What began with a mysterious Facebook account called Peepingtom Yogensha has months later bloomed into a full-blown project immortalizing a city in a curiously multilayered, electronic way. Earlier in an interview with downtempo duo Sulk Station inside a house-of-mirrors maze, they told me about these regular meetings that would happen in Abhijeet Tambe’s (guitars, Lounge Piranha) living room, with laptops, voices and a projector, the formation of a new secret underground. A quiet birthplace of alternative electronica, that living room witnessed casual collaborations between acts like Sulk Station, Sridhar/Thayil, with pieces of Lounge Piranha and Nikhil Narendra of The Bicycle Days, and eventually Yogensha.
Yogensha is the project of Abhijeet Tambe (Lounge Piranha), Rahul Giri (Sulk Station), and visual artist Bharat R Mirle. Their first public performance was at Bangalore venue Bflat last night, part of the Pigflower Presents series, playing alongside German electronica duo On The Offshore, Sulk Station, a DJ set by Nikhil Narendra (who also plays for The Bicycle Days), and Vandana Menon (visuals).
Rahul Giri, laptopist, says of the project, “We started talking about how we had a complex relationship with the city, we were looking at different aspects of the city, especially the metro – how it represents transition. The new metro that has come up, these massive structures near MG Road etc. It’s such a massive presence, and not only visibly. It creates different kinds of emotions, it’s causing a lot of displacement – not just physically, but static displacement as well. We took a few days to document the city in transition.”
Yogensha @ BFlat, Bangalore
It isn’t only video documentation, raw samples are taken out of city life and treated to create part of an experience. “Abhi records samples from noise, namaaz, traffic, chimes, etc and likes to play them in their entirety. When I take a sample, I tend to destruct it, I tend to rip it apart – it doesn’t have to be traditional or beautiful-sounding. We decided this was how we were going to work with our sound, maintain this duality, so we’d have one side that represents the city and visuals to represent the other side of the city. We’re layering things, and when we’re layering we’re manipulating. When you take something stark and pit it against some kind of emotion- it’s the same thing with audio as well. There are beautiful samples and there is destructive noise.”
Yogensha played an entirely unprepared, spontaneous set. The music appears out of reactions to the visuals, and vice versa. “Except for Abhi’s song, he’d been thinking about it for a while. We generally tend to do that, we’re in a habit of jamming spontaneously.” Check out Yogensha’s promo video below, cut together from raw footage of their initial homemade jam sessions.
Photos by Sudhanva Atri
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