Sounds of the Night

Bajirao Pawar

One of the most talked about events of the last few months was the launch of the Petri Dish Project, Mumbai musician and Blue Frog partner Ashutosh Phatak’s eclectic foray into electronica. The project that mixes everything from trip-hop, psy, trance, ambient, dub and electro-rock featured collaborations with some of the most happening new talent on the scene, including vocalists Ashima Iyer, Suman Sridhar, Monica Dogra, Saba Azad and Anushka Manchanda and appearances by the likes of Jalebee Cartel and Dhruv Ghanekar. The launch gig was a massive blowout at the Blue Frog that featured all his collaborators (Dogra, away in New York, was beamed hologram-style on a screen for her song) and even an interpretive dancer. Needless to say, everyone took notice.

Petri Dish, says Ashu, as he’s rather better known, “came out of a whim.” Getting ready to play a show at the Blue Frog in three weeks, he was busy prepping to play his older material from Sigh of an Angel and a rock opera he’d written when he was struck by the thought of coming up with new material for the show. “I got into the studio, I wrote nine songs in eight days, I got [drummer] Lindsay D’Mello and [bassist] JD [Thirumalai] into the studio and we had almost a brand new album, so within those three weeks it was recorded, rehearsed and performed. It all happened in a flash,” says Ashu. The album was recorded at Blue Frog Studios under

the watchful eye of sound engineer Jovian Soans. But the idea for the album had been incubating in his head for the last two years, ever since the Blue Frog was opened. “It was an observation of the night actually, this whole album. It’s all about the experiment of the party, it’s reaching into the different aspects of going out and people meeting.”

The idea for the collaboration with multiple vocalists too was something that had been germinating for a while. “I wanted to get, basically, the best of the independent vocalists on the music scene so that’s when I actually talked to Monica, Suman and Anushka and everyone just loved the idea and wanted to come and do it.” For the album he assigned each vocalist a role, a “zone” to fill out and bring to life in their own voices. “Like Anushka, when she sang ”˜Footdub,’ we were like let’s go into a different zone, let’s be funny about it. I told her, ”˜Imagine you’re this little blonde cheerleader who’s just giddy with partying, that’s the kind of voice we want.’ With Monica, the song she sang, ”˜Wasteland,’ was a tribute to The Who and the Pixies and, so I told her think about Robert Plant and think about The Who, so she went into that zone for that song. I asked them all to do something that they wouldn’t normally do with their own bands or by themselves, to try to find a different voice, but your own voice, in this context.”

But it does beg the obvious question. “Why only girls?” says Ashu, laughing. “For one I’d been wanting to work a lot with all these girls for a long time and secondly, I’m not going to keep it to only that. It was just a matter of convenience at that point of time because they all agreed to do it and I’d sung all the other songs anyway. Also, then I thought at the show it’d be better to have all these women,” he says, dissolving into laughter.

Point out to him that electronica is not necessarily his comfort zone and he’s quick to agree. “Honestly telling you, two and half years ago I couldn’t stand electronic music. Then I met all the people and then I realised it’s more about creating a vibe or an ambience and that it’s a lot less to do with the artist actually and it’s a lot more to do with the audience, which I found fascinating ”“ it’s like the opposite of jazz.” But despite making the concession to electronica, Ashu was determined to put his own spin on it. “I was keeping the musicianship alive within the electronica zone by actually using real instruments and using only old-school analogue equipment. This is modern electronica done with equipment from the Fifties and Seventies.” On the album, he played a 1973 Fender Rhodes electric piano and a 1958 Minimoog Voyager used by the likes of Pink Floyd on their earliest albums and these were also used to create the samples he used. “They have all these textures and noises and stuff that’s been used in like 2001: A Space Odyssey. So it was fun but also very satisfying because I wanted to introduce the songwriting element to this whole electronica thing.”

But Petri Dish is more than a one-off project. Ashu has plans to expand his repertoire, bring DJs and more artists into the mix, like he did with Jalebee Cartel on the album. And he insists repeatedly that he doesn’t want Petri Dish to be seen as a solo Ashu project. “Lindsay and JD are as much the core of this as me. And this project will evolve with every collaborator who comes in. Maybe if people follow this they will see an evolution of music that’s coming from song-based writing to dance and fusion of that in the middle and then going someplace else that’s why I’ve also asked a lot of other DJs to remix the stuff. So what would probably end up at the end of a year on a Petri Dish Project album might sound nothing like what we started with and, honestly, I’m cool with that. I’m really cool with that.”