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Over-the-top underground
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Underground music and everyday images of the city captured by young photographers took over I-Bar Friday night, during one long, hard-to-leave party
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Kashyap Murali: `I want to do more.'
THE I-BAR looked different from a mile away. The unspoken dress code limiting frequenters of the lounge bar at The Park to sophisticated formal wear was shattered by college students flashing youth and sex appeal at every opportunity: multiple body piercings, colourful flea-market-type clothes and even someone with a Mohawk in her hair.
No bhangra
The event on Friday night was Autopilot, a theme night mixing Asian underground music with visual effects. Twenty-something Kashyap Murali played DJ for the evening, steering safely clear of bhangra and hip-hop to mix, instead, underground music accompanied by a slide show of photographs, mostly his.
Kashyap is a graphic designer who then got into photography and has been DJing since he was 17. Talking about how he conceptualised the event, he says: "It took me three months to get the final form, combining three things: graphic design, photography, and music."
The first Autopilot was held at a local nightclub in February and its success prompted him to have a second such event. Autopilot is a term signifying the Asian underground music, says Kashyap. "Auto as in the traditional autorickshaw, which typically represents India and pilot is the DJ. Autopilot then symbolises the pilot taking passengers or the audience into a journey through India, through the highs and lows of his music," he explains.
The music and the photographs (which appeared regularly as a slide show on a blank wall by the dance floor) slid in and out of sync; sometimes coinciding gracefully; slow beats to the more mellow photographs, quicker beats accompanying random, disjointed images. At other times when they did not blend, the theme of the photographs (poverty on the city streets, garbage piles) appeared in stark contrast and irony to the vibrancy and wealth throbbing on the dance floor.
In themselves the photographs were a young person discovering both the camera lens and an unfolding world of speed images with their streaks of light, geometric shapes, colours and patterns. "There were about 500 snaps taken over the last two years," says Kashyap about his photographs. "Initially I just used to take a Kodak camera and keep clicking everywhere, then I got a Digicam and I could explore a lot since it's not as expensive to print with a Digicam. Earlier, I took a lot of gullies and architecture and weird things — autos and buses and Indian stuff, then after the first Autopilot, I started taking more technical stuff: electronic wires, guitars... things which go with the music."
The photographs might have been listless if strung together blandly on an art gallery wall, but in a club, ignited by the deep sounds of underground music, they talked to their audience. On the dance floor, the crowd cheered at the shots of vibrant masks, sniggered at piles of trash photographed under a `no garbage' sign, clapped at the close shot of the many earrings on a young girl, who also happened to be there that night. The photos clicked with the crowd on the dance floor; bringing together identities, symbols, locations and images, which defined and united the generation on the dance floor.
That music
Those who were untouched by the photographs had to succumb to the music. No need for yellow pants or pink halters; even pot-bellied middle-aged men made strange circling gestures with their hands, eyes shut, fists clenched — lost to the music. The music was not about the shared experience of a generation, it just entered you and moved you with a force all of its own. Even dog tired, reluctant-to-go-in-the-first-place-to-a-theme-night-with-a-strange-name, reporters kept promising their better sense they would leave after "just this one last track", which kept making way inevitably for the next.
Kashyap says he doesn't want to have too many more Autopilots because although "I want to do more... if I do a lot more, I'll be just another DJ and I hate being called that. What I do is more...combining stuff." So he just might pack his bags and travel a few cities introducing other partygoers to Autopilot nights.
HEMANGINI GUPTA
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