The bass player from Chand Tara Orchestra speaks to Instep about his upcoming feature film and the initiative called Paanch – The Mixtape, among other things.
Filmmaker, advertising man, music video director and member of Chand Tara Orchestra, Babar Sheikh talks to Instep about CTO, the progress on the film he announced earlier this year and the initiative Paanch – The Mixtape, which counts Babar alongside Wajiha Naqvi and Ahsan Bari as its chief enablers. An excerpt from that conversation…
Instep: Last year has been big for Chand Tara Orchestra. Where do you see it heading now?
Babar Sheikh (BS): In terms of Chand Tara Orchestra, I feel the band has always been a vehicle for expression. It’s been a thing we all have done on the side. Omran Shafique does his own thing as a producer, I am a full time filmmaker and academic, Rizwan is a craftsman; Sherry has his own work as a producer. So, as such CTO is not a band that we’ve put out there or monetize on.
However, what happens when we or any other artist is featured on Coke Studio is that it propels you into the right direction. Now, it’s up to the artist or the band whether they glide into something or they just eventually die down because the hype and numbers are not there. Coke Studio gives you a hit song, even if it’s mediocre because of the brand recall.
For us, our idea was that we’ll eventually release an album and we’ll see what happens. But we were always happy with what we were doing; Omran and I always had the idea that no one should come and tell us how to do something. However, because of Coke Studio, it did make us realize we needed to get our act together and make CTO known via social media and thus, we made our digital platform.
We even did our video for ‘Rung De’ after the show, which was a great follow-up to our debut. We’re now releasing our second video for our track ‘Makki Madni’; a graphic team that works with Patari were quite interested to do an animated video for the track. So, we’re quite excited for that.
Instep: In regards to the aesthetic CTO brings to the market, do you feel it will be able to become a viable name in the current music scenario in the country?
BS: I feel CTO will never be Atif Aslam or Jal. Neither can it be something like Strings – we’re something in the middle. I think the thing that’s different about CTO is the difference, itself. The fact that people listen to us and have opinions, which are varied from other artists out there such as our contemporaries like SOK, Jimmy Khan and Mughal-e-Funk, makes me think our aesthetic will land us somewhere. I don’t know if it’s going to be a zone of mainstream, but I think we’ve been fairly successful without planning or aspiring to be there.
Instep: You have also initiated Paanch — The Mixtape along with Ahsan Bari and Wajiha Naqvi. Tell us a bit about it.
BS: Paanch has purely come out of want and desire to create an initiative of something which does have its roots in CTO but is much bigger. I wanted to have a mix tape platform. It’s an idea that is quite old-school and dates back to the 70s and the Punk movement where it was all about DIY. It’s kind of the same thing. It hadn’t been done here before and we just wanted to retain its indie aesthetic without watering down the craft.
In the next month or so we’ll be coming out with the first volume, like we promised. We don’t know how it’ll do in the market, but let’s see.
The featured artists include Natasha Baig, CTO, Sounds of Kolachi and Jimmy Khan so far.
Instep: We’ve heard you’re also using your industry expertise and have started working on your feature film. What can you reveal about it?
BS: I have been trying to make a feature film for the last five or six years. This is my third attempt and this time I took lessons from people who don’t give up. This time I was introduced to Bee Gul at one of the institutions I teach at and I reached out to her. She is one of the most renowned names in the industry right now and has a value attached to her. She has written award-winning plays and I am quite excited that she is writing the film. We’re in the script phase and we’re heading towards the first draft.
It’s an urban drama and is a story of our households and is something that can happen at anyone’s home. It’s something which I think will work as glue to bring people closer to local cinema. Cake provided something like that, but our inspiration is from off-beat Indian independent films. What they have is a phenomenal storyline.
Thankfully, there will no item songs or action where people are getting a bullet. There will be an emotional bullet somewhere, but nothing that would make it a ‘banner film.’ However, the bigger battle for me is to fight the story for narrative. Fighting for a pure narrative is something other filmmakers like Asim Abbasi and Jami have done too.
Instep: You played at Lahooti Melo this past weekend. How did that experience go? Do you see more of such work happening in today’s media landscape?
BS: Overall, things are looking good. With the new government, things do seem good for media empowerment. Now is the time that whoever wants to make a difference, they can. There are people like Saif Samejo who are doing phenomenal stuff such as Lahooti Melo, where we just played. It was truly amazing stuff.
Then, there are people like Ahsan Bari, who are doing great stuff that is crossing borders. Apart from all this, there’s also a great focus now by the government to introduce art into schools. There’s a lot of amazing work that is happening so I am positive that the landscape is changing for the better.
