Small fry, big appetite

Lounge Piranha are among the best sounds to emerge from Indian rock.

Mumbai may be India’s mecca for fans of rock, but Bangalore too has churned out sounds that stand out from the rest. And it doesn’t get better than Lounge Piranha, who call themselves a “post-rock band”. Hearing them, you can discern alternative, psychedelic, psychotic, distortion, ambient guitar soundscapes, prog rock, didgeridoo, trumpet, Kazakh news grabbed from shortwave radio, auto horns, Jimi, G’n’R, Ugly Kid Joe and a funky visual art trip. All this will be in an album on your shelf very soon.

There is hardly a listener who has come away disappointed,. They have everything covered, even an impromptu “Ek Do Teen” for the Bollywood types.

In 2005 George Mathen (visual artist and drummer), Rohan Ramesh (doctor and bassist), Kamal Singh (guitars), Abhijeet Tambe (guitars), Pervez Rajan (didgeridoo and assorted instruments) and Archana Prasad (visual artist) came together not just as performers but as an identity. “We were definitely not on the same wavelength, but we found common ground,” recalls Singh.

As they describe it, they started out with 85,000 names, narrowed them down to 82 and then randomly chose Lounge Piranha. The primer to the band’s visual art trip was Mathen, whose graffiti adorns the walls of The Ghetto in Colaba, Mumbai. The Piranha symbol uses a variation on a small-fanged fish with enormous, pouty lips.

Mathen also does the band’s website (www.loungepiranha.com) and documents their travails in his running graphic comic, Shatrix. Prasad, from the National Institute of Design, was a late addition to the band, but she gives their live performances a different dimension by directing a running visual background.

“What separates us from the rest? We are not in a hurry — for gigs, to play or write songs. In fact, for our first six months there were no voices, just instruments. It is the sound first, and there is no philosophy to it. There might be a small structure, a rough idea of a tune and it becomes something improving with time,” they say.

Piranha’s sound cannot be described. It is not easy on the ears to start with — ask the Bangalore police, who threw them out of their first jam room — and its eccentricity should be left to grow on you. They were voted one of Bangalore’s top three bands in a radio-station poll, opened the Vh1 Rock Rules show featuring Taxiride in 2006, and won the Toto Funds the Arts award in 2007. Live shows have been held at Bangalore events and pubs, and there was also a session at Mumbai’s Blue Frog recently.

“We have been busy recording the new album in Chennai. We have hardly had time to tour. We are planning a small tour of India to promote the album,” says Singh. The effort, which will make the marketing types cringe, is called Going Nowhere, and features some of Piranha’s crowd favourites — “Gunsong”, “Ebb”, “Hand Hole”, “Snakes and Lotuses” — and new numbers like “Teenage Crush”, “Eclat” and “Going Nowhere”. Rahul Giri, a software engineer, mixes in electronica samples for these new recordings.

As usual, there is no record deal for the band, and the album comes out thanks to the Rs 2 lakh saved up from their Rs 25,000 pub appearances and Rs 35,000-plus live performances. The album will be sold at future performances. “A video is in the works and will depend on us raising more funds. But we are happy with what we have done. We want to just play consistently,” they sum up.