Infivictims :: PHENOM: Not For The Money, Not For The Pride.

By The Ironman

Phenom is quite popular in the Bangalore rock circuit, and the band released its ‘Unbound’ EP not too long ago. But the band has been quite inactive for a while, and the promotional effort for ‘Unbound’ was minimal, which led us to ask: what was up with Phenom? Were they still active? Had they broken up? Had the individual members formed other bands?

Well, I caught up with Gaurav Vaz, bassist and vocalist of Phenom, for an exclusive interview. For the answers to all of the questions above, and much more, read on…

What has been happening with Phenom? Apparently the band had disbanded for a while? Has the band reformed?

Phenom has regrouped… finally!! We are now getting back on the music circuit and have been playing a few shows of our own. The album downloads have been going well — we did our bit of the forum publicity and posts here, there an everywhere, but it’s largely our show audiences and audiences we get by word of mouth that is our current goal. We are trying to draw as many as we can to atleast give us a listen before forming an opinion, trying to carve our audience out from the millions out there.

About the “disband-ing”, Sashi, our lead guitarist went back home to Nagaland after engineering and we were looking out for a guitarist. Also, me doing the bass and vocal duties was not suiting us too well. So we were on the lookout for a vocalist too. We had never disbanded as such, we just weren’t functional for a period of about two months.

Now, we have Trinity D’souza (ex-Cryptic) who has joined us and handles the lead guitar duties and Mark Lazaro who does the vocals — this is the lineup that is going to remain for some time to come!

But wasn’t your voice an integral part of Phenom songs?

It was, but then that came with its limitations! I couldn’t do both playing and singing as well as we wanted it and also I do not have the range / ability as a vocalist for the kind of music we wanted to make. Mark has been a classically trained vocalist for years now and is a very popular figure in the choir circles who always wanted to sing our kind of music. It was an instant connection.

The songs that Phenom wrote, I could sing and express, and that formed the integral part as you call it. But now, Mark is a very big part of the songwriting process and so he brings to the band the vocal feel that we were always looking for.

You’ve sung the songs on the ‘Unbound’ EP. So, with Mark on board, how does it work, both in terms of songs from ‘Unbound’, and newer songs?

We are not going to re-record the EP with Mark singing but on our live shows Mark does all the main vocals. Mrinal and myself do backing vocals. The songs we wrote after ‘Unbound’ will have Mark singing.

What I, and a lot of other people are curious about, is your decision to release ‘Unbound’ online, that too through a Creative Commons Licence. How does this work? People can download the songs for free and distribute them in any way they like?

Almost — people can download [our songs] for free, and distribute them AS IS without any issues. Before you remix / re-arrange our songs, you need our explicit permission and also if you are going to derive any commercial benefit from distribution of our songs you need our permission. You need to also distribute them as Phenom songs and not as songs of your own. We would love it if people who have downloaded our music and distributed it drop us a line so we can have an estimated number of people that might have heard our EP. Currently we go by only the download statistics of the site.

But, why the decision to release the EP in this manner?

We considered going about our EP the way most Indian bands would. We approached every mentionable music / record label with our EP and none of the deals that they could work out for us were favourable. We did not take the ‘make your own CDs and sell them at your shows’ route because that would limit our reach — most shows in a city draw the same / similar crowd and then it would not make sense to go about doing that. So instead, we decided to use the power of the Internet and put up High Quality MP3s online so people could download [them]. We added the Creative Commons Licence because it favoured what our intention was.

There was no way we could make money out of this EP, at least not a substantial amount of profit. Our aim was to reach [the] maximum number of people, and this way we were sure we could reach more people than we ever will otherwise. Also it is a question of availability — our songs are online and available individually if you like a particular song or the entire album if you like all of them — anytime, and from anywhere.

The plan is to create the awareness and then give the audience something to go by. An informed fan is much much more valuable than just a fan. We have seen the benefits of this too. Our live shows have people we don’t know, singing along with our songs and it is quite a pleasing sight. These are the people who will ultimately buy any album we put out there.

The idea does make a lot of sense. Why do you think more bands aren’t doing this?

