What Do You Love?
A review of Hashback Hashish’s Zone EP, and the life and times of Ashish Sachan.
I remember four (maybe five) years ago Hashback Hashish, or Ashish Sachan, and I would go scrounging around for performance opportunities. This was less than ideal for a budding musician with no understanding of how the local music scene worked. Venue owners didn’t have the time (or sensibility) to spare for someone like that. When they did, it was on excruciating terms and even then the responsibility of promoting the gig lay entirely with us. This would have been okay for people who knew their way around such a thing, but for us it always spelled trouble. We’d go around town weeks before, wheatpasting flyers that were painstakingly designed, but we might as well have not for all the good they did for us.
First couple of times, he’d set up for exactly no one. I’d use this opportunity to dance like a shaman across the empty room, because I’ll take any opportunity to dance, and he’d play out his set. Point is he would always play out his set, empty room or not. He’d stand there consumed entirely by what he was doing, pretty much unaware of his surroundings in that moment. On occasion, he’d exchange a look with me, simply to share the paroxysm the music was bringing about in him.
Afterwards we’d swap new songs we’d discovered like trading cards and argue over who had the best haul. We soon outgrew that.*
When at his ‘real job’, an impeccably dressed Ashish would fit effortlessly into the ennui-riddled corporate existence at first. Folks would flock to him eagerly, mistaking him for one of their own. The dynamics would change soon after because he either listened to his music too loud to pay attention to them, stated his opinion too openly on the tiresome office politics and his 100% undiplomatic views on it, or crack a joke that was too poor in taste for the corporate machine. In that way, not much has changed, and here’s added testimony to that.
“Ashish Sachan is seated at his desk, somewhere in corporate Gurgaon. The glow of his laptop casts a soft white tint on his face, and his left hand, guiding a keystroke, is rendered into a slight blur. Surrounding him are ergonomic office chairs with mesh backs, two half finished cups of coffee, and a pile of stuffed animals rendered helpless — corporate consequence and detritus. The laminate of his modular white desktop is littered with runes, of some sort of thought calculus to propel his memory into a pattern of execution; scrawls of green and red ink, a hierarchy of value according to hue. He wears a t-shirt emblazoned with the legacy of a 1966 patent on low pass frequencies. I subjectively observe this photograph, imagining a person in the midst of an execution of an intent. The image presents the spectre of a certain predetermined clinical precision.
Days later, I visit Sachan in an alternate, yet mirrored arena, fomenting a deluge of paranoia onto a mass of revelling patrons. He is menacing both in gesture and in context, his face again bathed in a white glow, though now one borne of volume meters and synced hardware. The track he plays is the product of over four months of production, mastering, and deliberation, and tonight he debuts this to a public. He is focused, intent on presenting the scope of his vision, as clinical in this execution as I imagine him to be in the photograph.
The fact that I am prone to a sort of charactered fantasy when I think of this person is unsettling to me. I imagine him at the office with eight phones in his hands, writing fourteen emails of varying sentiment to brand managers, fending off insecure colleagues mired in office politics, while blasting Gesaffelstein on the PA in his mind. He is wearing the same Moog t-shirt, injecting coffee into his eyeballs. He is not shook. I have seen him on stage grimacing at EQ twists that threaten to cause aneurysms, head jerking right to every second drop on the fourth as a sort of welcome punch to the face. His hair remains the same, and I’ve never seen him with even a hint of stubble.
When someone you know performs for a public, a certain polar parallax tends to become apparent; the public persona and nature of the craft presented can be in complete opposition to the nature of the person you “know”. That I have built this persona of Ashish in my mind is unsettling, but I am drawn to the exercise. I balance this seemingly mercenary exterior with the grace of the person I know off stage, and out of the office. It’s a work in progress. I am drawn to the duality I have constructed. It makes this person relatable to me.”
— Rana Ghose, REProduce Artists
Things are, of course, different now. From having played SXSW thrice over and making an appearance at the cult-favourite Bangface, Ashish is kickin’ ass and takin’ names, albeit at his own pace. He performs frequently at REProduce Artists’ Dadaist Listening Room sessions. The most recent development signalling this shift is his bruising EP ‘Zone’. Here you can finally sense his personal aesthetic manifest, constituents of which are minimalism, palpable violence, and an underlying need to break things.
His single ‘Zone’ brokers the space between an all-out banger and a mood piece. Its industrial sound and relentless bass line could spell a sense of doom or a victory march, depending on which way you are leaning. For Ashish Sachan, both of these go hand-in-hand.
A remix of the same by _RHL (Rahul Giri), Bangalore, is also included in the EP. A footwork genius, Giri, has incorporated just enough of his signature sound in it to put you marginally at ease, but not too much.
I attended the launch of his EP wrongfully assuming to see a watered down version of the person I knew. I’m alright with being wrong on occasion, and this was one of them.
It is gripping to witness someone loving something this fiercely, a fraction of which is visible in the video above. Everything seems to line up. If you mirror this sentiment, discipline notwithstanding, there is absolutely no reason for you to call it quits. So, what DO you love?
Zone (CIRCUIT 4) is out now.
*This is a lie. Some things you never outgrow.
