Q & A with Drop Electric

Tell us a little about the evolution of Drop Electric.

Drop Electric started about two years ago, but the folks in the band have been playing music together in different configurations for about four years. We all met at St. Mary’s College of Maryland where we were students. A couple of years ago, Neel (our bassist) and myself were frustrated trying to bring together a reliable group of musicians to play music regularly. After a while, we just started writing songs together. A lot of experimental, electronic stuff. We played the tracks for our buddy Dave who is now the piano player in the band. He was on hiatus from playing music, but he decided to get back into it after hearing what we were doing. We brought Padma into the fold and we had a band. Basically, we’re just four friends who like playing music together.

Your music is a blend of diverse elements: Eastern and Western influences; electronica and acoustic; fast paced drum rhythms mixed with ethereal vocals... a hybrid of sounds that together make for a great collection of music. How do you work together within the band to layer these different styles of music together?

Each of us comes from different and often conflicting backgrounds. The band’s ethnic breakdown pretty much encompasses four or five geopolitical conflicts. Our ancestors have been on different sides of hundreds of wars. Somehow, we’ve found a way to get along despite these profound differences.

The blending of styles really isn’t a conscious thing. The music we play is all an accident. So to answer your question, we don’t really intentionally work on layering Eastern and Western musical styles together. It always kind of happened that way since we started playing together. We usually just go to our practice space and start playing and forming songs as we go along. We never intended on being a “Western/Eastern” group but that’s how it came out. It’s nice to look out in the crowd when we play in DC and to see really diverse crowds. If that’s because we are a Hindu-Atheist-Jewish-Christian band, and not because of our music, that’s okay too.

A major element of Drop Electric and what defines you as a band seems to be your involvement with and support of local issues. What are some of the projects and groups that you've worked with and why did you choose to support them?

This is something we have intentionally set out to do. We decided we would try to use our performances as a chance to raise funds for local organizations very early on. In fact, one of our first shows was a fundraiser. We all have lives outside of music and appreciate the fact that what we do is just an escape. It’s art, it’s good work, but it’s not the roll your sleeves up work that many people do in the community. Obviously, it’s nice to make money and fund studio work, but when it comes down to it we are all members of the community and as a result have responsibilities. We just want to make any small contribution we can. We’ll continue to do this as long as we are a band.

The first fundraiser we did was for Young Women’s Drum Empowerment Project. Everything else we’ve done with Empower DC! They are a local grassroots community organization that does such important work in the city. I encourage everyone to go to Empowerdc.org and I’ll let the site do the talking. Parisa Norouzi, Co-Director of Empower DC, is someone I really look up to. She’s dedicated herself to helping to Empower people living in DC. We are going to continue to raise funds for them at our DC shows. It’s truly our honor to do so.

Looking back at your previous blog posts I was touched by the support you had for fellow bandmate and vocalist Padma Soundararajan. The loss of several of her family members must have been devastating not only for her personally, but also for the impact it had on the band. How did Drop Electric grow and change from the experience?

First of all thank you for reading the posts and for the question. The tragic loss of Padma’s family actually brought us closer together. It put everything in perspective. I think each of us has learned to not take this time in our lives for granted. As result, I think our music has really matured. Instead of complaining about losing our singer for a while due to her new responsibilities we reexamined what were doing. At that time we thought making instrumental music would be impossible. We had no choice. It ultimately resulted in better material. I think the whole event made us take an honest look at the music we were making.

Now that we are ushering Padma back into the creative process we can see how much she has grown and become stronger throughout this ordeal. We all admire her so much! Her strength is beyond words.

Looking forward, what are some of your short- and long-term goals as a band?

At this point, we are only focusing on finally finishing our first EP. We’ve been writing songs for a year and a half now and I think we have 5 that are good enough to on an EP. One of our biggest problems is that we are so picky! Its been a slog trying to finish the EP because we always seem to change our opinion on something after it sits on the shelf for a while. We know that once you put something out, that’s it, you can’t take it back. Thinking about it that way can be crippling. Ultimately, it should lead to a good final draft. We’ll see.

We were recently asked and accepted an offer to do the score for a documentary about the EMS services in South Africa. Each of us is a movie addict so scoring films and documentaries so this is like a dream job. We’ve been approached several times by publishing companies and a few studios to do scores but this is the first opportunity that panned out. We have an approaching deadline so we’ve been spending quite a bit of our time together on it.

Please define your self-proclaimed musical genre: Indo-Iranian Yiddish infused ambient rock.

It’s kind of a running joke in the band. When you join MySpace it requires you to pick a genre to describe your music. That’s always been difficult for us so I decided to put together a genre title from different things drunken people have come up and said to us after our shows. Seriously, people have come up to us and said, “I love how you have the whole Middle Eastern-Indian-Sanskrit-Rock-Dance thing going!” I don’t even know what that means! So the genre just paraprahses these nonsensical descriptions of our music. Genres are pretty silly at this point to describe most contemporary music. Everything is just some mash-up of the stuff that has come before. It’s pretty much impossible to use any typical genre title to describe anything. That’s why we decided we might as well have fun with it.

Its also nod to each of our backgrounds. Especially since we spend a lot of our time together hurling ethnic insults at one another. A lot of it is pretty offensive. Good times!

To hear music from Drop Electric for yourself, visit: www.myspace.com/dropelectric.