Mumbai is bygone paraphernalia brought out of the attic to resuscitate the timeless in the new EX GENERATION album, The Mumbai Exchange. Spanning nine tracks, and conceived as the successive move to The Napoli Exchange by Australian Ziggy Zeitgeist and UK’s Lewis Moody — in collaboration with artists like Anuja Zokarkar, Vinay Ramadasan, NATE08, and Sandeep Mishra — the album constructs a city from the 80s and 90s disco it is often irretrievably attached to.
I am not a Mumbaikar — only a recent resident, but it becomes apparent to one that this a metropolis embedded in memory — but also quite strategically timed, because of the resurgence of the sonics of anything disco, and the optics of archival work within the alternative music space. This preoccupation with the 80s and 90s of musicality in Mumbai is perhaps a reformed, neo-oriental view of the city — because there is an attachment of inextricability with this city with this era. This is obviously not ahistorical or unfounded, the soundscape of the city during those two decades has itself become the Mount Rushmore of influence on Bollywood and independent music for ages to come — but it is also an easier playing field to foster the exchange bit of the deal, because there is no significant new iteration of it, the import-export-transfusion part has already existed for some time. The intent, perhaps then is not revamp, but replay and recreate and engage with the nostalgic elements and have fun while at it, and that translates quite well through the expanse of it.
A lot of the record reminds me of lines of sound from Alisha Chinai, Nazia Hassan, and even Asha Puthli renderings of the disco sounds that had inhabited South Asia in primal form for a surmountable period of time — especially Aao Naa and Sochti Hun, O Mere Jaanam which is a cover of Sister Sledge’s Thinking of You. Zokarkar’s Hindustani classical intricacies create wonderful textures when interweaved with the basslines and the synths. There is a significant holding back that she does, especially on Aao Na, where you are cognizant : here is an artist, acclimatized to doing so much more with her voice, but instead lets herself tease the potentialities, because she and you are both aware that this is not the place for it.
A lot of the album is also positively funny, especially Vinay’s rendering of a monologue on Jung Chidi Hai, and the bassline on Shringara — my personal favorite, which also features the sarangi and a form of lamentational singing one has relegated to Rekha Bhardwaj these days — jumps at you, almost like it is inducing humor into this apparently serious woe of the heart, where Zorarkar calls for her saiyaan.
The trifecta of instrumentals — Bandra Hustle, Lady of the Lake, and Dunes of Thar are interesting. Lady of the Lake has almost a simulated garbling of striking lake waters, and the percussion line helps create that rupture in the otherwise exaggerated Bollywood-y action-mystery-esque soundtrack, and its succession by Dunes of Thar hammers in the impact, almost like it is supposed to soundtrack a search mission in some artifact of the mystical East — hello, Said, — and the playfulness helps conjure the enjoyment which would otherwise make it entirely too on-the-nose.
The Mumbai Exchange could be perceived as a time capsule of sorts — especially if you are a sucker for the 80s/90s flair for the disco, and while it does promise to be an exchange with Mumbai, it also puts on the goggles of the city to stare out of it — look at the dunes, for example. The synthwork is quite possibly the thread that ties all of this together, while Zorarkar is the heart, interjecting from time to time to make the record more human — perhaps the only thing missing, is the absence of cacophony. The edges of sound are too sharp and too clear, while Mumbai unambiguously is impenetrable and famously incomprehensible, even to longterm Mumbaikars. However, there is a certain joy one can sense in the sonic interpretation of a space — which this body of work manages to convey, and that is one of the pronounced successes of this record.
