A day spent with passionate East London musician
By Sara Scheeres
In the heart of Shoreditch behind the bright yellow door of a corner apartment, Parijat Mishra strums his guitar from the living room. Maybe it’s on a track previously recorded, maybe it’s accompanied by a violin or even a cat, or maybe he’s singing a story with the harmony of his honey. The songwriter is often in a comatose state of melody-making.
“It takes me to a different place and it forms a core memory with every song, which I can later revisit,” says Parijat, 36. “When song waters flow through me, I feel as much solitude as when my head is in a bathtub.”
A lot of his songs are like fairy tales, and have to do with world building, picking up inspiration from household objects or their feline flatmate, Kali.
Born in Bihar, India, Parijat later studied in Mumbai. “Songwaters was my first band in Mumbai which I started with a schoolmate. And I kind of stuck onto songwaters.” But Parijat’s musical enterprise has many faces, including Ruby Cinema, the name which he uses as an all-encompassing platform for collaborations, something that the musician is very fond of.
“When I first moved to Singapore, a distant cousin came to visit. During that period, in 2016, we came up with lots of songs together. He was much more into electronic music than me, and we were exploring a lot of what we could do with sound,” he said, citing it as an influential period.
Later, he came together as The Sonic Vegetables with a cello player from the US, jazz guitar from Singapore, and a Polish guitarist with an atmospheric sound. In a 100-year-old colonial terraced house, they’d gather to jam for a few years regularly, but never properly recorded anything. “Not like we do now,” he said.
Now in London, Parijat’s living room, with its upright piano, a dozen varying string instruments, a drum kit, synthesizer, microphones, and amps, continues to be an international safe house for open-hearted musicians to express experimentally.
claustrophobes expanding outwards
In the evening, the jam session goes late, the bass passed between players and microphone handed off – everything hooked up to record directly into the computer.
Kaushani Bhattacharya, 38, is an introverted illustrator and Parijat’s partner in life and sometimes music. She says, “I had a lot of trouble with the jams in the living room at first”... eventually coming to appreciate the people with good hearts coming over.
One of those people is David ‘Isonil’ Etim, a classically-trained violinist from Nigeria. Having met Parijat at an open mic in London, he now stays in the spare room when visiting the city, going to orchestra rehearsals for work and coming back to chill in the living room studio, creating improvised fusion euphonies together.
In the morning, the sun lights the leather sofa, Kaushani is painting, Kat, Isonil’s fiance, a harpist from Frankfurt, describes the complicated marriage laws of Germany. Isonil says, listen: and plays a clip recording from the other day, where he plays his violin in response to Kali meowing. Remarkably, the call and response transforms into two different lines of melody, Isonil playing one thing, and Kali meowing on beat. The cat was clearly engaging.
“Music is a spiritual thing,” says Isonil, 34. “Not everyone comes to the realization of how deep it is.”
Parijat’s dad, who is retired in his 60’s, also lives in London, stops by in the mid-morning after a nearby appointment. Mr. Mishra asks if the upright piano has been used, or if it remains for decoration, and thus continues the discussion of music. He says he is musical to the extent of buying a guitar and learning the chords to play the likes of Kenny Rogers, and Simon & Garfunkel. “I bought the guitar when he was 2 or 3 years old, and the guitar was lying there for 15 years unattended.” When Parijat finished high school, he picked it up.
“I was writing poems by that time, and was inspired by some music. When I found the guitar it had one or two strings on it, and I wrote a song on those strings, it was called Storm Sketches,” Parijat reflected, considering that he might not have picked up the skill if the strings were all intact.
“Are you doing it as a hobby or profession?” Mr. Mishra asks his son, and says aloud to no one: “We’re always confused. We think hobby, he thinks profession.”
But so is the fine line of passion and profit. Success is defined by perspective, and there’s nothing more priceless than the culmination of emotion through musical notes and the sharing of the same amorphous dream that only exists once.
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