Ashutosh Phatak launched the music for Sarnath Banerjee’s art installation The Psychic Plumber And Other Lies at the Blue Frog on Tuesday, March 1. We were there.
Lower Parel venue Blue Frog has never looked better than it did on the night of Tuesday, March 1. The performance was set up to take place off the stage, amidst the centrespace transformed into an accessible lounge, with the stage also serving as a seating area. The launch of Sarnath Banerjee’s art installation The Psychic Plumber And Other Lies was accompanied by music from Ashutosh Phatak, with beanbags pervading the performance space and placed around it, with a grand piano at the centre of the room, and everything luminous under large cubical white candles.
In the studios adjacent to Blue Frog was an audio-visual art exhibit featuring Banerjee’s graphic short-stories; each series set to a piece of music composed by Phatak. This exhibit accompanied the launch of his book The Harappa Files. Banerjee’s art dealt with quirky life-snippets with absurdities twisted in, sometimes satirically projecting a looming urban loneliness. The accompanying music systems weren’t working. An abandoned Rhodes keyboard sat quietly near the framed artwork on the walls, wonderfully analog – and there’s always been a certain charm to mystery pianos.
Over at the Frog, the candlelit gig began a little past 10pm as per schedule, with Ashu seated at the piano surrounded loosely by a set of collaborators and a sparse audience. Visuals from the art exhibit were projected onto the screen, opening with a comical view on advertising, leading in to spoken-word performances sometimes descending into burlesque. Banerjee read from his graphic stories, set to easy-listening piano and synth melodies from Phatak, with the compelling Shazneen Arethna on vocals. As the evening wound down, the artwork and performers ventured into themes like alcoholism, inertia and the emotions that arise when an old building is torn down, the music growing stranger, by now peppered with retching noises. Stories revolved around an old building without a blueprint, and a psychic plumber; a young boy fascinated with a branded pair of Nike sneakers and his disappointment upon realizing they were not genuine, humorous sexual adventures with no strings attached, etc. With Vivienne K’s full throated vocal abstraction and bursts of power from Shazneen, the evening was bent into something exotic which turned into loungey gospel, while the screen displayed a sardonic still from a tragicomedy – a man holding up a pair of panties, “found wedged between James Joyce and Anthony Burgess”.
As a live performance, it worked – but recorded as a standalone set of music, it would not have held much value. Ashu has always worked well with distractions, as in this case – with terribly talented collaborators. He concluded the set with some older material from his solo rock opera, followed by the faux-vaudevillean title track off The Petri Dish Project (our review).
Check out a full gallery of pictures on our Facebook page.
Indiecision: B-
Photos by Kunal Kakodkar
Ashutosh Phatak @ Blue Frog, Mumbai
Sarnath Bannerjee @ Blue Frog, Mumbai
Shazneen Arethna @ Blue Frog, Mumbai
Twitter
Facebook