At the recent Mix The City Mumbai’s release earlier this month, a small group of journalists sit in one corner, tablets on their laps and headphones over their ears. The launch is for the Indian version of the British Council’s award-winning interactive musical platform.
The website has an intuitive interface where for instance, one tile features a five-second sample of percussionist Taufiq Qureshi on the djembe. Another adds the metallic sounds of Barmer Boys member Rais Khan’s morchang (jewish harp) to the mix. Tap a different tile and Imran Khan’s sitar joins in, each sample somehow perfectly fits in sync. There’s even a synth effect, if the sound of acoustic instruments isn’t good enough for you. Each sample has an accompanying video as well, of the respective musician playing in a different location across the city.
A couple of minutes of pressing buttons, and you’ve just created a song, with an accompanying music video showcasing some of the many sights and sounds of this bustling metropolis. With 12 artistes to choose from — each contributing two samples — there are enough possible combinations to keep you engaged for hours. “Can I email this to myself?” one excited journalist asks, as the attendant supervising the tablets smiles and nods in assent.
Cultural storytelling
Mumbai is the first of four Indian cities that will be documented as a part of Mix The City India. Delhi followed shortly after and later this year, the initiative will spread to Chennai and Kolkata. In all, 48 musicians from across India’s classical, folk and contemporary traditions will be featured on the platform, with each contributing two samples apiece. “The British Council exists to make cultural connections with people all over the world,” says Alan Gemmell OBE, Director of British Council India. “We believe in the power of culture to tell stories, to change lives and help us think differently about one another. And that’s at the heart of this project.”
Gemmell was part of the team that conceptualised and launched the Mix The City Project in 2015 with Mix The City Tel Aviv. Then director of British Council Israel, Gemmell was looking for a way to reach out to people on a platform where they spend so much of their time — the smartphone. “So we invited this incredible young Israeli YouTube artiste called Kutiman to work with us to come up with a platform that would let you experience cities all over the world.”
Since then, the project — created in collaboration with technical partners Flying Object and Roll Studio from the U.K. — has travelled to Moscow, Istanbul, Hamburg and the Balkans. Last December, the British Council launched a similar interactive video platform called Mix The Play, allowing users to direct a scene from Shakespeare’s iconic play A Midsummer’s Night Dream , by selecting options for location, actors, soundtrack and interpretations from a drop-down list.
A diverse mix
The project comes to India as part of the music conference, Exchange, curated by Submerge in collaboration with the U.K.’s Department of International Trade, and is the first of many initiatives planned to celebrate 2017 as the U.K.-India Year of Culture. Over a million people have already engaged with the Mix The City platform worldwide, but Gemmell promises that the Indian edition will be the biggest and the most exciting yet. “What I’m interested in doing is getting people to go ‘wow!’”, he says. “Either they go wow because they didn’t realise Mumbai was like that. Or if we’re really lucky, they go wow because that minute on the app where your choices become a music video, it’s very cool. And I hope we get a third ‘oh wow’ moment when they compare Mumbai to Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata and say ‘oh this is such an incredible country because it’s got such musical diversity’.”
The artistes for each city have been chosen by a British curator, with each also making their own mix that you can check out on the page. For Mumbai, the curators were British art-rock band Django Django, who met the artists and checked out locations in Mumbai when they came to India to play NH7 Weekender Hyderabad last year. Oliver Bayston a.k.a. Boxed In, Anna Meredith and Kutiman will curate the other cities. However, having international curators, especially those not deeply engaged with Indian culture, does raise concerns that the project might fall into the trap of a reductionist or essentialist representation of India. Something similar happened with Coldplay’s controversial video for their track Hymn For The Weekend . “We also have an Indian curator, the incredible Sonya Majumdar, who is giving overall shape to the project,” says Gemmell, about the curation process. “But that’s a concern that the British Council is aware of all the time, and we think we’re strongest when we’re working in a real partnership with Indian artistes, to make sure the story we’re telling is the story that India wants to tell,” he asserts.
Continually engaging
With Mix The City Delhi launched last week and Chennai and Kolkata scheduled for August and September, Gemmell has a lot of work on his hands. But he’s already thinking about how to add more content and keep users engaged with the platform once the initial thrill of creating your own remix wears off. One idea is to plug it into the British Council schools programme, which has trained over a million teachers in government schools over the last decade. Another is to make it a part of the hackathons the British Council has organised over the country in the last year. “In Tel Aviv, we installed it in the Museum of Modern Art, because they wanted to find a way to showcase Kutiman’s work,” he says. “So we’re looking for partners here, and I think we can have it in a couple of art museums in Mumbai or over the country.”
“The great thing about this project,” he adds as we get ready to wrap up the interview, “is that it brings together British digital innovation — as well as Indian tech from Smartron (a smartphone company) and then we also bring a British curator and we trust that magic will happen.”
Check out Mix The City on www.mixthecity.com
