MELA: An Electro-World Music International Collaboration

Electro World Fusion remixes of classic Chinmaya tracks Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon

MELA – THE STORY

It began with a meeting at a Steiner School in Devon, England in February 2019, with Chinmaya Dunster (established for thirty years as an artist in the New Age genre), dropping off his ten year-old daughter for her first day, and Ben Fordham (DubTouch producer/DJ), dropping off his son into the same class.

Thus at the eleventh hour the sound and lighting guy – in the form of a wonderful but fragile old hippy (who claimed to have been in on the mix for the Rolling Stones live in the ‘70s) and who would not only supply the gear cheap but would mix the sound at the event too – was taken off suddenly to hospital, leaving the following day’s gig without sound or lights. That frantic day ended with Ben being drafted in to sit behind the mixing desk and manage a seven-piece band performing on drums, bass, keyboards, sarod, two guitars, two vocals and a tabla.

By midnight it was all gloriously done and done with and Ben and Chinmaya could take a breath of fresh air outside the now-shuttered venue. Ben remembers being on fire, burning to get his hands on original multi-track recordings of half the pieces the band had played. “And Chinmaya just stood there and said ‘Nah, I haven’t got any of that old stuff. We’ll record them all again’, because it turned out that many of them had been recorded on reel-to-reel back in the early ‘90s. Turned out that he could pull it off too, I was amazed over the next months how he could pull in what I needed from his old musician contacts from any corner of the world.”

So it was agreed: Chinmaya would re-record his sarod and guitar on all the tracks Ben wanted, and commission old connections as instrumentalists and vocalists to play the melodies and solos required (a trip that took him virtually to Jordan, Iran, New Zealand and India); while Ben would weave them together with his psytrance background and new-found appreciation for all things Indian.

From then on, after dropping off their kids at school, Ben and Chinmaya took to meeting over a takeaway coffee under a village maple tree. Everything was up for discussion. For a start Chinmaya – having been closeted away for over thirty years dancing to live and world-based music at the Osho Commune in Pune, pursuing his New Age career as a recording artist and studying Hindustani classical music – had literally no idea of what had been happening in the dance scene from the ‘90s on. “Right away he loved what I was doing with the structures”, Ben says, “ Blending elements from two completely different tracks into one for instance, but it took him a while to get what I was doing with the sound”.

‘Jai jai Surnayak’ that summer was the first Chinmaya was presented with in anything like finished shape. He wondered what the singer and composer Sandeep Srivastav, his friend and co-creator of ‘Mystic Poets of India’ would think about his voice being treated to a background drowning in reverb, synth sounds and tweaked electronically to stand out above it all. ‘But at the same time it was as if my ears were opened afresh,” Chinmaya says. “The sounds weren’t interfering with the integrity of the Indian vocalists performances as I’d first thought. They were kicking it up into some juicy ground that I hadn’t really known existed”.

Ben too was having to make some adjustments to his ears. “Chinmaya kept demanding that I keep the melody lines clean. I realized that despite being bowled over by their twisty, enthralling loveliness and knowing they were at the heart of the project, I was unconsciously hiding them away behind a sound that was default in my psytrance scene. It was tough going at times, presenting him with mix after mix, having him rave about a track before pointing out my misunderstandings about the timing of a melody against my beats, or disturbing the integrity of a poetic vocal line, and all the time encouraging me to back off the reverb and get vocalists and instrumentalists out front”.

Their children transited from Class Four into Class Five; the maple’s leaves transformed from summer green to winter decay and with approaching ten tracks on the go, it was clear a full-length album was emerging. What to call it? What to call themselves? After all what kind of album was it? Psytrance, Chillout, World? None of it fit.

Richard, organiser of England’s long-running Whirl-Y-Gig festival, triggered an urgent appraisal of these questions, by offering them a spot to perform the material live at the August 2020 festival. He needed a name to put in the publicity; he needed photos, promotional material; a short video of what the festival-goers could expect would be good too…..

Chinmaya let him imagination roam over images and words from his long years in India. ‘What Ben was creating was music for dancing to, for festivities and celebrations; it was making me feel happy and light on my feet,” he says. “It reminded me of some of the best times I’d spent in rural India, at a simple village festival or fair, where people from far-flung districts meet and eat and dance and exchange their goods and eligible progeny. I got it with a jolt when I did a web search and was stunned to find that nobody had taken the name yet. There were no bands called ‘Mela’ out there. The bonus was that the word had a nice simple ring and look to it”.

While Ben worked and re-worked the tracks, calling on Chinmaya to provide new elements from his worldwide connections, Chinmaya started on the visuals, attempting to marry the traditional world of India with a contemporary techno vibe. Lebanese graphic designer Nathalie Mansour worked his elements into their final stunning form, while Ben’s partner Kaycee put and end to long ruminations by providing the album title.

Lockdown came, Whirl-Y-Gig was postponed, Ben and Chinmaya continued to meet at at the maple in a now-deserted village. As summer progressed Covid was bringing the project into doubt. Were there going to be any parties or clubs at which to play MELA’s music now? With the world spending much of its time online there was only social media left to connect people. And was there any point in releasing a whole album in these days of streaming?

Ben had been checking out Chinmaya’s music online in the few days prior to their meeting, after hearing that a musician would be a new parent at the school. It was an instant bonding with a shared love for India. Chinmaya had first visited on the hippy trail in the ‘70s, while Ben had recently returned from his first ever love-at-first-smell visit.

The gig was Chinmaya feeling extravagant, returning to his homeland, meeting up with old musician friends from around the world, and putting his dream band together to present his music live for the first time in the UK. However, as every performing artists knows, you can suffer if you pay a little too much attention to preparations for your performance, and too little on the technical support that will surround it.

Chinmaya remembers Ben then and there offering to re-mix a couple of tracks as soon as he could be given the audio elements of the originals. After a dig into his computer’s historical memory Chinmaya found ‘Ranjha Ranjha’ (a Sufi-inspired East-West fusion song sung by Indian classical vocalist and composer Sandeep Srivastav, released on their album ‘Mystic Poets of India in 2013).

Ben’s version of the song appears now as track 8 – “Ranjha Ranjha (Kudle Sunrise mix)” – on MELA’s debut album, but it would take eighteen months to finally incarnate in the form it has there. First another synchronicity had to happen for MELA to emerge as a project: Ben had to find himself mixing his first-ever live band at Chinmaya’s “Here I am back in UK after 31 years, let’s have a party!” sell-out Ashburton Arts gig in May 2019.

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