The much-album was found yesterday at Sangeet Saagar. Just goes on to prove how incompetent those Music World morons are. OK, I think the only album they have, that wasn’t visible at Sangeet Saagar is The Matrix Reloaded OST.

The price is good, fairly competetive. Times music never brought the price of the Kandisa album down from 360 rupees, I think that’s a good trend – good albums deserve to be priced higher. Now Kosmic music, the label under which Jhini has come out, is pricing a limited edition audio cd at 300 rupees. Not bad, this. It comes with a video cd that has the “making of Bhor” video and the video of the Jhini song, which is airing now on TV channels. 75 MB plus 54 MB. The picture and sound quality of the videos are pretty good though. Most likely the marketing ploy is this way – they check and see if the album sells on it’s own – word of mouth plays a very important role in selling Indian Ocean albums, really – and if the thing catches on, they can leave the price at 300. Otherwise, get rid of the vcd, and sell it for something like 150-200, which “normal” Kosmic music albums are priced at.

By the way, why exactly did the band and Times music part ways ? I thought they had a three-album contract.

The Making of Bhor is very nicely editted, nicely-captured. It has snippets of studio sessions ( too few of them, in my opinion. ), which shows Amit Kilam strutting his stuff, that guy is good – he even plays the recorder on the album a la Silk Route’s Atul Mittal. Then there are a couple of interviews, or rather conversational snippets with the band-members, the drawback being that the guys seem to reiterate whatever we have already known from previous interviews and articles – how the band came about, how they met each other, what the Indian Ocean music is like.

The video of Jhini stinks. Much ado has been made about the band refusing to let anyone make a video of any of the Kandisa numbers ( the rumours I heard include two famous movie-directors offering their services. One of them had an interesting “storyline” plotted out for the video, involving a Rajput prince on a horse, out to rescue a princess. Interesting?? Faugh! Both the offers were turned down ) And now, with this atrocity of a video, the guys seem to have bowed to contemporary music-channel tradtion. You have a lot of skimpily-dressed ( can there be any other term ? ) females scampering after a muscular lad , who is alternately topless and dressed in a transparent kurta. And then, because the music is traditional and the lyrics are saintly, ( the lyrics for Jhini are by Kabir. Yeah, that guy. ) the females start dancing around the guy. It’s obvious that they are trying to get into the trad-feel of the song because they try hard not to dance as energetically as, say, in a Daler Mehndi video. I mean, no wiggling hips and stuff. And then Shiamak-Davar-syndrome catches up (ah! The guilty pleasures of jazz dancing) and the guy starts picking up some the girls and generally twirling them around.

All this happens in a darkened set that faintly resembles a jungle. In fact, it does look like a jungle if I squit my eyes tight enough. And meanwhile, the band plays on, in a real jungle, this time. I bet they didn’t know the video director was carrying on with his grandiose ideas involving the not-exactly-dancing girls, otherwise they wouldn’t have been chilling out that much while singing. ( Right. I am a big Indian Ocean fan, so I give them the benefit of doubt ) And we don’t bother with things like where Rahul Ram has plugged his bass guitar in, or whether Asheem’s butt hurts because he seems to be sitting on an ant-hill, and other miscellaneous stuff like that.

Oh, yes, the spirituality bug catches the video, when we realise that the guy is trying hard to purge himself of his “inner demons”, or desires of the flesh, or whatever ( which are being represented by our female wannabe-dancers ). Obviously, our director does not have a clue what the word “subtle” is, because he goes to great lengths to show how our hero overcomes the enemy – the guy ends up tying the females with creepers to a tree, whirling around them with religious fervour ( and of course, keeping perfect time with the beat ), while his other self ( yeah, did I forget to mention that? There is a double-role in the video, with the tortured, underclad version of the guy looking at his happier, hormonal-tendencies-free version in the mirror. You can easily distinguish between both of them, because the mirror version has a kurta on. A white kurta. Spiritual video. )

And the band playeth on.

The album has Torrent, one of their oldest tracks, rendered a little more contemporary in the post-Kandisa tradition. Rahul Ram has written and composed for After the War, the last track, with semi-English and semi-Hindi(?) lyrics. One interesting, and slightly frustrating fact is that, the whole album was shot and recorded at some place in Andhra Pradesh. *Sigh*. What a massive intelligence breakdown!

All these stuff, even before I have listened to the actual album. :-P

That’s because I bought another cd along with Jhini, Vangelis’ Albedo 0.39. I know this means that my resolutions go down the drain, but hey, I am still in control. I saw Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief cd, available for only 350 rupees, and I stopped myself from buying it.

One interesting fact that I once knew, and had forgotten: Albedo refers to the reflecting power of a heavenly body. A body that’s a perfect reflector has Albedo 100% or 1. The earth is a 39% reflector, hence Albedo 0.39. Beautiful music, which has been copied umpteen times in Doordarshan advertisements, serials, and filler music. This also contains the original score of the Cosmos series.

And then Chandru gave me Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and Al Stewarts’ Best of album. Vasu brought me Mitti and the long-awaited Satya:The Sound. Also Santana’s Zebop, and a Miles Davis album that he bought the other day.