The Calm // Music of the Week / WS 28 Feb 2021

I’m about to take my next professional plunge (in less than a week now), and also my next residential plunge (in about the same timeframe), so this has been a week of planning, anticipation, and anxiety. As I sit down to write this week’s Music column, I’ve spent the last seven days running from house to house, furniture shop to furniture shop, and introduction to introduction. My mood is one of cautious excitement.

In between more running around over the coming week, I’m planning to schedule a little me-time. I’m planning to schedule some calm-time. But because what follows is likely to be a lot more running around, today’s theme isn’t so much Calm as it is the Calm, or the cliched calm that precedes the cliched storm. The most representative playlist for this time of my life is one I’ve already built, but one I won’t release until the 26th of March. See, there’s this interesting collective from Chennai, India, called Focus Group. And Vidyuth, who runs the collective, asked me to prepare a radio show for their weekly listening session. The playlist I’ve made, From Bam Bam to Bam Bam is among the most interesting playlists I’ve ever assembled. 

The concept is simple, starting from Sister Nancy’s Bam Bam, I’ve made a list of tracks that obeys the following rule until I circle back to Toots and the Maytals’ Bam Bam, the song that directly inspired Sister Nancy’s track and consequently, the genre of dancehall. Each track from Bam Bam to Bam Bam is directly related to the previous one, either because their artists have collaborated, or they share producers, or an artist has released a prominent cover of the other artist. The resulting radio show is nearly four hours long, and traverses the worlds of dancehall, dub, trip hop, punk, rock, and hip-hop. I had a lot of fun assembling the show, as I did listening to the punk-tinged debut EP of Vidyuth’s band, Focus Group Music, titled I. 

Overall, it’s been a week that’s a little less punk-tinged than the previous two, but one that’s been punk-tinged nonetheless. Take as evidence my featuring CHAI’s PUNK in the first of this week’s two editions of the Music Box. As an introduction to the album, allow me to quote myself. 

> [CHAI’s PUNK is a]n idiosyncratic mix of dance, punk, and J-pop… [T]he Nagoya four-piece’s second album is both a bundle of joy and a statement of rebellion against modern (mostly Japanese) society’s view of women. Of the several albums I’ve spoken about in the past few years, including the ones I’ve featured on Stranger Fiction, it’s one of the few that are outright joyous.

My second feature on the Music Box – Simla Beat '70 and '71 – really made my day. After writing this piece, I’m going to settle into a comfy chair and continue reading Sidharth Bhatia’s India Psychedelic, a book that chronicles India’s early psych-rock scene and the Simla Beat competitions whose 1970 and 1971 winners feature on those two LPs. Once again, quoting myself.

> When I read India Psychedelic, I imagine long-haired uncles and short-haired aunties smoking ITC Simla brand cigarettes on the bewildered streets of Matunga. In many of my pieces, I brand myself a member of the post-liberalisation generation of India: one of hundreds of millions who grew up in a country that had, as a consequence of the Balance of Payments Crisis of 1991, been forced to open itself up to the world. A country that has since been in the process of giving up the idea of wholesale state ownership of the means of production, of industry, and of culture. Mine was a post-Doordarshan, pre-Netflix India: one because of which nineties kids memes make a similar amount of sense to me as they do to many nineties kids around the world, but with added Indian references. It’s easy to forget that pre-liberalisation Indians did not live in that world. That in the sixties and seventies, as the west saw a broad cultural revolution, India saw three wars, a famine, and a temporary dissolution of its young democracy. Through all this, the idealism of Nehruvian India gave way to a stark realisation of the country’s myriad challenges, especially its widespread poverty and corruption. It was a time of widespread pessimism about the country’s future. Against this backdrop, that a local psych-rock scene could even exist is a miracle.

This journey into the Indian psych-rock scene took me into two orthogonal musical directions: one that ran through one of my favourite Zamrock albums, WITCH’s Lazy Bones, the other that ran through India’s peculiar – and by now quite famous – entry into the psych-electronic scene, the proto-acid-house album, Charanjit Singh’s Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat. If you’re intrigued by the Zamrock scene, it’s worth diving deep into it. Here’s a helpful starting point, from the Stories of Music Discovery vault. And if you’re intrigued by Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat, I’ll soon be featuring it. Perhaps when I move past the Calm to just Calm.

Isn’t that one of life’s primary goals? Calm? Or put more profoundly, peace of mind? Isn’t that one of the things all human beings burdened by an often overwhelming consciousness seek? No? Just me? Ok.