Mumbai Musicians Randolph Correia and Sidd Coutto Form New Band Laptop

Two Indian bands that are synonymous with shaping the sound of the country’s rock scene in the Nineties and early 2000s are Mumbai outfits Pentagram and Zero. Now, Pentagram’s guitarist Randolph Correia aka Func and drummer Sidd Coutto from the erstwhile Zero have joined forces to form a new pulsating electro-rock duo called Laptop. “It was kind of funny because normally you see two guys on stage playing and they are playing a laptop. But here, there are two guys playing on stage and there is no laptop,” says Coutto.

A year ago, the twosome began conversing on starting a project together. Those conversations eventually led to them jamming and writing a bunch of material. Coutto says, “We decided to just do something as a two-piece band with our musical talent into one project. Then time flew by and a couple of months back we started recording and now we have a three-song EP coming out soon.”

Before the yet-to-be-titled three-track EP drops in a month, Laptop are readying their debut single in the form of the glitch rock offering “Granted,” slated to be released in a few weeks accompanied by a trippy music video. Correia tells us that the song was born out of a jam at Mumbai’s Island City Studios. He says, “We said let’s just plug in and play. There was no planning, there was no, ‘Let’s do this [or] I have an idea’ we just went into the studio and played and came up with seven or eight different ideas including vocal ideas. So literally the arrangement is exactly the same like we did at the jam.”

The musicians tell us that the way they are going to approach their live set is “almost like a DJ.” The guitarist says, “I think it will be more eclectic than one might imagine. It won’t be just sticking to the genre that you hear on the EP.” Coutto adds, “I’m playing drums and singing and Randolph is playing guitar – we decided not to hold ourselves back after making music for 20 something years. We’re thinking, ‘How can we entertain the audience in a one hour or two-hour span, taking it up and down?’ Whatever we have in order to do that technology-wise and instrumental wise and it’s not just restricted to the two instruments we have on stage.”

Both Correia and Coutto are also quite complimentary to each other. “Randolph has been my favorite guitar player since I was 16,” says Coutto. “We mostly ran into each other during the same gigs also being from the same city and we were always hanging out and having the same laughs and jokes,” the guitarist says. Coutto also tells us that working with Correia reminds him of his younger self and how he was energized starting out in his first band. On what the project means to Correia, he says, “It’s the selfish desire to get back into the same feeling we did like back in the Nineties.”