Susmit Sen, founder-member and lead guitarist of the pioneering band Indian Ocean, opens up about his debut solo album and the kind of music he believes in. Subash Jeyan
(Published in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on January 24, 2012.)
Susmit Sen (lead guitar) founded Indian Ocean along with Asheem Chakravarty (tabla, vocals) in 1990. The current line-up, with Rahul Ram on the bass guitar and Amit Kilam on the drums and other assorted instruments, stabilised around 1994. The band has created a unique sound and has released six albums so far. After 22 years with the band Susmit Sen has just released his debut solo album, Depths of the Ocean, last month. Excerpts from a conversation.
As a band, Indian Ocean has created its own unique sound. Now, do you stay in your comfort zone to keep the audience you already have or is it a risk to experiment and explore?
Experimentation in music happens when one is trying out something new. Fusion music is experimentation because you are bringing in different maestros from different kinds of music, and trying to see what’s the subset. Not always does good expression happen out there. In my opinion, I think we have crossed that stage of experimentation long time back, even before I formed Indian Ocean and what I am primarily concerned with now is expression. And expression does not happen when you are still experimenting. I think you need to go beyond the technicalities to be able to express. It’s like when we are speaking, do we think about the grammar consciously? In the same way, you need to come to a level where you are not thinking about the technicalities anymore.
What was the rationale behind releasing one single every month of your last album? What difference did it make to you as a band, in terms of economics or popularity in reaching out to people?
When we released it one by one over a period of time, we were able to avoid traffic to our website coming in one huge wave and then petering off. We could hold the attention of people who would come every month and check out what was happening. At which point we started giving out a whole lot of other information, so the whole process got a lot more interactive besides giving us an idea of our popularity etc. Also, once a website gets popular, then you can attract other people also, like sponsors coming in. That’s how Johnnie Walker came in and became partners for the release of the album; we went on a concert tour with them, which led to reaching out to more people across cities as well as making a bit of money for us.
The ‘conflict’ between aesthetics and politics as it is played out in Indian Ocean’s compositions. It comes across that you are someone who is concerned about the form, while Rahul is extremely political with the others falling somewhere in between. How does the group negotiate these seemingly opposing demands?
I’d rather put it like this. I’m not averse to political content or messages but, even if the lyrics are powerful, but the composition is not good, the lyrics will mean nothing to the audience. So there has to be a balance. There is a problem if that balance gets shaky. I would not accept it if we start giving more weightage to the political aspects. Now, the politics is also of a weird nature. People think “Ma Rewa” is a political song. Whereas it was not composed for the politics of the NBA. It is a hymn which is hundreds of years old. When I see people take “Ma Rewa” only as a political song, I feel sorry for them because they are losing out on much larger aspects of the song. Ultimately music touches some of your basic emotions and if you are not able to appeal at that level, you have achieved nothing by going political. I have nothing against political or philosophical lyrics; in fact I love the lyrics Sanju writes for us. But I think what I have been able to do over the last 20 years or so is to create a type of music that does not stick to accepted norms. But the problem when you want to go overtly lyrical is that one tends to get into the trap of verse chorus. If I want to do that, I can go to Bollywood and earn lot more money too. We’ve been able to come out with a completely new genre and it’ll be tragic if we are going to spoil all that just because we want to forcefully say something political through our lyrics.
How does the absence of someone like Asheem affect the group dynamics and the kind of music you make?
Having been together as a band for 22 years, obviously his absence makes a huge difference. Mathematically it may sound wrong, but in a four-member band when one person goes away, it’s more than half that goes away. That’s the kind of synergy you have as a band, and it’ll take a long time to recreate that. The thought of whether to continue or not did occur to us but what probably made us continue as professionals — after Asheem was hospitalised and we realised we had performances in Singapore and Bangalore within a week’s time — was that in our 22 years of existence as a band, we’ve never ever missed out on a single show. And we could not let that happen. And friends came in and really helped us out. We played in Singapore and from there flew straight to Bangalore and played at the Bangalore Habba in front of 15,000 people. It’s not easy for a complete newcomer to do that in a week’s time but we did it. People obviously missed him more at that point of time, they still miss him and are going to miss him. But life continues. The world does not end with somebody’s death. One has to continue. It has been a great effort from us to keep the ball rolling and now what we have to see is when the new compositions come out, how that is going to be affected. Well, we’ll have to wait and see. With my solo album, most of which was done after Asheem passed away, I am not unhappy with what has come out. With Indian Ocean too I am pleased the way we are going. I think another kind of sound might come out. Obviously it would have been a different ball game had Asheem been there but we are definitely not going to stop creating and personally I feel I am at my creative best.
Why did it take such a long time for your debut solo album?
Coming out with an album takes a lot of time, and over the last 20 years Indian Ocean did not give me that time. I’ve been wanting to do this for at least a decade. These compositions have been with me for a long time and the process was very beautiful because I got to work with new artistes, some old, some very young but all very beautiful people.
Do you think Indian Classical music, which many would say has had a deep influence on you, remains in a ghetto; that it needs to make itself more accessible?
Look, there are certain genres of art that will probably never become popular, in a very mass-oriented sense. But they will have their niche audience always. I happened to grow up at a time when some of the greatest musicians on earth were at their peak, like Ali Akbar Khan Saab, Nikhil Banerjee, Mallikarjun Mansur, Bhimsen Joshi. They knew how to lose themselves in their music; for them, classical musical was not the technicalities but a way to meditate and that meditative quality is what is missing today, in the era of marketing. When a person can render a raga for two or three hours, it had a different effect on you, it can take you to another world. Any amount of playfulness cannot be a substitute for that; the playfulness cannot become the performance itself. Build the mood first. Everything else comes after that.
With current digital technology, which has really democratised the production and distribution of music, do you really need an intermediary like the music companies anymore? Especially since you have said that they generally have no competent means of evaluating, understanding or appreciating innovative music and usually opt to play safe….
I tend to agree with that. Look, the thing is that there is no music company in the world that has a golden era like they’d like to think. If they were so sensitive towards music they would have been doing their own music instead hiring musicians to do it for them.
As for digital technologies, we released our last album free on the Net. But at the end of the day, people also want to own a CD. A physical copy, to hold it, see it, read the material on the cover etc. The problem with the Net is, a) you have to give it in mp3 format, so people do not get to hear the music in the right quality; b) to own a CD is also something that has not completely gone out of vogue. For every band to start music companies to distribute their CDs is not practical. And every person who is doing good music won’t necessarily be a brilliant marketeer who knows the ins and outs of distribution, whether digital or conventional. So we do need the distribution network of the music companies to get across to people, and some of them are very good at what they are doing, like EMI. And anyone who is into serious music, like Indian classical for instance, would not be happy listening to a downloaded mp3 file.
Tales I tell myself 