It’s almost shocking to hear Ankur Chauhan concede that he doesn’t value the quality of production in music all that much.
Electronic music is a space where a lot of attention, unreasonably so, Chauhan feels, is devoted to the craft of production, to the point where it becomes sort of sacrosanct. “Does it really matter if you’re playing a sh*tty guitar?” He brings up the whole musicianship versus production debate, “If you’re writing music, you’re a musician. I think a lot of electronic musicians obsess more about the equipment they’re using.” At 26, Chauhan is the brains behind the New Delhi-based electronica project When Pandas Attack, under which he released a new EP, Requiem , in May this year. It’s a breezy three-song release that falls in that leftfield territory of downtempo electronic music that ever so often threatens to morph into full-blown dance frenzy, but retreats just before that point. It’s music that has a strain of melancholy, and at the same time, reinforces a sense of positivity and elation; melodic sounds powered through the steady pulse of the drums.
Chauhan talks of his penchant for using inversions in songs, and trying out different approaches. “I have, I suppose, a strange way of writing. The ease of working on your laptop for arrangements is amazing, as you can do everything in real time. In electronic music, I feel there’s a lack of exploration in a lot of music that’s coming out, so it’s easier to voice those things out.”
Requiem , Chauhan tells me, is his happy album. His first release as When Pandas Attack (the full-length Things Pass By , which he put out in late 2014) came, he recalls, from a place of great uncertainty. “It was a very depressing year for me. It was a period of transformation, where I was figuring out what I should be doing. That helped me compose the album; I put a lot of thought into everything.”
Requiem , on the other hand, is an album that reflects the state of contentment that he finds himself in. “I’m comfortable where I am. I’m happy. So I guess it sounds… that sense of looming isn’t there as much.”
Chauhan is a graphics designer by day, working in a relatively young start-up agency called Lazy Eight, and he finds himself shuttling between New Delhi and Nice, France, where his girlfriend stays.
He chose to limit the tracklist to a mere three songs, despite having lots more material, since he wanted the songs to somewhat fall into a similar aesthetic sensibility. “I tried to structure it like that,” he explains. “I realise I tend to go off on style, so this is a way for me to keep track of that.”
He counts the usual suspects — Four Tet, Bonobo, and the likes — as artists that have inspired him, but he also cites the influence of American producer Clams Casino (Michael Volpe), with the chopped-up vocals on Requiem being an interpretation of techniques he’s learnt from him. The oscillating vocal melodies on the album, he tells me, are samples he’s picked from Björk and Imogen Heap’s songs.
A kind of hypnotic repetition directs the flow of each of the songs, as motifs develop and get established over multiple loops, eventually unveiling the catchy centres of melody the songs have. The sound is almost fuzzy, faint, distant; a conspicuous contrast to production values of a lot of similar music, which tends to have a ‘pristine’, rounded off sensibility. Chauhan’s been learning how to mix his songs properly and often seeks help from his friend, Little Brontosaurus, who’s also mastered the album. “That sort of sound is on purpose,” he says. “People associate my live act with that slightly muddy, ground-out sound. I like that as well. When things are super-crisp, it moves toward a different side. I tried to make everything subdued. The ‘muteness’ of it is quite calming; it has power.”
When Pandas Attack used to be a fairly regular fixture on the Delhi club and pub circuit, although he hasn’t been as active for the past year or so, given that he’s been spending time in France as well.
“From my point of view,” he says, talking about performing live and the general gig circuit in Delhi, and, presumably, the rest of the country as well, “I like to have a good time when I do my DJ sets. The ‘scene’ or whatever… It’s only starting now, so it’s full of hipsters. Everybody has this thing: ‘Oh, it’s a Wild City event, so we must go,’ as opposed to music they actually like. People expect only a, say, Wild City or OML will promise a certain kind of music. That’s the biggest law of the land: the promoters have become the heroes, and it’s just the way things are.”
He attributes this to the fact that people are still developing tastes and writing new music; he says the obsession with genres and sub-classifications can get a little knotty.
This weekend, When Pandas Attack heads to Manali, Himachal Pradesh for the festival ‘When Mountains Call’. Chauhan is sticking to a DJ set for this, which is something he’s mostly favoured in the past as well. He is keen on developing a live set for his music, with a full band, but that’s something that’ll take time. Chauhan wants to do it properly, especially given the fact that he has been part of multiple bands in the past, and is an accomplished guitar player as well. In fact, he even got accepted into Berklee College of Music in 2008, but decided against it because he wasn’t sure about making a career in music. He chose to keep music on the side, which he anyway prefers since it gives him the freedom to approach music the way he wants.
Download Requiem: whenpandasattackmusic.
bandcamp.com/album/
requiem-ep
Chauhan talks of his penchant for using inversions in songs, and trying out different approaches
