Review: On ‘Babylon’s Camp’, Swadesi’s BamBoy Keeps Dubstep Political But In The Indian Context As Kaali Duniya

Dubstep has always been political, and so has Tushar Adhav. The Mumbai-based producer, known as BamBoy when he is providing the beats for the likes of socio-conscious hip-hop collective Swadesi, becomes Kaali Duniya when he hovers around 140BPM for dubstep and grime – which is what he does on ‘Babylon’s Camp’.

Before it became known for the maximalist raging collages of digital zany synths popularised through the likes of Skrillex, dubstep was the sound of marginalised diaspora communities in the UK who were mixing the rattling, psychedelic and laidback dub sounds from Jamaica with the 2-step trends of Britain. Decades later and continents across, it is this spacious, low-end heavy sound that Kaali Duniya opts for while giving voice to the youth of marginalised castes in his part of India.

The 10 tracks of ‘Babylon’s Camp’ are sparse, largely defined in their identity as dubstep offerings through the visceral, sustained bass motifs and drums that echo in the space allowed to give a full view of the depth left to them. Otherwise, they would be left as cinematic ambient soundscapes with plucked strings, a foreboding cello, their echo and found sounds making the central melodies on opening numbers ‘Gatekeeper Assassinator’ and ‘Vampire’s Empire’.

A chunk of the album is a love letter to this original sonic identity of dubstep. The vocal sample on ‘140 Percent’ asks you to question the usual understanding of the genre, while the elaborate one on ‘My Style’ outright rejects the aforementioned maximalist style as a part of dubstep. In both cases, right before Kaali Duniya arranges his limited sonic characters through simple entries and exits and echoes them through techniques that come straight from dub music and soundsystem culture.

Another chunk of the album turns its weight and intimidating textures towards gatekeepers and people who dictate who gets space and who doesn’t. It does it through the title on ‘Gatekeeper Assassinator’, sampling an exchange with the door security at a club turning away someone after profiling on ‘Not Allowed’, and kicking off the grittiest bassline on the album after a sample calling, “burn the gates, kill the gatekeepers” on ‘Burn The Gates’.

Finally, the album uses its approach of contextualising the music with vocal samples to address people dismissing caste discrimination on ‘Savarna Play. Savarna Dance’, the pessimism and obstacles that pervade the journey of the underprivileged on ‘Marginalized’, and tokenism on ‘Tokenism’.

This isn’t the first time Adhav has picked up the topic of caste discrimination and upliftment. From representing his own identity rooted in ati-shudras, the caste considered among the lowest in hinduism’s social hierarchy system, to singing about tribal issues and the like with Swadesi, BamBoy also often spins records for the collective’s regular Low End Therapy nights, where they make the genres of grime, dubstep and reggae accessible to lower-caste communities (even the tickets are usually priced at 140 INR in tandem with genre’s pace).

A lot of ‘Babylon’s Camp’ follows a similar approach of juxtaposing the genre and the narratives from the lower-caste communities. Then Adhav attempts to represent the emotion around the themes he chooses within the style. The sonic worlds he creates as a result floor you each time enough that you might be able to overlook the album’s biggest limitation, which is that the journey through these worlds often doesn’t evolve enough, leaving the tracks better as fodder for DJ sets, where they can be moved on from and at points more potent to the listener’s interest.

If ‘Babylon’s Camp’ was limited to just picking spoken word samples to put in front of sounds from Jamaica-via-Britain, which it does at the outset and on numbers like ‘Savarna Play. Savarna Dance’, the album would run the risk of approaching its aim without sufficient depth. But just like the tracks homaging the original sounds of dubstep launch into puristical grounds of the genre and the ones taking an aim at gatekeepers are one of the more aggressive numbers on the album, tracks like ‘Marginalized’, ‘Tokenism’ and even specially ‘Burn The Gates’ bring an inflection of folk drum grooves from around Maharasthra’s street culture to exert their own identity onto the template of dubstep. In doing so, Adhav finds a new lexicon that’s fresh, evolving to represent more closely the themes and people he takes a stand for, and giving Kaali Duniya a unique mark on the legacy of dubstep.

Words: Amaan Khan