Ashu Phatak: Mumbai music man's new project
Ten in the morning is an odd time for me to be climbing the stairs to Ashu's house. In the five years I’ve known him, the musician-composer-producer and Blue Frog nightclub/studio partner Ashutosh Phatak, better known as Ashu, has open-heartedly hosted countless after-hour parties, all-night sessions of drunken debauchery, general merriment, philosophical musings and impromptu jams that usually end as the day begins. It's been a long while since I was at one of those, though, and it feels different to be entering this familiar space at an unfamiliar time. Ashu lives in a bachelor dream-pad on the top floor of a three-story building tucked at the end of a quiet lane off Hughes Road in posh South Mumbai, and as I ascend the polished wooden staircase, I notice that there are many additions to the paintings on the walls of the stairwell. The original three still remain: colorful caricatures in oil of Ashu and his dogs Frodo and Magic.
Home of dogs and baby frogs
A wrought-iron sun-shaped mirror, framed prints of Tintin covers and vintage posters of French tipple decorate plum walls. Classic mosaic floors in burnt sienna, amber, cream and black add texture to the dining area, where a rough, relaxed wooden picnic table and bench eschew a formal dinner setup. The essential and well-stocked bar is easily accessible and in plain sight; in the daytime, I can see the August Kranti park from the window. Frog figurines of all shapes and sizes are scattered through the space: even before Blue Frog, Mumbai's benchmark live music venue, came about, it seems that someone gifted Ashu a frog figurine on a whim; someone else saw it on the coffee table and, thinking him a collector of amphibian statuettes, gifted him another, and on it went until a rather large and eclectic collection of frogs ended up inhabiting his house much to his bemusement. And now you know why it's called Blue Frog.
The large, sliding wooden door to the bedroom rolls open, and Ashu rushes out freshly scrubbed and apologetic, wearing a navy blue t-shirt, olive cutoff shorts and the definitive red glasses that frame his earnest, boyish eyes, which in turn belie his 38 years. We hug briefly and he orders coffee for us, pulling out his pack of Marlboro Lights.
Before, after and then: Project Petri Dish
"So... where do we start?" he asks. "Do you want me to tell you about the new album? Shall we listen to it?" He goes over to the console and picks out a track. He turns up the volume, and the quiet morning becomes an instant memory as the house throbs with a pulsing dub beat, Lindsay D'Mello's unmistakable drumming over a groovy baseline, synth swells under vocals by Ashu in collaboration with the diva-whine of singer Anushka Manchanda. "I got the ra-a-a-a-aight / To mobility / I got the ra-a-a-a-aight / To possibility," start the words to "Footdub".
The lyrics are cheesy and fun, but also honest somehow, and I'm hooked.
We listen for a while in silence, with the natural head-bobbing and foot-tapping that accompanies a good groove, and I wonder about the source of this dramatic change for the artist whose music thus far has often been blanket labelled "inspired by Pink Floyd". Ashu feeds me samples of other tunes: the dark and throbbing "Drive", hypnotic "Rain", elastic "Time Stretch"; the quietly euphoric love song Sunrise ("With you beside me / I’m free to find me / Just as we see the light, I fell in love with the night"), the jaunty, irreverent title track ("I'm like a sauna / You're like a fish / I'm like a chemical / On your Petri dish") and the energetic and catchy "Wasted", a homage to The Who with a spoken-word interlude which reminds me of Billy Joel's "We Didn’t Start the Fire":
In surprised delight I hear styles that include trance, ambient, dub, reggae, ska and drum-n-bass; there is an upbeat-ness, a bounce, a sense of hope that lies in sharp contrast to the introspective melancholy of his previous album, "Sigh of an Angel", but these new tunes still have, at their heart, the essence of Ashu. That was him then; this is him now.
There is a core of some depth to the surface fun and frivolity of this, his latest album, "Petri Dish". Ashu’s lyrics and approach have always been personal and soulful, and this "80s sensibility", as he calls it, is something he's consciously preserved in this new project. All the loops and samples have been played on "real" instruments, mostly by him. There are electronic bleeps created from synthesizer recordings processed through a digital bit-crusher, sounds from an old, cranky accordion, voices recorded through megaphones and walkie-talkies, vocal samples from Mumbai traffic cops and even from newborn puppies (on the track "Miss Understood", a dedication to Srila Chatterjee's queen dog Jomsom, who recently gave birth to a litter).
"Petri Dish" is not so much an album as an experiment in both sound and in format.
It was written astonishingly quickly. Ashu woke up one morning in late April and auto-wrote nine songs in eight days ("tapping into the collective consciousness"), going on to practice, produce and perform the first show at Blue Frog over the following two weeks. But it feels like the inspiration for this project may have been incubating over a period of some two years, since the inception of the Frog.
"I never thought of it like that," says Ashu however, "but yes, that is what it feels like. This is a celebration of nightlife, of the party, of a lifestyle I’ve seen and been a part of intensely for the past two years. At first I resisted this new movement of DJs, a couple of guys on stage with fancy gadgets instead of a band with actual instruments playing live music. But the more time I spent around it, the more I was able to embrace it and welcome it into my life and my sound."
Return to gig: "Selling music is no longer viable"
The return of focus to a "proper" live show has always been Ashu's pet dream. With Petri Dish, he's stripped the band down to three core members: himself on synth and vocals, the incredibly tight and punchy drummer Lindsay D’Mello, and solid JD on bass. Vocal collaborations come in several flavors of sexy strong women artists who are "doing their own thing", including Monica Dogra (of Shaa’ir + Func), singer-songwriter Ashima Aiyer, model-singer-VJ Anushka Manchanda (of Shkabang), and Suman Sridhar (of Sridhar + Thayil). For the first live show at Blue Frog, Ashu spent many nights after the club had closed programming every light in the house to work in sync with the music during his show. Monica Dogra was going to be away in New York at the time of the gig, so Ashu pre-recorded a video of her singing the track, then projected it life-size and hologram-like onto two parallel, translucent screens on stage while the rest of the band played live.
He's excited to be taking the show on the road late in 2010, to the extent that instead of being the headlining act on a big stage, he's willing to play at smaller venues as the opening act for another band or a big DJ set. Even if it's just the core trio present in the flesh -- not all the female collaborators can be present at all the gigs, due to hectic schedules -- Ashu is excited about finding creative ways to keep re-inventing the show, and this fluidity and evolution lies at the heart of the project.
We chatter until it's time for him to leave for the studio, where he has to work on the score for a film. He still does ad jingles, but now he and Dhruv Ghanekar, former collaborators who started Smoke studios (which eventually evolved into Blue Frog) now work independently, and although Ashu remains a partner at Blue Frog, he's stepped back from the day-to-day running and returned his focus to his original love: being a musician, artist and performer.
It's an auspicious full moon that night, and as I drive across the Bandra-Worli Sea Link bridge listening to a rough mix of the Petri Dish project, a track called "The Rabbit" comes on, with Ashu singing about the creature that lives in the moon. Rather than throwing out the old in exchange for the new, Ashu has managed to lay down a bridge connecting both worlds, in a sincere reflection of his personal evolution as an artist who's philosophically Indian, but with a global sound. And on this new album, the ride is smooth and the view fantastic.
Download free tracks from Ashu's new project, Petri Dish, through Blue Frog. Become an Ashu Facebook fan for news, gig updates and live streaming audio, and learn more about Ashu on MySpace.
