Éric and Rahul, both of you had a Deep India concert in Bangalore nearly a year ago. What is the collaboration like this time?
Éric: There is so much to explore musically with each other. Deep India was just the beginning. On this journey together, through discovering each other's music we are re-discovering ourselves. The santoor for example has a beautiful drone and I want to harmonise around that.
Rahul: As for me, it has been a fabulous experience working with Éric. I've been following Éric and Sanchez's group Deep Forest's work from early on. Éric's quite a legend in the tribal electronic genre. I feel collaborations will help me and my music grow. That's what led me in the past to collaborate with legendary musicians, jazz saxophonist Kenny G and pianist Richard Clayderman.
Can you talk about how you first collaborated on Deep India?
Rahul: Following earlier collaborations when I was presented with the opportunity to work with Éric I was excited. Because of both, the kind of musician and person he is. For Deep India, instead of homogenising it as Indian folk we were able to bring in the best folk artistes from Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Coorg in Karnataka and infuse it all in one album.
Éric: You know when we did Deep India I hardly knew Rahul. When I was asked to listen to his santoor, I was gripped. It's a very beautiful instrument and Rahul's a very good musician. So things fell into place without any hiccup.
How do you ensure that one genre doesn't swamp or overwhelm the other? Is there some kind of understanding?
Éric: Rahul do you want to go first?
Rahul: No Éric you go first. I'll come in later.
Is that how you ensure the collaboration stays mutually accommodating?
(Both artistes laugh)
Éric: Down the years I've done a lot of music... almost from early childhood. In a sense one acquires the language of music. While it may look like that, it's not all planned and worked out. I compose and share the music with whoever I'm working with. We go back and forth several times and given our experience we know we have hit the 'sweet spot' when we do. I cannot explain the process. It is a miracle. You never know if something will work or not and one just goes on.
Rahul: You know creativity is not like a continuous flow. It happens over a certain time... a few hours in a day. If something gets thrown at you at that time and you respond, something strikes and you go, "Wow! What was that?" Then you want to take it further, add a raga, shift scales or pitch. Ultimately, one needs to understand composing is a knack. You can learn to play with reading or a teacher, but when you're composing, it comes from within. That temptation to create something new and different can push you. The response we keep getting on various social media with 50-60,000 hits for some Deep India tracks only reaffirms that it is working.
Are there instances when you get something just perfect and you're yourself left wondering where that came from?
Rahul: Yeah, that can happen. If you are lucky, you remember the phrase you just played or have a recording. If not, you go back and start from scratch. When we began working together I'd send him some melodic lines via the internet and Éric would respond adding his bit. I'd be like, "Wow! I never imagined it could sound like this too!'
Éric: I would have to agree. Pleasant accidents are a big part of creativity. You get distracted, make a mistake and sometimes just like that you get a very different feel to what's emerged. When I'm composing I look forward to such accidents and that can happen only for a few minutes every day, like Rahul said. To get there, one should practise and polish one's craft and keep at it. Of course, technology has made things easier. One can hit a button and the computer will just record unlike the 20 minute tapes before.
When we talk of electronica, genres like trance and mash-ups come to mind. But you like ethnic electronica with folk elements.
Éric: As a teen, electronica was the in-thing. There was just no trance. It was all ambient music. Today, we can't think of a world without club and trance. I think every generation has its own thing (laughs). For me, electronica is a way to use the synthesizer, and the sequencer and a way to compose music using technical things like sampling, analog and digital sounds. Of course, trance is a part of it, and I will play trance too, but for me electronica is far much wider than that narrow space. Even when I collaborate, I'm not incorporating but actually trying to build something new with the elements at hand. Unfortunately in Valenciennes, France, where I was born, we don't have a tradition of ethnic roots in music like say in Africa or India, so that's what draws me.
Rahul, what is it like for you to work with electronica, a relatively younger music, considering you are a legatee of the santoor
Rahul: When I began as a school-kid my dad had bought me a small Casio. And you shouldn't forget the omnipresent harmonium, which is such an integral part of our music, is an older distant cousin of the keyboard. While composing for films I have often resorted to it. So, like I've been taught by guru and father Pt Shivkumar Sharma, it is all about creating music, irrespective of instrument and style.