Aditya Nandwana throws out a couple of unexpected non-sequiturs — about classic rock ’n’ roll excesses and groupies — as we start to speak. He’s of course being blithe; it’s a way to ease into things. My very first question is answered with another question: “Why are you interviewing me in the first place?”
Nandwana, 34, runs Animal Factory Amplification, under which banner he makes exquisitely designed and circuited boutique guitar pedals. They’ve been gaining recognition in Mumbai thanks to their quality and intricacy, and, further, he also has the approval of several well-respected international guitar players and producers such as Flood, David Torn, Juan Alderete, and Alan Moulder.
He’s also now — after an experimental, underground gig called the Listening Room on April 10 at St. Jude Bakery, Bandra — an electronic musician/producer, albeit a very reluctant one. It requires considerable cajoling just to get him to admit that, yes, he is a musician who played his debut gig as Animal Factory. That name, Nandwana says, was just a placeholder, and will be consigned to the ashes sooner or later, since he doesn’t want to mix business and music.
His music, at least the one set he performed that he’s uploaded on his SoundCloud page, is this grimy, sweaty, gritty, hard-hitting industrial variant, with passing elements of noise adding a strong contrasting force to the large, soundscaped passages that also rear their head shyly from time to time. The melody has colour, but along with it flows this recurring sense of unease. “More than industrial, I think it’s pre-industrial electronic ‘body’ music,” he says, music you experience viscerally. He’s been playing the guitar for almost two decades — “It doesn’t sound at this point like I’m torturing a baby whale”— and he’s also been “messing around” with electronic music and sound for some time. But his debut set was written over a period of a mere 10 days; he isn’t sure whether to take it forward or to start writing something new.
Nandwana has these seemingly endless reserves of knowledge about music: of its philosophical and abstract nature, about its history, the technicalities of sound. He speaks in long, thoughtful sentences — almost as if he’s thinking aloud — and tends to take frequent digressive detours, meticulously analysing each detail. We lose track of the number of times he has to ask me to repeat the question.
There’s an earnest attempt to bring together two often-opposing streams: a hyper-encyclopaedic understanding of sound/audio technique, versus raw emotional expression. Of making sense of the process not just behind the music but the sonic palette within which sound itself resides.
He’s self-critical to a fault, complaining in passing about how his set didn’t build up and break down the way he’d have liked it to, and seems to be the archetype introspective musician: “I don’t want to put out stuff for the heck of it. I’d also like to actually song -write, not loop-write, add actual acoustic elements. I’d love to perform on a regular basis, but I need a lot of practice.” That’s of course notwithstanding his love for a cheap laugh, be it at the cost of self-deluded rock star stereotypes and their affliction for intoxication, or via some good old self-deprecation. “I’m not accustomed to stardom, let me ease my way in,” he says with ironic faux-modesty, in between intermittent flashes of panic about turning 35 soon. “D minor,” he tells me, “is the saddest scale there is. People start crying whenever I play something in it.”
That aside, it’s evident that he’s devoted to, almost obsessive about, the craft of music. “Great art is great care. If you don’t aspire toward it, it shows. Anything that’s lazy comes across as lazy. I don’t like lazy music. There has to be an element of… that somebody paid attention to what they’re doing; that’s the thing.”
His musical sensibility is dictated by the welcome absence of a clear-cut definition. Creatively, Nandwana’s being pulled apart in multiple directions — from the slide blues to Chemical Brothers and Haxan Cloak — a fact he’s well aware of and tries to channel into something unique. He recalls buying an old piano when he was studying in Germany, hauling it up two flights of stairs, only to then discover that it was completely beyond repair. He played around with it nevertheless.
It allows for a different perspective, an interesting approach. His set-up looks elaborate and somewhat daunting, with an electric and an acoustic guitar tuned to two different open tunings, run through his own pedals; there were a host of effects but the primary ones were fuzz and big reverbs. He ran the software Ableton Live through his laptop, using a MIDI controller as well.
It all looks absurdly complicated — although he calls it “fairly basic” — and it took him close to four hours to assemble and dismantle. Naturally, he wants to expand on that, adding more hardware and live elements, further establishing his fascination for audio techniques and their purpose in songwriting.
Each sound in his music seems to have a specific reason for existence, a meaning behind it.
He explains how, at the gig, he set three different synths to different parameters and slightly different tunings, playing roughly the same note, leading to interesting patterns while the sound began to decay. “Being pulled in all directions is amazing; you open yourself up. In a way, it’s vulnerability. It’s why you read tragedies,” he says. “It’s something rooted in sadness and loss.”
The author is a freelance journalist
Each sound in his music seems to have a specific reason for existence, a meaning behind it
