At the popular Bangalorean indie music space Counter Culture recently, a crowd danced in partial darkness, illuminated only for brief moments by the light from images on a large screen. Performing at the factory-turned-gig space was Delhi-based audio-visual group Basic Love of Things (BLOT!).
The setup resembled an interplanetary mission's control room, with electronic equipment, a giant LED screen and several laptops. Keenly watching the crowd groove in front of them, as they stood hunched over their consoles and laptops, were Avinash Kumar and Gaurav Malaker, whose performances blend electronic music with films and visual art, throwing about quick smiles each time the crowd showed their appreciation.
While some danced, others stood back and took in the films that accompanied the music. A few others stood in the fringes, grooving, nodding, shaking a solitary leg, not entirely sure of their own reactions. A spectrum of responses also representing, perhaps, the general attitude to novel musical and artistic forms emerging in India.
The duo was performing as part of a four-city tour to promote their debut album Snafu. The gig that night was a veritable milestone for BLOT! whose journey began in 2007, when its two artists met in Delhi and decided to team up audio with innovative visuals. An unprecedented VJ act, with artistic leanings somewhat paralleling those of international clubs in the 70s and 80s, must have been hard to digest, even for Delhi's earnestly progressive audience.
"We invested our own money and created interesting setups and that got people's attention," says Avinash, a filmmaker and designer from NIFT. In many ways, BLOT! represents art's new order — gone are the days when musicians spoke of struggles and trials to illustrate their evolution. Instead, the band insists that its first performances were "exciting" and "like a feasibility test".
With no formal training in filmmaking and music, Avinash and Gaurav's real challenge was to make audio and video interact. Where innovative artistic forms looked for acceptance in the old days, contemporary music acts now look for comprehension. "There is no term for an electronic music group. Somebody called us a two-member rock band," says Avinash with an amused laugh. As they moved towards producing original music and films, an album was the next logical step.
Snafu's release performance included music produced by Gaurav and films and montages shot and edited by Avinash. They extended the act by mixing in real-time, live performances by musicians Vasundhara Vidalur and Suryakanth Sawhney — collaborators on the album. A major portion of the visuals were in 3D (requiring the crowd to wear special glasses), rendering the performance rather unusual, even by their own standards.
Interestingly, BLOT's films could belong anywhere from a nightclub to a museum of modern art. The rapidly shuffling montages — with shots of streets in Europe; pop culture and sci-fi clips — carried no seeming narrative at times, whereas other clever sets with Bharatanatyam mudras and clips of Salvador Dali, followed by visuals modelled on his signature style, were perhaps symbolic of their inspirations. They say their music has travelled a great distance from their techno origins to having a more melodic sound.
For an act that has at its heart two distinct formats coming together, both artistes vehemently downplay the extent of the collaboration. They insist that each of them works independently, and their creative outputs come together at a later stage of the production process. For instance, for a track on the album called Barcelona in A Minor, the visual set was a stunning film capturing the art and streets of Barcelona.
"I saw the shots from Barcelona and said, wow, I could compose a soundscape for this," says Gaurav, explaining that they don't necessarily tailor their work from the conceptualisation stage. Avinash jokes that they sometimes meet at the airport before gigs and discuss their plans. "We share an essential approach to things. That is the collaboration," he says a tad more seriously.
As young, well-received artistes who are known for experimenting with various art forms, the duo displays a refreshing irreverence to its pursuits. When asked why the name Snafu (Situation Normal All F**ked Up — military term denoting a steady state of chaos), they remarked that they work amidst constant confusion.
"There's always some drama or the other and therefore Snafu," Avinash explains candidly, while speaking about the tumult accompanying their creative activity in a manner that few mainstream artistes would be caught dead admitting. "There is no creative process. Ideas and sounds just happen," Gaurav declares.
As far as names go, Basic Love Of Things strikes as an ambiguous manner of describing an artistic vision. But Gaurav and Avinash really do share a frighteningly large range of interests and a fundamental obsession with making art out of all things encountered. For a French design conference, they created an installation about hawkers selling things on bicycles in Delhi, adding to it music made out of bicycle bells.
The British newspaper, The Guardian, recently commissioned a short-film on Mumbai, for which the two were filmed shooting videos and producing music capturing the quirky charms of India's culturally heterogeneous financial capital.
Their plans for the future are particularly hard to keep up with, as a fashion line incorporating t-shirts with prints from a 10-panel speculative fiction graphic novel (set in '60s Calcutta and featuring Subhash Chandra Bose); a cinema project with live Carnatic musicians, Bharatanatyam artistes, harpists, cello players, and of course, electronic music — to be performed at their own festival UnBox next year — are in the pipeline. They will soon be performing at a festival in Germany. "What we do has a history in Germany," they say, explaining that their work is perceived as having a particularly Indian touch.
With all this going on, neither of them shares my anxiety at BLOT! not consciously reaching out to a larger audience. They insist they simply do "whatever they want" in their continuous pursuit of visual art, music and design, which is why they've custom-designed their album art and cover. The excitement is palpable, as Gaurav shows me the work on their album — "laser cut, and very cool".
