Shoumik Biswas is a man of many moods. There was that time when he was angry after an especially average gig in Goa, and decided to direct a flurry of curses at the sound guy. On the mic. He used a few helpful hand gestures to drive home the point. This other time, there was an absurd conversation with a policeman on the streets of Mumbai in the early hours of the morning, about where each of them wanted to go. He’s only 23, so no, he was not wholly and completely schnockered. You can usually count on Biswas to say something weird, to be that goofy guy constantly entertaining people around him.
Just a week ago, Biswas released his new album, Spring . Biswas makes experimental electronic music under the Disco Puppet moniker. He admits that his antics are merely a facade, a defence mechanism of sorts. “I think I kind of subconsciously put on these roles…I was a really quiet kid. I’m still always very silent, unless I’m on stage,” says the musician.
He plays the drums and doubles up as the vocalist for Bengaluru-based experimental rock outfit, Space Behind The Yellow Room. Disco Puppet, on the other hand, is music he writes on his own. It’s far more inward-gazing, echoing his musical journey in a way. “I’m trying to express things that are very personal to me. It comes from a need to want to make music, to put it out there. The whole idea of Disco Puppet is that it’s an exercise to learn and emote at the same time.”
Spring is the follow-up to 2014’s Astronot , his debut effort, and it’s a stunning work of movement and restraint. The air of offhand nonchalance in the six songs, which lures you at first, is slowly peeled off to reveal a record of great depth and exploration. Spring is motion and transition, new beginnings and growth. And change. “It’s like a new season; you know, fruits, plants growing.” It’s a reflection of the changes in Biswas’s life at the time of writing the music, when he finished college in Bengaluru and moved to Delhi to work (he’s moved back to Bengaluru now).
The uncertainty finds a voice in the music, as a glitchy arpeggios loop, before shifting gears and jumping into almost atonal spaces of anxiety and ambiguity. With his band, Biswas’s vocal delivery is limited to pained yelps and screamed refrains. But he adopts a far more introspective style here, trailing off and allowing the music to develop themes of restlessness, before cutting that atmosphere with mumbled melodies washing over the sound. “In my head, I can ideate and formulate thoughts really well, but [they] doesn’t come out,” he says, talking about his hesitation with using the voice too heavily in the past. “Here, I wanted to be able to communicate more easily. I feel it’s good for me, for my art, to communicate. If I can’t do that, I’ll just be alone in my shell. I think this was just me trying to do that, to put more words into expressing myself.”
Within the six songs on Spring , Biswas casts a wide net sonically. The tonality of the music shifts radically from song to song; he employs blip-bloopy, ancient-video-game-era eight-bit sounds as on, say, ‘Untitled’, while the verdant pastoral soundscapes of album highlight ‘Forever Forester’ direct the song into large, carefree open spaces. There’s heavy experimentation in terms of form and structure, as arrangements rarely follow any semblance of conventionality. It’s a tic, almost. “I’m over bands. I try not to listen to a lot of music music. I’m more interested in exploring sounds.” It’s a constant search to develop his own voice as an artist. He’ll abandon ideas the moment they start sounding like something he’s heard before. “I’m trying to make art. I’m not trying to sell an idea to an audience. If I’ve felt a feeling before, if I feel this ‘exists’, then what’s the point of it? It’s not helping me heal,” says Biswas.
At the moment, Biswas is not really interested in playing too many gigs — except for the money, since a man’s got to eat — and calls himself a nervous electronic musician. “When I’m playing drums with Space Behind The Yellow Room, it’s great because I’m behind the drum kit and there are three guys in front of me. [For solo sets] I’d rather have a curtain in front of me or something.” He’s forever battling contrasting ideas in his head, wondering about conceptual themes surrounding art. He reveals how he sometimes feels he’s “scamming” the audience when he plays with a laptop on stage, evoking that great debate between traditional, orthodox instrumentalists and electronic musicians, Biswas being a bit of both. “Every time I play, I think I’m doing something wrong, because I’m not constantly doing something. But you have to relax; you have to keep yourself busy.”
Instead of live gigs, he wants to focus on writing more music with his band. They started off in college, belting things out in the jam room. But now their process has changed, with different people coming in at different parts of the songwriting process, so that’s on the horizon. He’s almost done with another new album, one which features influences he’s mined from having spent a lot of time lately with Ketan Bahirat, who writes electronic music under the name Oceantied.
There’s a strong influence of bass music here, as well as a lot of footwork, but rest assured, it should have Biswas’s own sonic imprint on it.
The author is a freelance writer
Check out Spring onsoundcloud.com/discopuppet
The tonality of
the music in the
new album,Spring, shifts radically from song to song
