The great electronic music festival

Why does Delhi think underground music is called that? If you play electronica in a residential area, the neighbours’ll get you grounded! Jokes apart, that’s what happened in Tivoli Gardens recently, on the first day of the Global Groove festival on Saturday last week.
The event was jointly organised by Ralph Cristoph, who also organises the Cologne Festival in Germany, and Amit Saigal of Rock Street Journal, who has to his credit festivals like Great Indian Rock show and Jazz Utsav.
The clearances were all in place, the licenses had been obtained and the crowd was warming up to the first few acts when the police entered and started towing away some of the equipment. Peacemaking efforts failed, as the cops didn’t seem to be in the mood to listen. Apparently, some of the neighbours had complained about the decibel levels. Says Saigal, “We had the licenses in place. This has never happened before. We couldn’t argue with them and had to stop the music.”
The venue is a staple one for parties, especially wedding celebrations. The residents, hence, are said to be used to high music decibels. When asked what went wrong, one of the organisers said, “The residents are used to Hindi music and stuff like Bollywood music and bhangra. When they heard electronic music, they must have thought, ‘Arre, yeh kya baj raha hai!’ and called the cops!”
Organised to bring together talented performers of electronic music, the festival was to be a platform for bands like Jalebee Cartel, Midival Punditz, B.L.O.T., Shaa’ir + Func and various artistes from all over Europe. When we asked Ralph Cristoph, the organiser, what brought him to India, he had said, “The youngsters in India outnumber the entire population of some European nations. This is a huge market for music and we are just trying to break into this, since the only money that the bands can now make is through live gigs. We are also planning to invite some Indian acts to Germany.”
Gucci Singh, a member of the rock band ThemClones, who was acting as the sound engineer for one of the stages, said, “Honestly, I haven’t ever seen the police storming in and walking away with equipment like this. We had clearance to play till 10 pm. We weren’t doing anything illegal. If there was a problem with electronic music or something, these points should have been raised earlier. The sound systems we were using were very powerful, but we didn’t crank them up to even 10 per cent of their capacity!”
Ashhar Farooqui from Teddy Boy Kill, one of the lucky few bands which were able to play before the evening was wrapped up, pointed out, “India has a lot of talent when it comes to electronic music. We also have avenues like these to play good music and reach out to a wider audience. So one feels sad when such opportunities are wasted; we need to learn how to manage things better!”
Which they did, apparently. On the second day of the festival, things were shifted indoors and the performances went off smoothly, with no hassles. When contacted, a source from the police station in Mehrauli said, “We got almost ten calls, complaining about the high decibel levels. It being a residential area, we had no other option but to try and get the volume lowered.” And taking away costly sound equipment was part of that decision? “We didn’t take away anything that was valuable. We only took that equipment which makes too much noise,” the source explained.
But Gucci had a counter-argument to this. “Why couldn’t the complaint be made in a more polite manner? Why come, create a ruckus, refuse to discuss the problem and just tamper with the equipment? Maybe they should have been carrying decibel monitors or something to know for sure if we were playing above the specified limit, because we weren’t!” he argued.
What was the problem, then? Could it have been electronic music and the lack of knowledge about it? “Could have been. Keh nahin sakte,” was the answer. But according to one of the organisers, that is exactly what it was. “If it were a jagran, not only would they put up with the high decibel levels, but participate in it. Just because they didn’t understand the genre of the music being played, they called the cops!” he said.