Performing Arts in India - Music

The contemporary/counter-culture music scene is now as easy to spot, as it is difficult to define. The shifting shape of the sounds that accommodate and thrive on the sensibilities of a largely urban consciousness can be traced along a host of dots and can go as far back as Kolkata of the '50s, a breeding ground for many musicians as they laid down the groove for the now defunct cabaret shows. Many jazz artists found patronage in Mumbai during the '60s as the city's love for the art-form was patronised through live shows at various clubs and restaurants. The beatnik consciousness affected the youth, along with the rebel yell of rock and roll in the 70's and till date, college festivals continue to be the starting point for any rock/metal band aspiring to shape their movement towards originality. With support structures like Mumbai's I-rock, an annual festival now in its 23rd year, there was a platform for such bands to start pushing towards an original expression. Unlike the scene from the '50s and '60s during which many a musician had to surpress his creative instincts to survive within a trade of playing covers to an audience who wanted to know every song, the rock band was more conscious of an evolving push towards originality, a small ripple that became a wave by the '90s. By then, India’s first rock magazine, Rock Street Journal (RSJ) had managed to outlive its days as a pamphlet to become a largely black and white magazine and in 2001 Bombay Black became the first major rock band from India to tour America. Today's independent artist is standing at a crossroads where the global pathway for exchange of sounds, technology and opportunities has become much smaller and yet has it's own share of traps and possibilities.

Amit Saigal, Mananging Director of RSJ events and Rock Street Journal, feels that the World Wide Web has shaken up this whole scene. “With digital exchange of music and online sharing, artists can not only access fans but the audience can also sample a wide range of evolving music from across the world”, he opines. Thus, original music, the movement towards which was crucially shaped and forwarded by RSJ's dedication to creating a platform for the same, is no longer a novelty factor for a musician to flaunt to his patrons. The explosion of sub-genres can be attributed to this awareness and it is a double-edged sword.

On one hand, an artist will find it easier to connect to fans of tech-death or post-rock music but the same also means that the audiences have been further fragmented and scattered. The platform for independent rock music has also morphed and expanded along with the evolution and growth of this listenership and a noticeable development has been the decline of the competitive stage from the apex of an independent artist's aspirational map. Delhi's Orange Street who were, during the turn of tide, at the forefront of the revolution towards writing original music, was one of the last few bands to have toured Europe in 2004, having emerged victorious on a competitive platform.

However, vocalist Bann feels that such competitive platforms no longer apply to the current scenario. “Earlier, there was this need to create a space for original independent music and acquaint the audience with the same. Today, it's still great for amateur bands at the formative level but beyond that, with growing options, competitions are redundant”, he says. In fact, The Great Indian Rock Festival, RSJ's long-standing platform for independent rock and metal bands, once host to a competitive platform which lauded the likes of Orange Street, Bombay Black and Zero, is now a non-competitive festival which, in its 13th edition in 2008, travelled to seven cities across the country.

However, this shift in consciousness and infrastructure has been a scattered movement which has witnessed a concentrated growth in certain centres and has been stunted or slow to take off in a few. Kolkata, for one, has never really been an important peg in this neo-cultural rub of things. Although the city is well-known for its patronage of live music, the infrastructure for the same is still lagging behind that of the others. There are just two venues for live music in Kolkata, namely Someplace Else and Princeton Club, and Amyt Dutta, guitar player for the city's veterans Skinny Alley feels that the global economic recession might make it even slimmer for the independent musician to survive in the live scene. According to Anando Sen, vocalist of The Supersonics, one of the newer talents to have found its way outside the city with its garage-y rock and roll sound, “people in Kolkata do not really spend a lot of money, like in the other metros, and that really sets off a chain-reaction. Thus, even though bands are trying to make their own music and find their way up through winning competitions, it's tough to find a platform beyond that”. While Amyt says that it does not provide the spirit of independent music with enough food to keep growing, Anando is actually glad that the lower cost of living in this metro helps him stay afloat during this period of change for independent music.

Bangalore, on the other hand, once a thriving centre of independent and counter-cultural growth is trying to find its way across the city police's ban on live music at places that serve alcohol. However, Opus, one of the city's most famous watering holes has been staunch in its support of the live scene and according to owner Carlton Braganza, the venue was always committed to hosting live music, a task that he took upon his shoulders with a guitar in his hands, during the early days. Despite the restive feeling amongst the city's musicians, events like Rock Ethos (now in its third year) and Whiplash continue to attract a crowd which merely reiterateses the obvious. India's first online radio station dedicated to the country's independent music, radioverve.com, is the brainchild of Gaurav Vaz, entrepreneur and bass-player for the city's folk-rock exports Raghu Dixit.

