“It’s more about the feeling, I think the words take away from the feeling a song usually gives you. When you put down words, it becomes subjective. When the listener at the other end might end up perceiving those words as whatever they want to. If the artist tries to portray a certain feeling, that sometimes gets lost in the subjectivity of the words. So we did put words in, but tried to make it more about where the words fit in to the music. It’s a ride, words drowning out and surfacing later again, you enter the song and collect all these little bits of information,” Talha Wynne, guitarist/vocalist for Karachi shoegaze band //orangenoise, talks about how they drown their lyrics within their wall of sound.
Wynne is about to turn 25, working as a sound designer at a radio network by day, and moonlighting as part of the most exciting band we’ve heard in a while. The four-piece recently released their debut EP //veracious as a free download- a thrashy, moody psychedelic five tracks.
“There’s two things happening in //orangenoise – there’s me and Danny, we used to jam and make some psychedelic post-rockish stuff.” Wynne and Daniel Panjwaneey, //orangenoise bassist, used to play in a band called Look Busy Do Nothing. Meanwhile, Faizan and Danial – guitarist and drummer for //orangenoise, were in another band called Mole. “Once, those two were playing, and Danny went out and played for them for this Radiohead (tribute) gig they were doing. I met up with these guys after the gig and we went back to their place, we jammed a little, and I thought ‘Hey we could probably jam with these Mole guys, we could do something.’ Just over a couple of months. This was about March last year, and we bonded to form this noisy little thing //orangenoise, yeah,” he reminisces fondly. Wynne and his bassist had a lot of mutual friends, and it still took a while for them to bump into each other.
Panjwaneey was already quite established in the circuit as a good bassist, and played with Mole on occasion. One day, the four of them were jamming on a friend’s rooftop, and they realized they could really do something together. “Danny is a really great bassist. And also a fabulous chef – he makes excellent steaks.” Mole and //orangenoise are quite closely associated – there are mostly gigs with a Mole followed by //orangenoise, or //orangenoise followed by Mole.”
“We first played at this big collective, there were a lot of musicians, we played a gig – the four guys who are in the band right now, we were filtered out from the whole process of that collective gig.”
The EP recording was completely DIY. “We had a room, the Mole guys were recording their EP alongside us, so we had to match timings and schedule. They had a soundproofed room, actually it was recorded everywhere – the drums were recorded at another friend’s place when his parents were out. We soundproofed the room with quilts and stuff, we basically just wanted to get the sound recorded so we could work on our laptops and make something out of it.” The band is currently working on its full-length album, due out this year. “This EP was kinda like a stepping stone, even during the recording of the EP we were jamming on some songs that we thought we could save for our next lot of material.”
“I listen to a lot of psychedelic, shoegaze-y music. Danny, my bassist, listens to a lot of Tool and Porcupine Tree, a lot of electronica and dubstep. Faizan and Danial bring in all their electronic influences like Flying Lotus and all, and Radiohead. It’s not like one person’s influence changes everything, it’s a combination of the four of us, all of our influences gel together to make something weird that we don’t even know how to define.When we jam, we don’t even know what’s going to happen.”
Wynne has been playing guitar for about five years now, and is a communication designer by education. He studied at Indus Valley School of Art, the only art school in Karachi, and went on to work at an ad agency in Karachi, a job he abandoned to immerse himself deeper into sound. Bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, A Place To Bury Strangers, Me You Us Them, The Brian Jonestown Massacre are some of Wynne’s favorite music at the moment, and he’s currently reeling from recent films like Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Gaspar Noe’s Enter The Void. “Growing up, I was listening to all sorts of popular stuff, my dad used to listen to The Beatles and stuff, The Eagles, Santana, I guess my guitar-based rock music was kinda coming from there. But alongside that, I was listening to a lot of jazz and classical music – that appealed to me a lot more than popular music. I was subconsciously into all of this, and I wasn’t into rock music until my college days – where I was introduced to a lot of rock music. I felt like I had to discover this whole spectrum of sound that people have been making for so long. I guess it started off with all that bluesy stuff, which led into jazzy stuff, that led me to rock from the ’60s and ’70s, then finally I landed – somewhere near this noise.”
//orangenoise played their first gig at a popular venue in Karachi, the Pakistan American Cultural Center, in July last year. “It was brilliant. I think all over the world people were celebrating World Music Day, and in Karachi we had this gig where all these different bands were playing. We were asked if we wanted to come play for this and we were like yeah, for sure. Because we had just recently started jamming and we had churned out a few songs. We prefer indoor gigs to outdoor spaces, it gets really loud inside a confined space. You can really crank the speakers up.”
“The entertainment industry is completely dry in Karachi and Pakistan. There are these kids who have musical instruments and they want to play, and they need a place. All these cafes are just randomly popping up all across the city and these bands go there and perform. About 80% of that music is cover-based, mostly like Pink Floyd tributes, Led Zeppelin tributes, blues and classic rock tributes, stuff like that. It’s changing like that, but we’re trying to come out with original music, trying to tell people that it’s okay to have your own sounds.”
“There are a few original bands. Mole, they play some crazy electronic, kinda like dubsteppy hip hop. They’re really talented guys. There’s a band from Islamabad called Bashir and the Pied Pipers. They make this cool drum ‘n bassy thing. Over the past two or three years, there’ve been a lot more bands coming up. Bands are starting to lean toward making original music, but they still need to get out of that shy phase, playing in the shadows, and trying to please the audiences with what they’ve already heard. Rather than coming out with stuff that they should be expressing.” In Karachi, there’s now a gig almost every weekend. The only way that being in an Islamic state affects the band is that, “There are some religious occasions, you really don’t know if you should pull a gig off on those big days, that’s the only conservative bit. There’s no barrier on performance, or what you wanna do.”
Barely a year old and one-EP strong, //orangenoise is already receiving international attention, and are slowly climbing into the internet-spotlight. They’re looking forward to touring anywhere, “but I guess Brooklyn would be fun. It’s open to a lot of craziness, a blend of a lot of different cultures. Also Melbourne, a lot of crazy stuff is happening there. Places that support the noise scene.” They’re also open to signing to a label, “not just any label – we’d want something that has other artists that we sound similar to, so they know where we’re coming from.” Wynne mentions that there is an indie label called Mooshy Moo – it has two bands under it right now, Dalt Wisney and Mole. “The drummer of //orangenoise, Danial- his brother runs this label. He does his own electronic stuff, so yeah I guess that’s one indie label here.”
The Karachi independent music scene is just about emerging, and musicians are still holding on to their day jobs. However, the process of letting go has slowly but irreversibly been put in motion. “Faizan and Danial are doing so much with their music – they’re full time musicians. I’d be a full time musician, at heart I guess.”
"Enter The Void is such a fucked up movie." "Can't watch it sober." "I know right." *moment of silence*
Stream //veracious below.
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