My friend Anil had, about two months ago, passed on to me a huge swag of mp3s and movies, a 240-GB distillation of the goodies available on the LAN of his institute. It will take me some time before I actually get to listen to, or watch all of it, but I am doing my best.

Saturday night, high on the after-effects of Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Spiderman, I went home. No one was around, and after messing around with Opposing Force for about an hour, I decided to let the streak continue and started reading Planetary. Put on some music, hit random on Winamp and started off with issue 1 of the Warren Ellis series. There were nineteen issues in all, and a couple of crossover issues and it took me quite a long time to finish them all. Far more, in fact, than it took to read thirty eight issues of UXM. Because I was distracted by the music.

In the middle of issue 1, this very strange, goosepimply voice started singing, with minimal instruments playing along. What drew me to the singing was the fact that it resembled the folk music of Assam – the Namghoriya form, we call it, more of chanting and clapping, a community exercise where the loudest voices are those of the old folks, who put their soul into this devotional singing. The voice singing this song was exactly that way, a dry, rolling tone that would seem harsh if you were not in the mood to be unhappy. I checked Winamp, the artiste ID said it was by Huun Huur Tu, I hadn’t heard of them ( I guessed it was a band, and not a person) before, but whoever they were, wherever they were from, the music was superb.

I erased everything from my playlist but the Huun Huur Tu songs, there were twelve of them, and started playing them in a loop. Awesome. It was an amazing feeling, reading Planetary with this particular background music. The voice!! It murmured and gurgled and messed with my head in strange ways. Sometimes it was like the singer has forgotten to breathe. Heard a digeridoo? Sometimes the voice took on the precise tone of that Australian instrument, with occasional change to a high bubbly tone. “Digital manipulation.”, I thought. Then yesterday, I did some research on Huun Huur Tu and came up with this Scientific American article that explains that it’s a band from Tuva ( think Mongolia/Siberia), and the particular kind of singing is khöömeior khoomii, from the Mongolian word for “throat.The article explains it this way – “a remarkable singing technique in which a single vocalist produces two distinct tones simultaneously. One tone is a low, sustained fundamental pitch, similar to the drone of a bagpipe. The second is a series of flutelike harmonics, which resonate high above the drone and may be musically stylized to represent such sounds as the whistle of a bird, the syncopated rhythms of a mountain stream or the lilt of a cantering horse.” Amazing, really.

The tragic part – out of the twelve mp3s, about six have annoying blips and clicks in them, not bad enough to distract from the song, but irritating anyways. If anyone is inspired enough to download/own any of their songs, please do give me a buzz.

Happiness is – reading sixty issues of Ultimate Spiderman, followed by thirty-nine issues of Ultimate X-Men, all in a single Saturday.

Crappiness is – your eyes giving out on you by the time you’ve finished reading ninety nine comics in a row.

Brian Bendis, you are good, my man.

Edit: In all these years, ever since Roop Inka Mastana, the first remix album came out, I have thought badly of certain remixes, liked some of them for their innovativeness, and have occasionally thanked some of the remixers for the slight nostalgia trip they afford me.

But until now, I have never, on hearing a remix version for the first time, thought of taking a gun and shooting everyone involved in remixing that song in their faces – or wherever it hurts. For the record, right now, I want to.

Who was the Brainless Idiot that thought of remixing Vaseegara?

A bad or neat joke, depending on which end you’re at:

You: What’s your mobile service provider?

Unsuspecting Hutch user: Hutch.

You: Bless you!

or the variant:

You: Hey, what mobile service does (insert name of some unsuspecting Hutch customer here) use?

Unsuspecting non-Hutch user: Hutch.

You: Bless you!

In both cases, be prepared to run.

Sometime in the winter of  ’93, I heard about Didi. Then I heard the song. Then I learnt that the music was a form called Rai, and the singer was an Algerian named Khaled Hadj Brahm. My uncle ( my maternal grandfather’s younger brother’s youngest son, and a year elder to me ) won a prize at a local dance competition groving to this song. Even AR Rahman, in one of his interviews, mentioned how much he loved Khaled’s music. My father bought a cassette for me, some label called Peacock Music which, as I found out from The North-Eastern Sun that used to run anti-piracy ads, was a pirated label. That’s why it cost only 22 rupees.