While the website's streaming player caters to your choice of genre with eight separate and dedicated channels, the plan is to collect as much music on the website for the future and make cross-linking easy for the listener as well as the artiste. “The ban on live music”, according to Vaz, is making the artiste in Bangalore more pro-active as, “from what I have seen, the musician here has not been too pro-active in getting out and grabbing the gigs and opportunities that exist”, he says. Like Kolkata, Bangalore too, lacks the presence of any artiste management agency or organisational support system for independent music and yet, recently, post-rock outfit Lounge Piranha toured in a bus across five cities in the country in support of their album Going Nowhere, an exercise that was a first of it's kind, was self-sponsored and has yielded no financial loss. Abhijeet Tambe, of the band, confesses that they had tried to include music channels and event organisers/sponsors as part of the same but they were always sure about doing it themselves even if it didn't work. “Music channels, I realised were more interested in having control, rather than supporting the music, whereas organisers either want a spectacle that runs into crores or nothing. So we just did it ourselves – from booking the shows to painting the bus”, he says. A self-produced film of the tour will be out soon.

The spirit of the DIY mantra which has always propelled the course of any indie expression has also been adopted by believers and is being manifested increasingly by efforts to provide a surrounding structure to the form. Only Much Louder (OML), a Mumbai-based organisation, started by co-director Vijay Nair as a management company for independent artistes, has been extremely significant in pioneering the state of the art towards order. Bobby Talwar, his partner-in-crime and bass player for the now-defunct Zero, an alternative/rock 'n' roll band from Mumbai, whose E.P. Hook continues to be the highest selling E.P. for any independent band in India, describes OML as “an arm for the independent musician”. More like they have provided a shot to it, as they leverage their services to emerging acts such as Indigo Children who recently toured the U.K. as a part of the Soundpad platform, while also managing indie rock's highest billed act electronic-rock act Pentagram. The organisation also houses Counter-Culture Records which functions as an alternative to major labels, releasing and distributing indie albums within a wide spectrum of sound and Babblefish productions whose cost-effective strategies make it easier for an independent artist to shoot a video and release it. They have recently announced an initiative titled the 'Short Circuit' project by virtue of which a selected band or artist gets an opportunity to tour across select pubs/clubs in different cities. Thus what they effectively wrap up as a tour will also constitute a gig-circuit. While initiatives like Pubrockfest which was hosted in pubs across 22 different cities in 2008 continue to expand on the avenue of live opportunities that these clubs can provide, they also throw up a picture of the quality of the talent on hand.

According to Amit Saigal there exists a disparity amongst the available audience, in terms of ability to pay for entertainment and the same holds the key to the sustenance of a musician's lifestyle. Thus, even though Kryptos one of Bangalore's most active metal bands and pioneers of an old school sound might have released their last album on OSM records in America, their fanbase which could consist largely of college students and young professionals might not be able to engender heavy sales at a venue's bar. “What works or not is not in the hands of the artist”, says Bobby, citing the presence of many a singer-songwriter who is good but still not sustainably marketable to any kind of audience. The teeming populace of Indian Metal is often at the raw end of such a deal because heavy music, though increasingly favoured by young people, still suffers from lack of patronage.

“Most venues are still very conservative about metal. They think it is noise and will drive away their regular patrons even if it's one night only” mentions Sahil Makhija, vocalist of Demonic Resurrection, from Mumbai, who also operates Demonstealer Records and organises gigs for metal bands locally. According to him, economic independence and age is also a huge factor when it comes to entry at pubs and clubs and thus bar sales also don't add up to encouraging figures. Ruing the current crisis that Mumbai is facing with respect to venues for metal gigs, Prashant Shah of experimental/hardcore act Scribe says “(since) it's basically about going out there and playing the music to people… you do so. At any given opportunity, and for little or no money whatsoever”. Their album, Confect., was counted amongst the top 10 Indian releases of 2008 by Rolling Stone Magazine and Rock Street Journal and the band had clocked a total of just 13 live performances that year. “Most of the bands that send entries for GIR are metal bands”, says Siddhartha Menon, event manager at RSJ which would also explain why festivals like National Law School Bangalore's Strawberry Fields and Independence Rock, both platforms for amateur/independent bands, have consistently featured metal bands in profusion.

