Efforts

The Pamphlet Project is aimed at reviving the pamphlet, a literary genre that has gone out of vogue today. A pamphlet is topical, generates interest and communicates with readers from a cross-section of society.

While today, pamphlets are largely used for religious and political propaganda, Red Earth wishes to exploit the immense potentialities of the genre to articulate varied secular and non-ideological concerns. The pamphlets published as part of the project will centre on issues of popular culture, urban life, and the arts and culture in India.

A major premise of the project is to critique certain western models of living and certain elements of the western ethos, which are being embraced by a significant part of the Indian populace, uncritically and unthinkingly, even though they are mostly culturally dissonant and in some cases even harmful. Additionally, it will also critique some aspects of traditional culture.

As part of the Project, Red Earth will also be taking up the publication of material (in the form of pamphlets, broadsides etc.) that is often rejected for publication in the mainstream media due to its polemic nature or its critique of state or media policies. This will be a humble attempt to counter the strong censure of critical voice by the media. The vision is to generate public opinion and awareness and boost the critical mentality of the readers. If accomplished, this would be a small step towards creation of a healthy, more democratic dialogue on some issues of core importance to our lives...

The2Project.com was conceived and implemented online. The only time we required a music studio was when Shubha had to record vocals. Hygge composed the instrumental electronic track, Shubha heard it and responded by recording vocals. All this while I did not allow the two musicians to contact each other in any way to keep the response to each others music spontaneous and uninhibited.

I was exchanging files (in wav and MP3) with Hygge via a P2P program called Soulseek. Once I passed the raw wave files to Hygge, he laid them out and created the initial mix. Following this, Hygge and I started working online (using MSN) to mix and refine the tracks further on our home PCs. This meant staying up late nights and exchanging files and ideas online.

Once the mixes were complete, I downloaded the files from his PC using SoulSeek, normalised them and sent them off to a replication place in Mumbai.

We were able to keep the production costs pretty much shoe string :) The CDs are available online at www.underscorerecords.com I am also working to create a network of stockists who will be able to sell our CDs at cultural events in Delhi." - Abhay Adhikari

Underscore Records Pvt. Ltd is driven by the belief that a major part of music making in India lies unheard, untapped, unrecorded and unpublished. Several streams of music that coexist in the musically vibrant Indian society are not sufficiently represented in prevailing forms of dissemination, and many musicians continue to work silently despite the severe lack of proper and sustained patronage and recognition. underscore believes that there is an urgent need for creating space for all forms of music, and for musicians to empower themselves in order to find a voice of sanity in an irksome market situation.