points of departure

There is one main bus service in Sydney, which connects the main areas, but all the other small unimportant suburbs use smaller private bus services. I normally use the main state run bus service, but occasionally when I have to go to my field site- which is a park, really- I have to take one of these smaller bus services. The problem is that hardly anyone uses these buses, except for school children and old people who presumably can’t or don’t want to drive anymore. These bus services constantly grumble about “transporting air”, referring to the fact that at any given time, the buses are more likely to be empty than not. I can bear witness to that, every time I board one of these buses, there’s at most 10 people, and the number goes up a bit on Thursdays, which is when the old people get their pension payment.

But these smaller buses often go through the small suburbs and which means that usually the passengers know each other, and there’s a sense of community about travelling in them. People greet each other by name, they exchange a few words with the driver, exchange gossip, etc etc, a phenomenon that is never encountered on the busier State buses. After a couple of days of travelling, I could recognize regulars myself and even got an odd nod of recognition. The bus drivers themselves behave differently. While the State Transport bus drivers wouldn’t dream of holding the door open for one more second than necessary, or hesitate at the stop even if they see you racing for the bus, the local bus drivers frequently wait for people to get on. And if it means making an unscheduled stop in front of some old person’s house just to save them the trouble of walking a few steps, so be it. And since most of the regulars were old, it wasn’t hard to notice their problems. Like getting off the bus. Like carrying around shopping bags.

So it was no surprise to me to see the Helping Hands make an appearance in this community. The Helping Hands is still an experimental device, but its already revitalized this community. I tried to find out how they worked, but what little i could find was not very clear, so I don’t know how they work exactly. Basically it consists of a ribbon like structure that can be worn around the waist. On the free end, there’s a hand like structure. There are two types, one with four prongs and the other with three, but other than that, they are identical. Both the prongs have a rubberised grip. When the Hand is active the ribbon is unwrapped from the waist, and the ribbon becomes stiff but flexible. The person with the Hand usually has a headset of sorts that is used to direct the movement of the Hand. I reckon it works something along the lines of that bionic arm that was in the news recently, but I believe this is far more experimental and radical.

I saw the Hand in action quite a few times, and its brilliant, people who previously would have taken ages to even disembark from the bus started using the Hand to balance themselves and get down easily. One guy was famous for using the Hand to hold and turn pages of his book during the trip. I spoke to him once, I think it was after the media and the schoolkids started calling them “tails” or even monkeys. The kids used to make mocking comments all the time, sometimes even within the earshot of their targets, and it always bothered me. I asked one of the old men if it bothered him. He said that it used to in the beginning, but considering the new lease of life that the Hand has given him, he simply didn’t care anymore. He also told me that he’d once scared the living daylights out of a particularly annoying brat by grabbing his leg with the Hand. I observed all the different and inventive ways the Hand was used by those who really needed it, and it never ceased to amaze me. But my field work ended soon after that conversation and I kind of drifted off.

A couple of weeks ago, however, I had an opportunity to go back to the park where i worked and took the old familiar bus route. But to my surprise, nobody seemed to using the Hands anymore…apparently the trial wasn’t as successful as the makers wanted, and the experiment had been abandoned. Still, life goes on. It always does.

When I last met Lucy, she insisted that I attend the July concert, because it was supposed to be The Big One. I assured her I would, but even then I had no idea just how big it would be. This would be the third concert that I had listened to Lucy Voronov’s music. I wrote about the first time I heard, -indeed heard of,- the cimbalom in this post, and I was looking forward to this concert.

When I was but a wee child growing up in Bangalore, I used to sneak out of the house and go to the National College’s Auditorium. The auditorium was just in front of our house, and it was often the venue of all manner of concerts. Back then, when India and Russia was still pretty good friends, the auditorium played host to one of the concerts of the Russian Festival. The following is one of my earliest memories, so bear with me as I try to recall what must be the first Russian music that I’d ever heard. I couldn’t enter the actual auditorium, and I watched the whole concert from the window. I don’t remember the concert in any great detail, but what I do remember is that the singer did this crazy babbling number, fitting Russian words or even gibberish, to the tune of a Mozart piece - The Turkish March. That the tune had stayed in my head for all these years was suddenly and dramatically brought home to me by Lucy’s recreation of the same song accompanied the guitar and the cello. Though Lucy claimed no responsibility for the particular piece, it was breathtaking, and she brought back memories that I did not even know that I still retained.

There were two parts in the concert organized by the Café Carnivale people. The first half consisted of a series of pieces that Lucy played accompanied by a diverse set of performers with an eclectic mix of instruments. I’ll talk about this in more detail later, but for now, I’ll just mention that there were pieces performed in collaboration with Larissa Burak (she plays the Ukranian Bandura, and sings as well); Stephen Lalor on classical Guitar; Anatoli Torjinski on Cello and a student of Lucy’s (whose name I can’t remember) on the piano. The second half of the concert was with the Sydney Balalaika Ensemble, featuring a whole slew of instruments including the domra, the double bass balalaika, the accordion-like-thing which had a different name, the guitar and of course the cimbalom as centrepiece.

The balalaika ensemble was awesome. Again, some of the music triggered memories. These were songs that I had heard long back, and they’d remained in my head somehow. A great deal is made of the power of smells to trigger memories, but I reckon a song can have pretty much the same effect. D. told me that the folk songs reminded her of her childhood, of a time when her father, who was a bit of a russo-phile, used to play these songs to entertain her. The highlight of the ensemble was clearly the singer Sophia Cece, who came up to the stage dressed like some exotic bird of paradise, with a voice to match. She enthralled the crowd every time she sang. It was a masterful performance, and the entire ensemble played with passion and life, each one clearly enjoying themselves. Their most recent CD is called Mail Troika, and can be purchased at their website.