“There used to be a huge dependence on the college-festival circuit but financially it helps only if you win the competition in which case you can't participate again. We stopped going for such competitions as soon as the live music scene started opening up in Delhi”, says Reuben R. Bhattacharya of Undying Inc. a math/extreme metal band whose founding members hail from Shillong but swear by the live opportunities that Delhi, their city of residence, affords them. “Having a day job always helps if you wanna play only metal”, opines Venkat of Bhayanak Maut, arguably India's biggest drawing metal act, who've released their their third album under Gray and Saurian Records and continue to juggle careers that involve the likes of boardroom meetings.

However as one notices a global accumulation on electronic pastures as the sound of the new generation, there seems to be a rapid rise in the growth of electronic music within contemporary circles. One can link the acceptance of the same with the growth in clubbing culture or the breakthrough of the DJ as an artist but Samrat B., producer/arranger for electronic/experimental act Teddy Boy Kill has a different take on this altogether. “Every four or five years there is a collective desire for change that has always shaped the risk attached to the growth of indie music”, he says, referring to the earlier movement towards electronic experiments within the independent scene. Interestingly, he has been instrumental in this, having played the keys and samples on Bombay Black’s self-titled album, as well as having engineered the electronics on the now defunct progressive/experimental rock outfit Envision's Patterns and Moodswings both amongst the earliest examples of a conscious electronic vibe. However the real explosion of electronic music on the urban sensibility was forwarded by the success of the MIDIval Punditz and is being further strengthened by the global success of Jalebee Cartel. Needless to say there are a thousand acts in between and it's becoming frighteningly hip to be seen at an electronic gig because electronic music is the current trend and according to Amit Saigal, “most of the people who go to such gigs don't listen to the music or know much, they're just there to shake a leg because it's cool”. With technology becoming cheaper there developed, parallel to the guitars and the distortion pedals, a scene that could be built upon sound cards and processors.

The DIY thrust to recording has been a digital revolution and once the price to pay for such tools began to fall, people started to experiment. Pentagram guitar player Randolph had already added the cutting edge of electronics to the band's sound with Up, their second release and currently his pairing with Monica Dogra as the stylish dance-rock duo Shaa'ir and Func. is not only finding airplay on the radio and television, but also playing at international festivals such as Glastonbury and Big Chill U.K. in 2008. Ritnika Nayan, former manager of Jalebee Cartel and founder of Music Gets Me High, a management agency for independent artistes explains why the logistics of organising a tour for an electronic artist is not much of an issue. “Most electronic artists do not have a full-fledged band set-up – it's just one or two people – and most clubs have a DJ setup. Thus, it's not too expensive for an Indian electronic artist to be playing gigs abroad”, she explains.

Labels like Dada Music and Chill Om Records have sprung up with the rain to specifically support the electronic movement. Blue Frog, an integrated project that comprises, amongst other things, one of the country's swankiest venues for live music and an artiste management company/record label, is another such target specific enterprise. Launched in 2008 the club hosts a live gig every night and has played to many a distinguished international host but, most, importantly is caters to the pool of musicians who exist outside the bracket of rock music. Shaa'ir and Func. have released their latest album Light Tribe on the Blue Frog label and the venue provides, what is easily, the most professional and world class gigging experience for the seasoned musician in this country. Over the last three to four years, the glow that the internet has cast around independent music has primarily served to break the fetters of isolation that was hampering the unification of our awareness and efforts with the global wave that harbours these various sounds and vibes. Each band now, whether amateur or professional, is quick to create that myspace page that serves to be the most accessible contact point for fans or organisers. Similarly, home recording technology has, indeed, become a potent tool for musicians, and bands like Scribe have recorded whole albums at home and released them for download on their myspace page. Technology and access have teamed up with spirit and talent to usher in an age of consciousness that the independent artist has been, for long, striving towards. The cynics will be quick to point out a market that is already, or will soon be, saturated with mediocrity but the optimist and/or the listener has never witnessed such plenty. Graphite for one, gold for another… hop by to the nearest venue and take your pick.

Shomi Gupta was once editor and now contributor to Rock Street Journal. Sanmitra Gupta is known to all as ‘Shomi’ and to many as a screenplay writer. Some day, he will write and direct a feature film.

November 1, 2009

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