Durjoy Choudhury speaks about recording an entire city irrespective of borders and nationalities
Already into the fifth season of Friday Night Originals, Durjoy makes an effort to record the unique sound of independent musicians across several countries.
Durjoy Choudhury gave us a few names of cities when speaking about everything he is working on right now. Cities like Mumbai, Dhaka, Pondicherry, and Johannesburg are right now on his list, and with the shoot for FNO Melbourne already on the way, he is now planning for a Season 5 of Friday Night Originals. A non-profit organisation, Friday Night Originals (FNO) started with a curious interest to record the original music of independent musicians across Kolkata which soon extended far beyond the borders of the country producing four seasons each of which consist of 8 to 16 episodes.
In a brief conversation with Apeksha News, Durjoy spoke about FNO’s upcoming venture, where he stated, “We have already started the shoot for FNO Melbourne Season 1, which will soon go on air. We have started planning for a Season 5 in Kolkata and we have received around 50 demos from across the country.” Soon, FNO will start shooting for Dhaka and other places keeping up with its initial idea of recording an entire city. It all started when Durjoy was approached by Abhibroto Mitra, presently FNO’s chief sound engineer- who wanted to record his songs, Durjoy readily responded, “Why would you like to record me, when you have the whole city to record?” And so began the journey to record an entire city and with that FNO began to surpass boundaries such as genres, languages, and nationalities.
(Source: Friday Night Originals)
What perhaps sets aside FNO is the plethora of unique sounds which somewhat define the land that they came from. This is what Durjoy has tried to capture in his venture to make the organization a platform for musicians across the country to put up their original content. For an instance, FNO released its Chiang Mai division in February this year and in the eight-episodes long first season the city’s music comes to life in slow-moving, dreamy lyrics which Durjoy states might be the result of North Thailand’s seemingly peaceful political society. When asked what he thinks might be the reason behind the difference in content between Indian indie musicians and the ones whom he recorded in Chiang Mai, he noted “Every geographical location will have a different sound. Be it the lyrical content or the music.”
He further elaborated, “Because India is going through a bad phase in its democracy that is why you hear protest songs. Indie musicians tend to go a little political but that is not so with North Thailand. They don’t really have to oppose things because things are somewhat favorable. It is not a police state, tax rates are not high, the population is low. There is little unemployment. You do not have regrets there socially, so the songs that come out are mostly love songs. The content is completely different.” Durjoy also noted that compared to Kolkata which has a panoply of indie musicians with not sufficient venues to portray their art, Chiang Mai was more welcome as he was allowed to shoot at bars during the day.
Being a part of the indie scene for nearly a decade, Durjoy has put recording independent musicians as his highest priority with Friday Night Originals. Only recently he went back to being a member of a band named Murphy’s Paradox which will soon release its debut EP. Murphy’s Paradox has already released two of its songs, ‘Dream in Technicolor’ and ‘Cecile’ each of which were penned down by Durjoy way before there was any idea of the band being formed. He never had any intention of being a part of any band after he had to dissolve his former group ‘Bee and the Buskers’ that he was a part of between 2010-2016. It was not until November last year that he had to rethink his decision when he was approached by two fellow musicians Budhaprabha Roy and Anindyo (who is also a former member of ‘Bee and the Buskers’) who wanted to form a band. However, Durjoy was not yet sure but agreed to jam a couple of times to see if it works.
But what follows next is perhaps the most suitable clarification behind the band’s name, Murphy’s Paradox. Durjoy, while describing how the band came together, said, “We jammed a couple of times but after two days, Anindyo said he was leaving for Hyderabad. Now Anindyo changes his name on Facebook quite often and his name was Murphy at that time.” Which is a pretty clear indication that the epigram stating, ‘anything that will happen will happen’, became the tag for the band one of whose founders was talking about leaving it sooner that the rest. Durjoy joked about it when he mentioned, “It was a paradox that he formed the band and now he is leaving for Hyderabad.” However, Murphy’s Paradox came together when several members of FNO joined in such as Arka Chatterjee in drums, Abhibroto Mitra in guitar, Budhaprabha Roy in bass, and Durjoy as the vocalist.
With their EP coming out pretty soon, Durjoy also spoke about the arrangement of the songs. As all the songs were written by him much before the band was formed, he explained the arrangement, “It has five songs, and all of them are love songs. There is a pattern to it...as in if you take a relationship and you see there is a starting point and an ending point, and a point where you remember that relationship. So the first song talks about the start of a relationship, the second song you are into the relationship, and by the third song the relationship has ended. The fourth and the fifth songs are more about remembering the relationship.”
In Spite of the band’s EP now coming out, Durjoy continues to maintain FNO as his foremost priority. He said, “FNO consumes more time from me, and that was what I had told my band members that my whole attention is for FNO. I want to build it into something big.” In the end, spearheading an initiative which helps record indie musicians while working on an EP of his own band, Durjoy stated, “At some point you have to balance things out. It’s not about if I can, I have to.”
