Music·Art·Science
Some voices only wake after sundown. Turn the lights off. Light a candle. Press play.
Three photographs and a letter written after midnight.
They say the night keeps no promises. I have found the opposite. It remembers every one.
I have walked through candlelit halls where the clocks forgot to tick, and stood at windows while the storm wrote its long letters on the glass. Every song I write begins there: in the hour when the city sleeps and the heart refuses to.
If you are reading this, you are awake too. Stay a while. Let the music be the lantern.
Yours, after dark. B.
For every soul who ever fell in love with the night.
All words here are original.
Bibek Rana is a Nepali singer-songwriter writing songs about love, memory and moving on, and an artist who paints and sketches between sessions.
“Kasai ko yaad, Kasai ko Saath.”
Bibek, on Sadhana Chahana
Official lyric videos from his YouTube channel, plus every single so far.
Song videos and covers, straight from the crypt.
Gothic tales, original and short enough to read by candlelight.
In a town where every clock stopped at midnight, a girl kept one watch ticking. Each night a pale stranger came to buy a single minute from her. On the hundredth night he asked for nothing. He only wanted to hear the ticking, he said, because it sounded like a heartbeat he had lost long ago. She gave him the watch. In the morning, every clock in town began to run again.
He played at the cathedral steps after dark, and the roses in the old garden turned their heads to listen. One winter he did not come. The garden kept a single red rose blooming through the snow until spring, when a new violinist arrived with his eyes and his song, saying he had dreamed of a flower that waited.
When the house was sold, the new owners found two hundred letters beneath the floor, all addressed “To whoever stays awake.” None were signed. Each ended the same way: “The night is long, but you are not alone in it.” They put the letters back, and wrote one of their own.
Play a keyboard, tap a drum pad, try chords, sketch and write lyrics. Free, right in your browser.
Every scar a story, every job a verse.
Long shifts, heavy lifting, teamwork and timing. The discipline that keeps the music going.
Painting and restoring classics: Volkswagen Beetles and other VW classics, Mustangs and racing cars, plus furniture. Patience, prep and a perfect finish.
Precision knife work, speed under pressure and respect for the craft.
His project: an atelier of hand-crafted candles with delivery across Nepal. A website, not an app.
Sales at Bihani Traders.
Marketing for Beautyxo.store.
Gothic books and new releases, music business and Nepal disaster updates, freshly gathered every visit. Every story links to its original publisher.
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Sources: The Guardian Books · Literary Hub · Reactor · Google News · Billboard · Rolling Stone · Pitchfork · Music Business Worldwide · Billboard Business · ReliefWeb Nepal · The Kathmandu Post · The Himalayan Times. Headlines are fetched live on every visit (cached for up to 5 minutes) and belong to their publishers.
Even the night has a heart. If you can, lend yours.
Nepal’s national Red Cross, on the ground in flood-hit districts.
Donate on the official site ↗Red Cross Red Crescent appeal supporting the Nepal Red Cross response.
Donate on the official site ↗Health, nutrition, water and protection for children in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading.
Donate on the official site ↗The government’s official card gateway for disaster rescue, relief and rehabilitation.
Donate on the official site ↗Health, financial and addiction-recovery help for people in the music industry.
Donate on the official site ↗Crisis relief, mental-health and wellbeing support for Australian artists, crew and music workers.
Donate on the official site ↗Every button opens the organisation’s own official donation page. This site collects no money or details and is not affiliated with these charities. Give only through official channels, and beware of personal QR codes or accounts.
An exhibition of original paintings by Mr B. Tap a frame to view it on Instagram.
Tap any frame to open that painting on Instagram. All artwork is Bibek's own, from @bibekranamusic.
Original short poems written for this site, some paired with Bibek's artwork.
The candle leans the way I lean, toward a door that isn't there; the wax remembers every name I whispered to the midnight air. Come late, come soft, come wrapped in rain: the dark keeps nothing it can't spare.
I'll love you in the hour of bells, when roses close their crimson eyes, when every star forgets its name and moonlight learns to tell no lies. Hold out your hand. The night is long, and we were made for long goodbyes.
