It’s hard for music composer and producer Donn Bhat to fit his music into a single bracket. Ask him to define his sound and he starts counting its various flavours on his fingertips. His years as a guitarist with New Delhi group Orange Street oriented him to rock music, and later he began dabbling in electronica. The influences don’t end there. He has collaborated with a Baul singer, Delhi-based sarangi player Suhail Yusuf Khan and most recently with singer Shilpa Rao, to name a few. When you add all these diverse elements, what you get is Bhat’s band — Passenger Revelator.

When we catch up with Bhat in Mumbai, he is preparing to leave for the UK’s prestigious Glastonbury Festival, for what is likely his biggest performance (on June 26) so far. The music festival, which has hosted the likes of Kanye West and The Who, will be spread across nearly 100 stadiums. “We will be performing at the Toad Hall. We will play around nine songs,” he says. Apart from his own performance, Bhat is excited about attending the other shows as an audience. “I’ve never been able to attend Glastonbury before. The tickets are sold out in eight minutes flat,” he exclaims.

Edited excerpts from the interview

At what age did you start learning music? Since when have you been playing professionally?

I still don’t do it professionally! This is something I do for myself. I work in advertising. I create jingles and background scores for films and documentaries. That’s why I shifted to Mumbai from Delhi a few years ago. I started playing with a band at 16, when I joined college. But I started learning the guitar in class VI. I had teachers just for a couple of months. I’m mainly self-taught.

Who were your early influences in music?

Initially I was just playing a lot of hard rock. I was listening to Joe Satriani, Dream Theatre, Guns N’ Roses. Later I started listening to others like Leonard Cohen and Jeff Beck. After that I slowly got into electronic music. So now I take all those influences and create my own kind of music.

When did you start discovering electronic music?

In my second year of college, I was a guitarist for Orange Street. That’s when I got my first software called Reason. It was a revelation. I thought, ‘Wow, you can sit in your room and make a song on your own’. I didn’t mind spending 200 hours in front of a screen making a song. A lot of musicians find that very boring, but I find it very exciting. My first track was called Wait for You. It was with Imran Khan, who used to sing Indian classical for Orange Street. I remember recording it in my room with a tattered mike.

You’ve been a part of two bands in the past — Friday the 13th and Orange Street. How different is it to compose music by yourself at a digital workstation?

It is not a traditional format where there are four people and everybody has a duty to play guitar, drums, etc. This is a solitary process. I grew up playing in a band and I still feel that the energy that comes from different people playing together is great. But with technology, the making of music has also changed. I’ve been doing it like this for a while now and I find it liberating. I do not have to rely on anyone else to make music. Say, I want to incorporate a sarangi sound, I’ll leave out that bit. I may not know exactly what I want to do with it so we may jam up for that section later.

Also, I can give a song enough time to breathe. Sometimes when a new song happens, I’ll just have two lines for it. But then I’ll develop it, go away for a few days, and then come back to it and think about what kind of rhythm I want.

How would you describe your genre of music?

That’s a tough one. I think I’ve tried many times but I’ve finally come up with this — danceable, folk, electronic-meets-rock. I have the mandolin, synthesiser and elements from EDM (electronic dance music), but it is not EDM. I have poetry by a saint in the 1400s mixed with a Baul song. I also have some out-and-out rock songs. But simply put, my music is live electronic.

Tell us about your association with Delhi-based sarangi player Suhail Yusuf Khan, with whom you will be performing at Glastonbury.

Suhail and I have been making music together for more than four years now. We were playing together a lot when I was in Delhi and we understand each other’s music very well. He’s already in London, so we’ll jam together once I get there.

We have performed most of the songs we have planned for the gig, so it is nothing new. It’s good to not rehearse too much because then you have that nervous energy on stage.

Why did you pick the name Donn Bhat + Passenger Revelator for your band?

I like this song called the Passenger by Iggy Pop, and ‘revelation’ is a word I use a lot. Also, I like travelling. So I put the two words together and they rhymed well. As for my name, it is actually Anant. But everybody called me Donny when I was young.

When I moved to Mumbai, a family numerologist told my mom that the ‘Y’ in my name is evil. So I cut it off from Donny and one ‘T’ from Bhatt. When I released my album, I thought, ‘Ok man, this name has a good ring to it. So let’s keep it!’

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