Then came the mandatory follow-ups. Khaled sang Didi in Hindi, yessir, with atrocious pronounciation and much rolling of the words “Bharr de bharr de, dil ki dua oh dilruba”. The HMV cassette ( again, bought by my father ) also had Mory Kante’s original Tama Tama and some wacky song called Nappy Rap (which I am still looking for, it was THAT weird a song) A song called Ladki Ladki was featured in a Hindi film called ‘Shrimaan Aashiq’, the lyrics of the song modified to make it an anti-women/anti-love song.

It was much later that I began to listen to the other Khaled songs on the  album, and whatever else I could find. El Harbi  was cool, so was N’ssi N’ssi. Hey Ouedi featured a stunning violin solo( or was that some other traditional bowed instrument?) In college, loads of friends had mp3 collections of Khaled’s songs filed under World Music, and it was a treat rediscovering the the old ones and trying out newer tracks. Aicha Aicha, later remixed as a hiphop track, has one of the funkiest guitar riffs ever. There was a live version of El Harbi, a Bhangra mix, a Club version, none of which has the charm of the original version.Sahra (named after Khaled’s daughter), Wahrane ( a tribute to his hometown), Yalla Bina ( the only Khaled song whose Bhangra version sounded better than the original).

Ya Rayah ( which I suspect is a cover version of a folk song), has been copied by Sanjeev Darshan in ‘Mann’ as Kaali Naagin Jaisi.

Seems the guys who produced Khaled’s eponymous album ( which was his first international venture) were Don Was and Michael Brook. The same Michael Brook who collaborated with U Srinivas on Dream and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on Musst Musst and Night Song. Man, that guy pops up everywhere. Seems that album charted maximum sales in (gulp!) India. I wonder if they counted the pirated albums too, when they came up with this statistic.

Khaled: Live in Paris was an absolute delight. Live versions of all the familiar songs, variations aplenty. He is accompanied by fellow Rai artistes Faudel and Rachid Taha, and a superb set of instrumentalists ( the electric guitar solo that comes at the end of Didi , ooooh), and the three voices complement each other very well. Abdul Kader is a song that’s traditional, but sounds great live, with three voices and a combination of ethnic Middle-eastern and western instruments. The energy of the live performance is just awesome, as you can hear from the audience response ( people singing along to most of the songs )

Some Khaled songs sound very poppish, completely Western instrumentation. I have never been able to like Chebba, for instance. Not that the song is bad, but a voice like that deserves better.

Find of the week: El Harbi Wine (from the album Kenza ) was one of the songs in my Khaled folder, which I heard pretty recently. Starts off with a very familiar tabla beat,( later I remembered it was the same as the beat at the beginning of Tere Bina [Sanoo Ek Pal] from Musst Musst. Hmm, the Michael Brooks connection strikes again) and then Khaled is joined by a female voice who sings in Hindi. The song is very similar in mood to Hisham Abbas’s Naari Naari. a little cheesy at times, overexaggerated Bollywood homages and all.The female voice interested me, and a couple of googles led me to her name. She is Amar, a UK based singer who has her own album , part of which is produced by Nitin Sawhney. Interestingly, Amar is the same voice I had heard on the song O Meri Jaan  in Talvin Singh’s ‘Sounds of The Asian Underground‘. The song said ‘Talvin Singh feat Amar’ and I didn’t realise Amar was the female voice.

Khaled is cool. Definitely.

Note: If you listen to Khaled, and like his music, you might also be interested in albums like Jimmy Page/Robert Plant’s No Quarter, which has interesting reinterpretations of Led Zep songs with middle-eastern instruments. Deep Forest: Live in Japan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Shehbaaz,Hisham Abbas’s Naari Naari, and I can’t seem to think of any other album right now.