The stage goes dark, the amps still hum, one spotlight finds the empty floor; I sing the last song to the moon because she always asks for more. The crowd goes home. The echo stays and knocks like you upon my door.
Graphite, smoke and one stray line, a face arrives before I call. I shade the hollow of a cheek and hear the quiet in the hall. By morning there's a stranger here who knows me best of all.
Under the lamp, the city breathes in red; he counts the cracks the evening left behind. His coat holds rain, his pockets hold the road, his silence holds a song he cannot find. Walk on, old shadow. Every street is home to those who keep a lantern in their mind.
One iron flower blooming in the dark, a hymn of amber over wet grey stone; it never asks who passes underneath, it only makes sure no one walks alone.
She was dipped in morning, wing to wing, a coin of sunlight learning how to fly; the gold runs down like honey from a hymn, too heavy for the wind, too bright to die. Hold still and she will teach you how to shine: not loud, not long, but fully, once, and high.
A splash of sky broke loose and grew a beak, then shook the canvas off and caught the breeze. Some colours never settle on a wall; they wait for one held breath, then cross the seas.
He turned his face from centuries of sun, his hair a fire the dark could not put out. Eternity is long, he told the wind, but one red dawn outweighs the years of doubt.
True, documented findings about the brain, art and music.
The brain is only about 2% of body weight, yet it uses roughly 20% of the body's energy at rest.
Music you love can trigger dopamine release in the brain's reward system, the same chemistry linked to food and other pleasures (Salimpoor et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2011).
The 'chills' some songs give you are linked to activity in brain regions for reward and emotion (Blood & Zatorre, PNAS, 2001).
Playing an instrument works the auditory, motor and visual systems together, and brain scans of long-time musicians show differences in those areas compared with non-musicians (Gaser & Schlaug, 2003).
Drawing something helps you remember it better than writing it down, a finding psychologists call the drawing effect (Wammes, Meade & Fernandes, 2016).
The brain has a region specialised for recognising faces, the fusiform face area, which is part of why portraits grab us so quickly (Kanwisher et al., 1997).
Piano, a huge chest voice and nowhere to hide. Proof that one honest take can fill an arena.
Improvised runs that climb for minutes, harmonium and handclaps building to a trance. The voice as devotion.
Names only, to point you toward the sound. Go listen to the originals.
Candle smoke, cathedral echo, a slow minor chord.
Sufi devotional music: a lead singer and chorus repeat a line, rising in pitch and speed until the room is in a trance.
Brooding post-punk with cavernous echo and deep, theatrical vocals. Romantic, cold and candle-lit.
Synth-led melancholy in minor keys. Cold pulses, warm sadness.
Heavy guitars meet a full orchestra and choir, often led by an operatic soprano.
Baroque weaves ornate lines over a driving bass (Bach, Vivaldi, Handel). Classical trades that for clear, balanced phrases (Haydn, Mozart).
Drama told entirely through song, with an orchestra in the pit. The first big landmark is Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607).
The 12-bar blues turned up loud: bent notes, crying solos and a swagger in the groove.
Distorted guitars carrying Nepali melody and poetry. Big choruses, raw energy, often a folk turn of phrase.
Masks, chandeliers and arias sung into the dark.
Masks, a chorus and open-air hillside theatres. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides competed at the festival of Dionysus.
Founded by Kan'ami and Zeami: carved masks, slow precise movement, chant and a painted pine on a bare stage.
A masked Lakhe dancer with a red face and wild mane leaps through the streets to drums and cymbals, especially during Indra Jatra.
A thrust stage under an open sky (the Globe, 1599). Few sets: the words paint the scene, and boys played the women's roles.
The body tells the story: mime, movement and dance first, words second. Jacques Lecoq's Paris school (1956) shaped it.
Bold kumadori make-up, frozen 'mie' poses, a runway through the audience (hanamichi) and revolving stages.
Song, dialogue and dance carrying one story, from Broadway to the West End.
Titles and composers only. Every one is centuries-old public domain music; find a recording you love.
Recent posts from his feed, sorted by category. Tap any to open Instagram.
For any inquiries and work, email bibekrana585@gmail.com or DM me on Instagram @bibekranamusic.