Quite a few bands think of an EP or a short recorded album as a way to make money. True you will make money, but it is not substantial. If a band sees a self-produced, self-distributed album as something that is going to pay them for all the years of hard work, they either have their expectations low or are under some big illusion…

The other reason which I hope Phenom has changed is the lack of awareness of such a thing. Many people do not and have not thought about the Creative Commons Licence or such things because they are not aware of these things. There are a few bands who are putting out their songs on various servers without a copyright or anything at all associated with them. I do not know the exact details about the policies followed by the places that host these songs, but then, they are running a huge risk if the songs are out there, unprotected.

Two facts about the Internet and putting songs up online — all the big bands are doing this now — and that is because they see their album sales rise after such a thing and not fall as people expect it to. It’s all about the informed buyer. The second thing being, the Internet reaches further and faster than anything else you know for music. So if your aim is to popularise your music, by all means use the Internet.

But the ‘big bands’ as you put it, they release one or two songs for download, not entire EPs…

That is when they are selling the same songs as their EP. They put up clips of songs, etc. But then, as far as Phenom’s thought process went, we saw our EP as means of getting to more people and not making money. The other fact that will have to be contended with is that people are going to make MP3s of your CDs and you are most likely to get the songs that way and not [by] buying an EP. That will happen no matter what. So, if your aim is to spread the word, why bother with the middle man? Why bother making the CD, etc? Just give the MP3s out to all. Make it legal to distribute. Your aim is acheived — you don’t spend on making the CD. Money saved is money earned!

This is also a statistic for hitting the music labels the next time ‘round. Tell them ‘these many people downloaded our EP completely’. So, you have so many people who have heard our music, so many people who are likely to buy something that we put out that matches the quality here.

Another popular Bangalore band, Thermal And A Quarter released their album ‘Plan B’ in similar fashion a few months ago. They got a considerable amount of press for the album, and for the layman, it was almost as if ‘Unbound’ never happened. Was there ever a feeling of ‘We did this first, and now they’re getting the credit for it’?

Thermal And A Quarter is a much bigger band, and [the] bigger you are, the bigger the splash. Being compared with them itself is an honour for us. There was no such feeling among either camps. Technically speaking, they modified a Creative Commons Licence and made an exclusive TAAQ Licence and that makes us the first with a ‘non-modified’ Creative Commons Licence — but then, those are just details. We have received our share of the cake and are still seeing the benefits of this move — and so are TAAQ. After their latest interview, I was told their site went bonkers by traffic from the US of A — all because of instant availibility. You hear it on the news, you check it out, you download it. From there, it’s your music that does it. They reached a much wider audience than they have for their previous two albums!

But, no, there was no ill feeling at all. In fact, Bruce and all of us used to joke about it!

What kind of jokes? :p

Well, if you really want to know, we discussed the whole Creative Commons thing and music online and how the downloads were going and cracked some really funny musician jokes like — why was the drummer stuck outside the door? ... ‘coz he din’t know when to come in!

How has the response to the ‘Unbound’ EP been so far, both, in terms of numbers, and otherwise?

Overwhelming! Like I told you before, it’s an awesome feeling to see people singing along to songs you wrote — you did that for your idols and have always fantasised about people doing that for your songs. At shows, we have people coming and telling us that they have downloaded the songs and have loved it, giving us feedback, discussing songs, lyrics, [the] reasoning behind some songs. People [are] writing in to us… it’s been just amazing! Till May 31st, 2005, there have been around 2,934 song downloads.

So, where does Phenom go from here? Is there another album in the offing? Are you guys working on any new material?

We are. We are now set with the lineup, have a done a few shows… got tremendous response. We meet very regularly. The main album should be out soon — we are targetting early next year, trying to carve and cater to our audience, looking for places unexplored.

What are your new songs like? Any song titles you can give us?

We have some songs that were not included on ‘Unbound’, which we are polishing and getting together. The others are untitled as of now, they go by the names Song7, Song8, etc. We’ll start playing them as soon as they are ready and done!

To wrap up this interview, is there anything you want to tell our readers, and potential future Phenom fans?

Download our music! Tell us what you think — we’d love to hear from all of you. And watch out for more that Phenom has to give!

You can download the ‘Unbound’ EP at this location . Please do e-mail your feedback to the band, or post your comments here, in the space provided below.

tags: bangalore, india, progressive rock