You’ll see the faithful gathered in perfumed droves at Mumbai’s hippest synagogues of synth sound every weekend or so. The musicians hold court, surrounded by the paraphernalia of their trade.

Consoles, strobes, the colored lights of the amplifiers, monitors and panels light up, and the music begins. Here to promote Business Class Refugees, a dynamic, collaborative platform for music and musicians from around the world with up-and-coming electronic beats, apart from the duo, Kartick (Patrick Sebag) and Gotam (Yotam Agam), their show also featured Mahesh Vinayakram (Vocals), Padma Shankar (Violin), Yoav Bunzel (Drums), Eya Mazig (Bass), and Meher Malik (Dance).

But who are these guys? Kartick & Gotam have performed on many venues and stages across India, and several international shows, including opening the AWME 2009 (Australian World Music Expo), Melbourne, Australia. In 2010, Business Class Refugees has performed at Drom and The Shrine in New York, Reading 3 and Bamboo in Israel among others. As they said, the birth of the album was at an airport.

Kartick & Gotam were traveling from South India to a remote village in Indonesia, in a journey through Asia recording indigenous music forms. An overbooked flight and unexpected luck landed them in business class luxury. In transit in Singapore, they applied for the visa to Indonesia, and the Special Permit to Aceh. It was to take three hours, but threedays later, they were still waiting — Business Class Refugees without passports, identity, and stateless, aimlessly roaming Singapore Airport, sometimes worried, but mostly, making music on their laptops. So that’s the story behind the album. Now, over to them...

What is your method to recording in the studio? How do songs get life?
We don’t have a specific method, we start to work on a tune when we meet up with a musical element that we like and it leads us into building up a song. We try to balance between analogue (old school) techniques and new digital techniques.

How will you’ll present this live onstage when the time comes to do so?
Actually the time has come and we performed in Mumbai on July 16 and 17. We created an electro folk journey featuring musicians from different backgrounds using lots of video art and dance elements and tried to deliver the same experience we have while traveling.

What was it like working with the other musicians on the album? Any special memories?
It was a great experience having musicians from different backgrounds. In most of our projects we do collaborations and that’s what drives us . There are many special memories. One of the biggest one is from a song called ‘Tamil Bosa’, we had vocalist Mahesh Vinayakaram coming to the studio and we presented him a groove and we were not sure where to take it , he came up with amazing lyrics that got us all so excited.

How did you’ll get into music? Was it a difficult path?
Music got into us from young age and it came naturally.

What music are you’ll currently listening to?
Chemical Brothers, Charlotte Ginsbourg and Bombay Jayshree.

Any plans to go completely Bollywood?
We are waiting for the offer. We are involved in a very big production from UK/USA and going to be very busy. But yeah Bollywood is always attractive.

What instruments are you’ll most comfortable with and why?
Computers. We work in a collage system and using technology gives us the freedom to see and create the big picture of a musical piece.

What plans for the future?
A world tour and a new album. We also have a new portal on the net called earth moments, a sample based site tools for musicians and producers. We work closely with our label and production house who keep us in sync with the Earth and always have new productions happening.