches the format of Andre 3000’s song titling for New Blue Sun. For example one of the song titles is called: “I Really Wanted To Make A Rap Album, But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.”

Enjoy this one-of-a-kind media artist/reviewer/philosopher/story-teller/…../……/ meander about @feedbackDef on Youtube and Substack: https://feedbackdef.substack.com