Mumbai hardcore act Scribe’s sophomore full-length effort Mark of Teja is already a contender for our album of the year. The fictional story of a 17th century industrialist is told via the most compelling set of metal arrangements we’ve heard all year. We spend some quality time with the band, tearing the album apart piece-by-piece and figuring out what makes India’s most ingenious metal act tick. This is part two of a two-part interview.
In this part of the interview, we learn about the Scribe songwriting process, the fashioning of a fabulous chair, opening for Lamb of God, getting flashed, and growing up on a lot of Bollywood. Read part one here.
What’s your songwriting process?
We’re a Scribe cover band.
In the early days, we had more time to meet then, and also Prashant and Akshay have become better producers in the band. By producers I mean that they have a better way of putting their ideas down. So when you think of something – we are not the kind of band who comes into the jam room saying “this is something I wrote” and one guy joins in and another guy joins in. We could do that at the drop of a hat, we could come up with shit easily – that’s like a jam band. A jam band doesn’t really go on stage with ideas, you’ve got a bag of tricks and then you put them together on the fly. We don’t come to the jam room and write a song. We come with ideas which are like, audio. And then we all listen to it on a computer, we make the song at the computer, and then we play. We just put ideas down and leave it for a while, come back later, it’s like making a film. You shoot something and you cut it, then you put that scene in and think, does that look alright? It’s not like we come on set and play, on set we play readymade stuff.
How did you record this album? How is it different from how you recorded Confect?
Confect was a bedroom album. This is a studio album. I guess that’s why Confect had a certain charm. It’s like a handwritten letter, and Mark Of Teja is like a printout, in clarity. More than a printout, it’s like laminated and pretty.
You did a basement studio recording…
Yeah we did. Previously it was a bedroom recording, parts put together from different places – from Akshay’s bedroom, from Pra’s bedroom, a studio where I used to do a lot of work because I’m in advertising, and then we put all that together and brought it to Demonstealer’s (Sahil Makhija of Demonic Resurrection) house and sat on his computer and he sat and mixed it. So we would just sit over there, drink coffee, eat omelettes, drink coffee, eat omelettes, drink coffee, eat omelettes, and that’s how we made that album. Whereas this time, it was a little different. We pulled Anupam (Anupam Roy of Grey & Saurian Records) out of Delhi into Hamza’s basement, we took several cardboard boxes and made two sort-of pillars and you know those aluminium doors with which toilets are shut, we put an aluminium door on top and made that a table. We needed a good chair. Anupam really needed a good chair because when you’re going to be sitting for a long time you should be comfortable so that you can work properly. So, the chair was fabulous. The table was kinda cool, we made a little bump over there for carpal tunnel syndrome. We did the vocals at Demonic Studios, and we put it together at Grey & Saurian studios in Delhi.
Tell us about opening for Lamb of God. How was the experience?
Lamb of God was great. I’m talking about Lamb of God the gig. Us playing in Bangalore was fun, I didn’t think of it as opening for Lamb of God, I went there to watch a Lamb of God show and also happened to – I just had like backstage access. I was just really excited about watching Lamb of God. Opening for Lamb of God – it’s always fun when you know there are gonna be people. Someone just fills up an auditorium and gives you a microphone and gives these guys guitars, and says “Okay, do something with these guys for about 35 minutes”, and you’re like “Yeah sure, why not?” It was great because it was also the launch of the album, so it was the first time we were playing all of that material live, and to a brand new or varied audience. People had come for Lamb of God from all parts of India. Lamb of God coming to India is itself a huge deal, it’s a step in the right direction.
And your gigs in Norway...
It was like The Olympics, it was like going for The Olympics. We got pampered with the gear, great onstage gear, the guitar players were really happy. Overall, it was really eye opening. I’m tired of using that term, but that’s what it was, eye opening. And also, it gave us a chance to really bond as musicians, for a good amount of time. We were just on the road and musicians, in a whole other continent. Everyone wrote musician as occupation on the visa form. I was going to write metalhead, then I thought I might get stuck here.
What were the highlights of the whole Norway trip? Your favorite part?
Oh there were lots of them. Kristiansand is a little fishing town, a couple of hours from Oslo, and Norway is basically empty. I’m exaggerating when I say it’s empty, because it’s really empty. Oslo airport was empty when we landed. So Kristiansand is a fishing town, so even fewer people, and we weren’t really expecting much of a crowd, but two awesome things happened. We found the Anuj Gupta of Norway, who comes for every gig – we have a video of talking to that guy. He goes for every metal gig in town, and he saw that an Indian band was playing and he had to come. By the second or third song, people started texting other people and people starting showing up. Something like that happened and they would come in and those guys would be like, “check it out, check it out.” So people started trickling down and after a point, they were really into us. For the last song, I made everyone get off stage; and I got everyone in the audience to get up on stage. A Norwegian band would’ve never done that. That was awesome because everybody wanted to get up on stage. So it was just unbelievable.
Any women?
Yeah, Pra got flashed.
What kind of music do you individually listen to? How does it influence/contribute to your sound?
Scribe stopped being the output of inspiration, and started being the output of collaboration. Because we’ve been doing this together for like five years now, trying to put ideas together as a team, as a band. It’s not really the music that’s inspiring us to make new music.
So what’s inspiring you?
Other things, like videogames, and food, we’re not making music because another musician’s making music.
Bollywood is something all of us have grown up on, you should see Prashant’s VCD collection. You should start talking about Bollywood and see how much trivia Vaas knows, he’ll tell you what happened at the shoot, he’ll tell you which singer sang it and what happened at the sound recording, and who got angry and walked out, and what shoot took how much time, we’re all so deeply connected to Bollywood, because we grew up on that – the cool Bollywood I mean, when Bollywood was a good thing, when it was fun. Now… just a few films are really nice.
What’s a recent film that you found really epic?
I like Vishal Bhardwaj, but I did not like Kaminey, but I think that’s because Shahid Kapoor ruined it. If you go through Vishal Bhardwaj’s body of work, he made a film like Maqbool – dude if you make a film like that you’re a legend. So newer films there is some stuff that does inspire, but it’s mostly older films, we’re like a classic band. The ’90s mainly. The ’90s were really memorable.
Check out our review of Scribe’s latest album Mark Of Teja. Read part one of this interview here.
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