Wishtank Edu

interview by: GARRETT HEANEY

Wishtank: Why did you decide to fashion an album around this particular instrument? One could compare your use of the sitar to RATATAT’s utilization of electric guitar riffs to build a signature sound. You think we’ll hear more from Quanny Sitar, or was this a singular project?

Quan: I’ve always had an inexplicable attraction to the sound of the sitar. To quote George Harrison, “it hit a certain spot in me that I can’t explain, but it seemed very familiar to me.”

Even when I was growing up and I was first exposed to The Beatles, my favorite songs were “Norweigian Wood” and “Within You Without You,” both of which feature Harrison on sitar. As I got older and my tastes evolved, I started to explore Indian music, and further down the line I got exposed to the wonderful world of Bollywood, including the music of Kalyandji and Anandji Shah.

Over the seven years I’ve spent making beats, there have been a couple that have featured sitar samples in varying roles, but for whatever reason I wound up making two or three of them in a row towards the end of September, 2007. Coincidentally, I was given a copy of Gregory David Roberts’ book Shantaram around the same time, and shortly after that I saw the Amitabh Bachchan movie DON for the first time. This combination of events pushed my interest in India and her culture beyond a simple love of the sitar, and that’s when I decided to turn this new batch of tracks in to an EP. Even though I think it stands well as its own body of work, I had a great time putting it together, and I’m definitely considering a spiritual sequel somewhere down the line — especially once I’ve actually learned to play sitar.

Wishtank: Quanny Sitar sounds like a play on words from that old western Johnny Guitar. Do you foresee this album becoming a cult classic like that film? Why do you think so many people were drawn to that film Ñ other than the fact that the villain is played by an actress with a name as pornstar-ish as Mercedes McCambridge?

Quan: As a matter of fact, it is — I’m a huge fan of old westerns, and Johnny Guitar has been a favorite of mine for a long time. I had always considered the more obvious possibility of calling a record “Quanny Guitar,” but then this project came up and I couldn’t resist the opportunity, even though I further obscured the reference. I’m not sure that Quanny Sitar will ever have any sort of cult following quite like that of its namesake, but it has its fair share of quirks and idiosyncracies, so I won’t count myself out yet.

Like so many other movies dubbed “cult classics,” Johnny Guitar was pretty well received when it was first released in 1954, but it wasn’t until some time later that people started lauding it like they seem to now. I think one of the major reasons people are so drawn to it is that it’s visually stunning — the colors are very bright and vivid, the angles and lighting are sharp, and the sets and locations invoke the sense of grandeur one associates with the Great Plains. On top of that, at the time, it was one of very few films in the genre featuring two women in the respective roles of hero and villain. Joan Crawford plays a straight-up badass — more badass than anyone else in the film, save maybe the titular character — and women were probably excited to see such a strong female character represented on-screen.

Wishtank: Tell us about the song “Indian Summer.” That track sounds like a sitar rendition of that Dropkick Murphys song “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” that was featured in Scorsese’s The Departed. I can see this song being hugely popular in the city of Boston where you live.

Quan: I can say for sure that it wasn’t intentional — I hadn’t heard the song or seen the movie until after we had started this interview, so any parallels are results of coincidence. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Dropkick Murphys, especially considering their local ties, but they aren’t a band I typically listen to. That being said, having since heard the song, I can definitely recognize some similarities between the melodies of “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” and “Indian Summer.”

To tell you the truth, I hadn’t considered trying to get any of my tracks on-air. For one, I think modern FM radio is dead; I have very little tolerance for top 40 hits and constant barrages of annoying advertising. Furthermore, there isn’t a station around here that alternative and underground hip-hop artists and/or listeners can really call home. Emerson College’s student-run radio station (88.9 WERS) plays blocks of hip-hop in the evenings, but whether or not the music is any good depends on the DJ for that night. None of that means you’ll never hear Dr. Quandary on the radio, though — my music is currently in rotation on a couple of different web stations, and I’m hoping to make better contacts at some out-of-town college stations with underground music programs.

Wishtank: We’ve talked before about how you build your beats, it’s almost like a cross between a scavenger hunt and a jigsaw puzzle – finding all the pieces and making them fit together. If you had to estimate, how many pieces interlock in the average Quanny Sitar song? How many sitar riffs do you think you sifted through, and where were you digging?

Quan: In a way, yes, it’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but with an actual jigsaw — that way you can cut the pieces as you go and force them to fit wherever you want. Sometimes, I’ll work with snippets that are a few beats long, and other times I’ll get so meticulous as to cut out individual drum hits or notes. If I were to estimate, I’d say the average Quanny Sitar track had its roots in at least 5 songs, which were trimmed into individual samples of varying lengths. On top of that, I used a lot of synth for this project because I was trying to emulate the Moog and Arp sounds you hear so often in the psychedelic music of the 1960s. In the end, to put it a little more clearly, there are probably between seven and twenty components or layers that make up each track on the album.

I couldn’t even begin to estimate the number of sitar riffs I sifted through. I think the album that provided the biggest direct inspiration was Ananda Shankar’s Sitar Meets Moog. Aside from that, I went for staples like his uncle Ravi Shankar and Budhaditya Mukherjee, but I also used material from more unconventional fusion sitarists like Colin Walcott from Oregon, and some really obscure experimental stuff from the 60s like July, Ramases and Vampire Sound Inc.

Wishtank: What are you working on now?

Quan: At the moment, I spend a lot of my free time trying to get World Around Records up and running. WAR is the web-based experimental hip-hop label Justin Boland and I have been working on with our friends and fellow artists Mitch Pond and Ross Abrahams. We’ve got a solid roster of twelve acts, many of them currently offering free downloadable albums, and we’re putting together an awesome website with Chuck Choiniere at Back Brain Media that we hope to have live sometime this spring.

As for my own personal projects, my itinerary is constantly shifting. My most immediate goal is to get Beyond All Spheres of Force and Matter — a body of instrumentals from as far back as 2006 — mixed, mastered, and released for free on my website. After that, I’ll be trying to round up the last round of collaborations for an EP called Strange Loops, and we’ll just have to see where 2009 goes from there.