The future’s now

One of the first electronic music collectives in country, Bhavishyavani Future Soundz launches an annual EDM festival to celebrate 15 years.

After a Bhavishyavani Future Soundz (BFS) gig in the mid-nineties at Skream, a basement club near the airport, the venue owner came up to them, teary-eyed offering them an envelope of Rs 11,000. The owner, a certain Mr Shetty, had not expected a crowd of 200-odd rich kids from all across Mumbai to turn up at his newly-opened property, and was genuinely grateful. But for BFS, one of the first EDM crews in the city, organising gigs back in the ’90s was not a business; it was a great way to listen to the music they liked, and throw a party in the bargain.
This year, the crew turns 15, and to celebrate that, they are throwing a three-day music extravaganza, titled Eden Festival, which they intend to make an annual property. “We want the festival to be to Mumbai what Sonar is to Barcelona, or what Electric Zoo is to New York — a festival that is associated with the city,” says Mathieu ‘Mmat’ Josso of BFS. The event, from March 28 to March 30, will be held at different venues — blueFROG, a private boat and Palladium Hotel respectively — and will feature genres they have played through the years. From breakbeat and drum ‘n’ bass to techno, the festival promises a smorgasbord of sounds with a spattering of international acts that include Phon.o, Deadbeat, Minilogue, among others.

BFS, even before the name was coined, started off with private parties at their tiny graphic design studio set-up at Mahim. “The studio was located in an industrial estate, which would be empty in the evenings. We were so sick of Bollywood music and hip-hop playing at the time that we started throwing small electronic music parties there,” he adds.

Tejas Mangeshkar, who co-founded the crew with filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia, artiste Mukul Deora and music producer Jatin Vidyarthi, says he misses the days when he had to search for venues. They’d describe drum ‘n’ bass as ‘Ganpati ke time drum jaisa music’ to owners and managers who had no idea what they were talking about. “At one of our parties in Bandra, the console was on the first floor with the dance floor below. The owner asked us to reduce to volume twice, but each time he walked down the stairs from the console to the dance floor, we’d pump up the volume. The fourth time, he came up to us, he took out a gun and coolly started cleaning it,” says Mangeshkar. They got the message.

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Their parties were not about the music alone, but the experience they offered. Ahluwalia would source stock films for projection, they’d design flyers, which eventually became a talking point in the city.
“MTV, Sony and all these big companies would come to us to design stuff for them. That’s how Grandmother India was born,” says Mangeshkar, who co-founded the seminal web design agency in 1998. Then there’s the robot the crew is named after. The ‘bhavishyavani robot’ — placed at tourist spots in Mumbai that told the future for a handful of coins — was integrated in their design and would be a prop in their gigs.

One of the key factors behind the constant evolution of the party experience they offered is their collaborations with the creative community. So Shilpa Chavan, now known as Little Shilpa, would design kurtas they’d all wear; friends from JJ School of Art would take photographs; and some would help with flyers.

BFS is a collective in the truest sense of the word. When the founders got too busy with their careers, they invited three Frenchmen to take over the reigns of the company — Mathieu Josso, Charles Nuez and Cyril Vincent Michaud — and that’s how it stands today. Josso says, “We were partying together since the early 2000s. They would come for our events, and we would attend theirs. So we decided to just work together.” The first official gig they did together was to get down techno legend Laurent Garner. It was also the first time in seven years they ever made money.

Now, the company is on the expansion path and they want to start a blog on culture that will showcase cutting-edge music, art and short films.

kevin.lobo@expressindia.com

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