The Ghetto Groove

British outfit Visionary Underground is not a band that is well known in this country, but it should be considering its heavy Indian influences. Their sound is an explosive mix of drum n bass, breakbeat, meteoric time signatures, old school reggae-rap, searing harmonies, warped synth lines and sporadic Eastern drifts. The band, made up of Paul Edwards aka DJ Feel Free (DJ/producer), Coco Edwards (visuals/VJ), Damion Mulrain (vocals), and Duane Christie aka Duane Flames (rapper), gets its Indian influence largely from Coco, a Brit-Asian who is married to Edwards. Her roots are in Kolkata, but she hasn’t been to India in a long time. “But I have always been in touch with my culture. We are, of course, around a lot of Asians and Indians, so in a way I get those influences a lot. London is very cosmopolitan,” she says.

Coco and Paul founded VU in 2001 and their debut album Keep the Grime On which came in 2005 was packed with big name guest artistes like Dr Das (Asian Dub Foundation), MC Navigator, Aref Durvesh (tabla maestro), Sonia Mehta (Indian vocalist), Chandru (Bollywood Strings), and Pandit Dinesh amongst others. This was followed by a several singles and remixes as well as collaborative appearances on albums and tracks with well known Asian musicians like Nitin Sawhney, ADF and Ghetto Priest (rapper). Their second album Fired Up released in November 2008, however, kept collaborations to a bare minimum featuring only bass virtuoso Dr Das of Asian Dub Foundation fame (he is also Coco’s elder brother) as the outside musician.

VU’s music stands out for its angry, cause-driven songwriting. Intrusive governments, police high-handedness, eroding public privacy, civil rights, the environment”¦ everything finds its way into the tracks. Mulrain poses as a reggae soulja against the militant backdrop of drum and bass on ”˜Freedom Fightaz’ from Fired Up as he delivers the refrain “Freedom fighters/Flash up your lighter now.” “How free are we really, with CCTVs monitoring our every move and the government keeping extensive records on us?” he asks. The current economic crisis, according to him, and the social problems that it has engendered has lent an urgency to what they have said on the album. Says Flames, “In East London the kids usually emulate a lot of what they see, usually like on MTV. I am trying to stay away from that. I know the kids look upto what we do, their minds are still developing with that kind of fragile information, so I want to ensure we have a constructive influence.” Adds Coco, “This is an altogether more urgent affair, both musically and lyrically, reflecting the escalating problems in an urban environment.”

The band is currently working on their third album which is expected to be out later this year. The first single from it, `Get the Beers,’ in fact, is now up on YouTube and MySpace and will be available for digital download starting this month. The music, like those from their previous albums, has a lot in common with Asian Dub Foundation, both in terms of sound and songwriting. The band members, though, refuse to acknowledge these parallels. It is, of course, very obvious that like the dozens of other bands which came into prominence over the last decade, VU owes a great deal to the pioneering work done by the likes of Sawhney and ADF etc. in creating Britain’s Asian underground in the 1990s. As Edwards says, “There is a lot of Asian breakbeat and drum and bass out there now, but it is all fast becoming the stuff of mainstream.” says Edwards.