Mumbai Gig: Imaad Shah, Saba Azad on Madboy/Mink's new album

The future is a construct. We imagine it to be a certain way. But there's no guarantee that it's going to turn out the way we foresee it. It might be Utopia. Or, it might be dystopia. Who knows? That's the message that Madboy/Mink seem to be sending out with Persons.Elastic.Superior.Fanstastic (P.E.S.F), their latest EP.

"Both of us have been quite morbidly fascinated with retro-futurism," says Saba Azad, aka Mink, Imaad Shah being Madboy. "But I think that the idea of what the future looks like is never really how it is. And if you go back all the way to the late '60s and early '70s, there was a lot of cinema made around the subject, and a visual idiom was created about how things would be in the times to come," she continues, asking us to imagine what furniture, for instance, would look like 30 years from now.

It might look like the white-washed bar scene in one of the early shots of Clockwork Orange, for all we know, where Alex and his violent friends wreak havoc high on Molotov cocktails. But again, that's just conjecture. The song's in P.ES.F. are aimed at dis-imagination, if that's a word.

"The EP, the way I look at it, is a view of the world from a distance. So if one were to go away into space and then see the earth as it is - the one we inhabit today - that's when you get a perspective of what things are all about. And that's where I think the music was born from," Azad says, ahead of a launch gig they will play at a central Mumbai space this weekend.

In that upcoming concert, they will miss Karan Joseph, the late pianist who contributed the keys to Plastic Elastic, P.E.S.F's opening track. (Who knew what was coming?). The music, it must be said, is indeed futuristic. It's a departure from the electro-swing sound that the act had sometimes come to be associated with in the past. The beats fluctuate between being apocalyptic and hopeful. And even as Shah builds a sonic image of how a human being would view himself from outer space, Azad's vocals seem to float in from the same realm. You'd have to reach far to catch it, had her voice been tangible.

There is the band's signature brand of fun across all four songs - Plastic Elastic, Laika, Minimum and Comets. But this time, it's as if all the tracks are grown-ups sitting in a living room and having the adult idea of a good time. It's not a bunch of frat boys losing their mind on puerile humour, for sure. The thrill in the music is tinged with a sense of ominous foreboding. "I think that as a narrative, in terms of what's going on with the songs, the world that we live in today - especially the fascist construct we find ourselves in - is important to address. And we do that through our medium, which is music, and so that's what we have done with this album," Azad signs off.

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