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The Making of Gorillaz's 'The Mountain': How Anoushka Shankar and the Bangash Brothers Became Part Of The Epic Collaboration
With Anoushka Shankar on sitar, the Bangash brothers on sarod, and Asha Bhosle’s unmistakeable vocals, Gorillaz’s new album is a masterclass in cross-continental collaboration.
There are certain sounds with which a musician or a band makes their presence felt. With Gorillaz — a virtual band because it is made up of animated characters led by a real human, Damon Albarn, alongside Jamie Hewlett — some markers keep appearing: Albarn’s soft, slightly weary vocal tone announcing how he’s happy because he has sunshine in a bag, layered over strong basslines in a cartoonish, often hellish, landscape where sound travels from outer space to murky swamps. Albarn is not alone in this world. In the past, he has managed to pull everyone from Tame Impala to even Bad Bunny to share his erratic vision.
Crossover Energy
In “The Mountain”, or पवत in Devanagari on Spotify India, the stakes are not just high but…different. If you thought getting Bad Bunny was a big flex, how do we make sense of the fact that one album has the melody of Asha Bhosle in a Gorillaz album, along with a sitar by Anoushka Shankar and the gentleness of the brothers, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash?
The brothers tell The Hollywood Reporter India that they recorded their parts during a full-day session in Mumbai. “The energy in the studio was electric, allowing us to freely explore and flow with Damon and Jamie’s musical ideas,” they said.
“That kind of cross-cultural integration pushed us into a more unpredictable territory, perhaps more emotionally, spiritually, and structurally, compared to more ‘pop + world’ or ‘electronic + feature’ collaborations.”
Beyond its maximalist soundscape, the album is all set to be conscious of the world going slowly nuts, too, if the songs released thus far are anything to go by. “Happy Dictator” is one song that we can all make our guesses about — and the chances of those guesses being correct will be high — yet it takes on an optimistic hue, with featured artiste Sparks singing about propagating an eternity and sealing it with his kiss. In “The God of Lying”, things are less subtle. IDLES, a British post-punk band, are asking us: ‘Are you deafened by the headlines, or does your head not hear at all?’
It is safe to assume that the songs created with our Indian giants will be conscious of the real world, too. Anoushka Shankar says that when she came in, “They were very open about which songs to put sitar on, and after one or two, they must have liked my style, so we kept doing more.” Shankar played throughout the record, and then Gorillaz chose what they wanted. “We did a big two-day session, and in the end, I think I’m on six or seven songs.”
Sonic Experiments
However, while the political awareness and reaching across different languages and cultures are a first for Gorillaz, Shankar is conscious of how it is perceived by the larger world. “People like me and others have been doing this kind of crossover work for decades now,” she said. “However, someone at their level, with their reach and fan base, bringing it into the absolute mainstream again doesn’t happen often. With The Beatles, it happened, and a few other moments too, but not frequently. This feels like one of those moments where millions will hear something they otherwise might not. Some of them will want to explore more, and that can be a truly wonderful thing.”
The Bangash brothers, for their part, armed with their sarod, found a rather surprising home for the instrument in the soundscape of Gorillaz. After all, while Gorillaz have collaborated with Bad Bunny and others, the brothers have the Dalai Lama to their credit. “The sarod has a unique way of amalgamating beautifully with the requirements of a song, and in this case too, all the songs have absorbed the sarod in a dimension never heard before,” they said. “Hence, there is authenticity and deeply rooted playing. The nuances of Indian sounds helped blend levels, equalisation, and dynamics so the sarod sits naturally.”
Ever Evolving
For an album that draws upon a host of cultures and languages, it couldn’t be half the record it is now if Albarn wasn’t open to learning from beyond the Atlantic. Shankar attests to the fact that after a few songs, she started offering more ideas and showing things they might not otherwise associate with the sitar. It couldn’t be a generic ‘Indian’ tune, tucked away in the sonic basement of a song. “For example, in one track with ‘Prince’ in the title, I suggested a multi-layered technique where fast strumming creates a cocoon for the voice. They wouldn’t know that unless you really know the instrument, and they were excited to take as much as they could and weave it together,” she said.
In its 2001 review of the band’s eponymous album, Pitchfork had dismissed the band, saying, “Gorillaz is the definitive side project: even at its best, it’s never more than a divergent one-off stint.”
With “The Mountain”, nearly a quarter of a century later, that ‘stint’ just got an Indian classical music degree. The sounds are not Panjabi MC’s same song remixed over a dozen times. They stretch the limits of the sarod, flow the sitar across the album, and top it all with Bhosle’s far-reaching voice. India takes the wheel — and rewires an entire sound system.
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