Uhclem,
CD Review
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Who are these guys? Whatever are “business class refugees”? And, most of all, why should I care?
You should care because this album, Business Class Refugees, is a new and extraordinary music, created internationally, in ways that simply haven’t been possible till now. It comes out thirty years after “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” the pioneering Byrne / Eno collaboration which used electronic ambience, and world music behind sampled vocal tracks, but assembled painfully in the studio through analog trial and error. Kartick and Gotam, known as K&G, also weave a beating net of electronic ambience, but overlay it with a stunning selection of Indian and south Asian musicians as foreground. And they do it live with visuals as well, though that comes later.
Kartick is Patrick Sebag, born in Tel Aviv to Moroccan parents, a music producer, and keyboard player. Gotam is is Yoyam Agam, a “sound designer” also originally from Israel but now living in Chennai, India where he co-founded EarthSync, a production house that aims to nurture folk, native and tribal music. Travelling together through Singapore, they were both upgraded to business class on an overbooked airplane (the good news), but sentenced to a three day wait in the business class lounge until visas and passports were straightened out (the bad news). They passed the time on their laptops and wireless, assembling soundscapes, creating the genesis of Business Class Refugees.
What does this music sound like? It’s been called electro-funk, electro-folk, or world-beat by other critics; the one commonality to the names seems to be a hyphen. K&G supply beats and grooves, underlying performances by Indian musicians such as flautist Navin Iyer (Slumdog Millionaire’s soundtrack) , and Carnatic (south Indian classical) vocalists Anuradha Viswanathan and Mahesh Vinayakram. The sound ranges from a few steps beyond late sixties raga-rock (Door Open Door) to Indian electronic, to traditional Asian, with a masala mix of sitars and tabla added to drums, bass and synthesizers. There is an extraordinary range on the album; if you didn’t know you might guess it to be a compilation o rather than a single work. The lyrics are generally from traditional Indian devotional songs, and not in English (Tamil Bossa, translated, is revealed to be a five minute affirmation that “The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon, nor burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by the wind”.)
Live, K&G perform as DJs, with guest musicians, Indian classical dancers, and with filmed visuals by EarthSync’s in-house visual team. You can see a sample, thanks to youtube, here, and download a free trio of songs from Business Class Refugees, as they were performed live in Melborne, here. (And if you do that, you’ll want to download the full album, a dollar cheaper than iTunes, directly from EarthSync.)
The album has an Indian feel to it, as those were the musicians with whom Kartick and Gotam collaborated this time. But their goal is way beyond that. For their next album they plan work with Arabian sounds and musicians. Their goal is to mix local musics with electronica. Like contemporary literature, this is art that is so compelling because it strains at, explores, and finally transcends the borders between cultures. Think of Zadie Smith, born to Jamaican/British black/white parents, writing On Beauty, a comedy of manners set in present day New England but modelled on Howard’s End by 19th century writer E.M. Forster. The healthiest solution to the clashes at borders, in the Middle East and elsewhere, is to dissolve those borders through shared creativity. And Business Class Refugees is a glorious step in that direction.
06/13/10
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