Says the lawyer-turned-music producer, "If you don't augment your act with the media available to you, you are wasting an opportunity." It is their experiments with unconventional media, pushing the boundaries of live performance, and a feverish excitement for creative projects, which make BLOT! interesting.
The setup resembled an interplanetary mission's control room, with electronic equipment, a giant LED screen and several laptops. Keenly watching the crowd groove in front of them, as they stood hunched over their consoles and laptops, were Avinash Kumar and Gaurav Malaker, whose performances blend electronic music with films and visual art, throwing about quick smiles each time the crowd showed their appreciation.
While some danced, others stood back and took in the films that accompanied the music. A few others stood in the fringes, grooving, nodding, shaking a solitary leg, not entirely sure of their own reactions. A spectrum of responses also representing, perhaps, the general attitude to novel musical and artistic forms emerging in India.
The duo was performing as part of a four-city tour to promote their debut album Snafu. The gig that night was a veritable milestone for BLOT! whose journey began in 2007, when its two artists met in Delhi and decided to team up audio with innovative visuals. An unprecedented VJ act, with artistic leanings somewhat paralleling those of international clubs in the 70s and 80s, must have been hard to digest, even for Delhi's earnestly progressive audience.
"We invested our own money and created interesting setups and that got people's attention," says Avinash, a filmmaker and designer from NIFT. In many ways, BLOT! represents art's new order — gone are the days when musicians spoke of struggles and trials to illustrate their evolution. Instead, the band insists that its first performances were "exciting" and "like a feasibility test".
With no formal training in filmmaking and music, Avinash and Gaurav's real challenge was to make audio and video interact. Where innovative artistic forms looked for acceptance in the old days, contemporary music acts now look for comprehension. "There is no term for an electronic music group. Somebody called us a two-member rock band," says Avinash with an amused laugh. As they moved towards producing original music and films, an album was the next logical step.
Snafu's release performance included music produced by Gaurav and films and montages shot and edited by Avinash. They extended the act by mixing in real-time, live performances by musicians Vasundhara Vidalur and Suryakanth Sawhney — collaborators on the album. A major portion of the visuals were in 3D (requiring the crowd to wear special glasses), rendering the performance rather unusual, even by their own standards.
Interestingly, BLOT's films could belong anywhere from a nightclub to a museum of modern art. The rapidly shuffling montages — with shots of streets in Europe; pop culture and sci-fi clips — carried no seeming narrative at times, whereas other clever sets with Bharatanatyam mudras and clips of Salvador Dali, followed by visuals modelled on his signature style, were perhaps symbolic of their inspirations. They say their music has travelled a great distance from their techno origins to having a more melodic sound.
For an act that has at its heart two distinct formats coming together, both artistes vehemently downplay the extent of the collaboration. They insist that each of them works independently, and their creative outputs come together at a later stage of the production process. For instance, for a track on the album called Barcelona in A Minor, the visual set was a stunning film capturing the art and streets of Barcelona.
"I saw the shots from Barcelona and said, wow, I could compose a soundscape for this," says Gaurav, explaining that they don't necessarily tailor their work from the conceptualisation stage. Avinash jokes that they sometimes meet at the airport before gigs and discuss their plans. "We share an essential approach to things. That is the collaboration," he says a tad more seriously.
As young, well-received artistes who are known for experimenting with various art forms, the duo displays a refreshing irreverence to its pursuits. When asked why the name Snafu (Situation Normal All F**ked Up — military term denoting a steady state of chaos), they remarked that they work amidst constant confusion.
"There's always some drama or the other and therefore Snafu," Avinash explains candidly, while speaking about the tumult accompanying their creative activity in a manner that few mainstream artistes would be caught dead admitting. "There is no creative process. Ideas and sounds just happen," Gaurav declares.
As far as names go, Basic Love Of Things strikes as an ambiguous manner of describing an artistic vision. But Gaurav and Avinash really do share a frighteningly large range of interests and a fundamental obsession with making art out of all things encountered. For a French design conference, they created an installation about hawkers selling things on bicycles in Delhi, adding to it music made out of bicycle bells.
The British newspaper, The Guardian, recently commissioned a short-film on Mumbai, for which the two were filmed shooting videos and producing music capturing the quirky charms of India's culturally heterogeneous financial capital.
Their plans for the future are particularly hard to keep up with, as a fashion line incorporating t-shirts with prints from a 10-panel speculative fiction graphic novel (set in '60s Calcutta and featuring Subhash Chandra Bose); a cinema project with live Carnatic musicians, Bharatanatyam artistes, harpists, cello players, and of course, electronic music — to be performed at their own festival UnBox next year — are in the pipeline. They will soon be performing at a festival in Germany. "What we do has a history in Germany," they say, explaining that their work is perceived as having a particularly Indian touch.
With all this going on, neither of them shares my anxiety at BLOT! not consciously reaching out to a larger audience. They insist they simply do "whatever they want" in their continuous pursuit of visual art, music and design, which is why they've custom-designed their album art and cover. The excitement is palpable, as Gaurav shows me the work on their album — "laser cut, and very cool".
Says the lawyer-turned-music producer, "If you don't augment your act with the media available to you, you are wasting an opportunity." It is their experiments with unconventional media, pushing the boundaries of live performance, and a feverish excitement for creative projects, which make BLOT! interesting.