I am a relative newcomer to world music, and as such, my opinions are more driven by gut feeling rather than years of study. With this disclaimer, I’d like to reiterate my stand that the most exciting part of listening to world music is the cross cultural fertilizations that seems to be happening all over the place. For example, I was intrigued to learn that Cuban music, which was heavily influenced by the music brought over across the sea by Africans, is now influencing music in Mali. This sort of transglobal collaborations is always exciting and when done well produces the greatest listening treats. A very good example is Ry Cooder, who has been devoting considerable energy in collaborating with musicians from all over the world. His album with Ali Farka Toure, Talking Timbuktu, is amazing.

Back to Lucy Voronov. The highlight of the evening, for me, was her inventiveness and her energy. She played a traditional Irish jig on the cimbalom, accompanied by Larissa Burak on the Ukranian Bandura. There were a series of songs designed to explore the cimbalom in different settings from jazz to piano. The pieces accompanied by the guitar and the cello were downright amazing. She kept going from strength to strength before ending with that highly entertaining version of Mozart’s Turkish March. Lucy’s star is on the rise and I look forward to hearing more from her in the future.

We first heard about Mocha Din and the Cosmic boogers at the Sydney Writers festival. I had inadvertently attended a talk organized by the SWF- I say inadvertently because I went to the talk only because it was a reading by Neil Gaiman, to top it all it was held in the Uni, rather than some inaccessible venue in the middle of the City. The talk was very good, Gaiman is an excellent speaker, and he had us all enthralled during the reading of a short story from his yet to be published book, a collection of short stories called “Fragile Things”, as well as a poem called “The days the saucers came”. He enjoyed the talk- he called it very different, so I assume it must have been interesting for him as well. Anyway, the talk was but one of millions hosted by the Sydney Writers Festival, and the bulk of those were held near the Rocks area of downtown Sydney.

It seemed rather silly to talk about Mocha Din and the Cosmic boogers when the main event was the Sydney Writers Festival, or even the Mexican Film Festival that we went to later, but such are the ways of this world. A sudden flash, a quick insight, a shared secret, and you are quickly on the way to some unplanned destinations. The making of patterns is a noble task, and as long as the patterns are interesting, there is no blame in following them. It didn’t take much to set us off on this path: just a glimpse of Mocha Din and the Cosmic Boogers huddled around a coffee table, and we were caught in a new world.

Mocha Din and the Cosmic Boogers first burst onto the music scene in the last couple of years, and they were everybody’s best kept secret, but a secret that you couldn’t help revealing to your best friend. Their popularity spread through word of mouth alone. You might think that this was a bit anachronistic, especially in this information age that we live in. But you’d be wrong; it was just that the medium had changed. Emails, sms, and phone calls essentially ensured that Mocha Din went viral, to the extent that every performance would be mobbed just a few moments before it actually started even if the performance itself was a closely kept secret. But we didn’t know all of this, it was only after we stumbled across a very rare hand crafted CD by the group and a few painful hours spent trawling the Internet was I able to come up with a bit of a backstory.

The CD turned out to be the first ever release of Mocha Din and the Cosmic Boogers’ music (intriguingly titled as CD#8). The cover featured a photograph of a face being attacked by a strand of light, and it is said that the band found their name when they came across this photo. Mocha Din is supposed to be a great believer in the power of serendipity and I quote from an interview (an interview by the way that was not only not official, but rather stolen from him in the guise of sharing a light for his cigarette on a rainy Sydney evening. This too has added to the myth behind the band)-“There are signs all around us. What makes them symbols, instead, is by our recognition that these signs are important to our lives”. It can be easily argued that the image that lent such power to the band’s name, has also influenced the music in directions that was entirely different from what they were used to up to now.

Mocha Din and the Cosmic boogers play a genre of music that is very hard to describe. Electro-folk? Ethnic subversive funk? Techno soul? It’s very hard to place this music in any particular state, mainly because the music invariably involves not only a meeting of states or styles, but instead a virtual collision. Instruments that do not have any business being played together not only play together but also merge and weave musical magic in incomparable ways. I am left a bit bemused by their first CD, and it is hard to review something so ground breaking that there is really no basis for comparison. One must take refuge in metaphors, and even these sound hollow after a while. One can talk about meteors or underwater volcanoes till the cows come home, but surely describing something that can only vaguely be captured in words is almost futile.

So in the end we only have statistics. There are 8 ‘songs’. They are on average 8 mins long. There are 4 people in the band. Mocha Din favours the harmonica, but of course, nothing is simple about this group, so the harmonica is heavily modified. The rest of the band does not even have pseudonyms. They have lots of guest musicians, but all the music is written by the core group. The CD is sparse on details other than song names, which are in no language I can identify. Even the dedicated fan following at the usenet groups have no clue what the songs mean, and it is believed that several amateur linguists have tried but failed to identify the language. But in any case, the name of the songs is really no indication of the songs themselves, which wanders all over the musical landscape of our times.

I would like to recommend this CD, but I’m not even sure that you can find it. One of these days, I’ll upload samples of the CD onto the web, and maybe it will finally elevate the profile of a band that deserves to be heard by all.