A review of Depths of the Ocean, a music album by Susmit Sen, published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on December 17, 2011.
The year is 1991, the scene the cultural festival at Roorkee University. Two young musicians are waiting for their first semi-professional show on stage and watching more experienced musicians being booed off. As Asheem admitted in the 2010 documentary “Leaving Home: The Longer Trip”, they didn’t expect to hold the audience’s attention for more than a minute. However, they ended up playing for almost two hours. Some of the numbers they played that day — “Torrent”, “Melancholic Ecstasy”, “Euphoria”, “No Comebacks”, “Ruins” — remain among the most original sounds in contemporary popular music and are as refreshing today as they were in 1991. Asheem and Susmit went on to form Indian Ocean, a band in which music was a process of constant negotiation, being as it was made up fiercely individualistic members.
A contemporary guitar great, Susmit Sen’s ability to simulate the meditative quality of Indian Classical music has always been the emotional core behind the band’s unique compositions. One song from the 1991 show, “Depths of the Ocean” never featured in any of Indian Ocean’s albums; here it is in Sen’s first solo album called “Depths of the Ocean”. Why now?
Musically and ideologically, the band was a motley bunch. There was Susmit who was convinced music should transport one to different worlds, Rahul who believed music should politically confront the here and now, and Asheem who was reflexively a bit of the other two, one foot in the aesthetic and the other in the political. Finally, there was Amit, a versatile musician who was flexible enough to glue the band together.
What came out of these negotiations, especially in recent years, Susmit felt, was a tendency towards pacy numbers and verse chorus. Perhaps there wasn’t space in the band for Susmit to do the kind of things he believed in. “Depths of the Ocean”, one tends to think, afforded him that space.
The seven compositions, like the band’s earliest numbers, are without lyrics . One gets to hear Asheem’s soulful voice again in “Rejuvenation”. “Tribute” a 10-minute, single-take, solo guitar piece is vintage Susmit as is the “Six String Salute”, his rendition of the national anthem. If the album is a kind of going back to one’s roots, it’s also a looking ahead. Besides an established artiste like Shubha Mudgal, the album finds space for up and coming musicians like Nitin Malik, Papon and Sari Roy.
Tales I tell myself 