The Sound Collector

Around the holidays in 2014, I had a chance to chat with an effervescent and endearing young musician by the name of Zoya Mohan, who is about to release an album this spring. Her approach to the creative process was inspiring, and I enjoyed my discussion with her. More on how I approached it later. The article published in the February 14, 2015 issue of India Abroad. To view it on the newspaper’s platform, click here.

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Zoya Mohan approaches music the way an international chef approaches a signature dish, gathering sounds from all around the world as if they are spices to flavor the final product she’s going to serve.

“I take every song and just see what it needs,” the 21-year-old singer/songwriter, who recently released a visual album and plans to release another record in the spring, said. Her music is a collection of diverse and manifold sounds: shakers, African percussion, American guitar, vibraphones, and even the Indian bansuri—a flute carved out of hollow bamboo.

“I don’t care if we use American instruments—or if we scratch on walls,” she said of her and her band members’ style.

I met Mohan at a coffee shop on Mass Ave. in Boston, across the street from the Berklee School of Music, where she recently graduated with a degree in music business. It was the windiest New England night in recent memory, and she was wearing a teal cable-knit winter beret. Mohan was ebullient and quick with a smile, and yet also sharply introspective.

I tell her that, in one of her songs—“Letters to Toska”—I observed that her voice seems to adopt the raaga undulation of Indian classical music, to which she responds with conviction: “That’s the thing. I’m not doing it on purpose, but I kind of wish I was. I wish I was trained in Indian music. I just think it’s from dancing and listening to Indian music when I was growing up. It just comes out in my style.”

Mohan is careful not to classify herself solely as a folk-fusion artist—that is, one who mixes styles from both the American and Indian arts—which much of the press so far has described her to do. In Mohan’s world, in order to be a deliberate fusion artist, one has to know both arts academically.

“I’m not going to sit here and say I know Indian music like the back of my hand, because I was trained in American music,” she said.

Instead, Mohan prefers to describe herself more as a “sound collector.” And not just sounds from instruments you’ve heard of.

“My dad owns a travel company, so I was really lucky; I traveled a lot,” she said. “Every time I go somewhere, I get new music from these places and listen to them.”

For example, on a recent trip to South America, “I would just go into these little shack-like shops and ask them what instruments they had,” she said. “I literally had a suitcase full of them when I came back.”

In her most recent musical work, a visual album called Lasya released last November, you’ll find the sounds of guitar chords, shakers, drums, flute, and, not least of all, a haunting voice that Mohan uses as an instrument. A choreographed dance video complements each track of this visual EP—a genre credited to Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album where a music video pairs with each song.

The three-track visual album is a purposeful reflection of the female spirit: the term Lasya refers to the Hindu goddess Parvati’s graceful dance in response to the male energy. The videos’ artistic dancers, whom Mohan found via help from the Internet and her own musical contacts in Boston, individually chose to interpret a song to a specific form of dance.

“I gave them some songs and just told them to play around and pull what they felt from it and use it for whatever they needed to,” Mohan said. “They took them and interpreted them, and it was crazy to see what they came up with. The dances they choreographed were super beautiful.”

What resulted from the collaboration were three individual music videos, each showcasing a different dance form—bharatnatyam, ballet, and modern contact—and the emotion elicited from these artists as a result of Mohan’s songs.

“It was kind of cool because it was all of us girls, too,” she said, referring to the videographer, photographer, and dancers involved. “And the three songs they picked were love songs and kind of feeding off that energy that we all feel.”

Giving the dancers involved the freedom to paint the emotions each song evoked in them is core to Mohan’s approach to sharing her music. Though she says she writes about some very personal, vulnerable subjects in her songs, she stresses that she doesn’t want to limit a song with her own interpretation.

“I don’t want to put my own opinion on my own song out there,” she said. “When I write and I have girls come up to me after [the show] being like, ‘That song got me through that breakup’—that’s why I like doing it.”

That’s not to say that Mohan’s work is not intensely personal to her. Some of her songs draw inspiration and storylines from her own identity. Her upcoming album to be released this spring, The Girl Who Used to Live in My Room, explores “the girl I used to be in the past, and conquering that.” Although, she notes with a smile that at the time of recording the song, “It was the girl I was in that moment; in the future, it’s going to be about the girl who used to be there.”

She describes her musical storytelling as a “collection of different moments I’ve come across—as well as an attempt to find home.”

It’s a sentiment that sweeps over her whenever she visits India, where she was born. Though she spent most of her childhood in Orange County, California, she said that whenever she finds herself in northern India, an overwhelming emotion consumes her.

“I get this feeling of, Oh my God, I’m home!” she said wistfully. “But I’ve never gotten to live there. There’s this whole side of my life that I haven’t been able to shine light on yet.”

One day soon, she said she’d like to explore her art there, preferably in Rajasthan.

“I actually want to spend time in India to do my music, rather than just go visit and see things,” she said. “Among all the chaos there, there’s also so much peace.”

That link to her art and her place of birth began long ago. Throughout her childhood, Mohan’s parents encouraged her to learn about her heritage via Indian dance lessons and performance art.

“They would throw these huge Indian parties, and they used to have two-hour segments set up for people performing choreographed dances, skits, and songs,” she recalled. “Everyone would sit in a circle after dinner and sing.”

“It was annoying when we were younger,” she laughed, recalling her younger brother and her reactions to the performances. “We’d say, ‘Stop singing, Mom and Dad—we want to go home!’ But looking back, I’m so thankful for it. I wouldn’t be here. I was in a really encouraging environment.”

That’s the thing about Mohan—in her self-reflections, she remains true to origins and their effect on identity. So, somewhat unsurprisingly, she prefers that the sound of her music is as real and honest as it can be, too.

She maintains the raw, organic sound of her songs by recording her music outside of a studio and instead in her own spaces. She recorded her entire 2013 album, Letters to Toska, in her own room.

“It has that immediate, natural sound to it, which is what I’ve always wanted,” Mohan said.

Being outside of the studio also enabled a bit of sound exploration and experimentation.

“The thing about working in a studio is that you have a time limit, and you can’t really try things,” she said. On the other hand, when she recorded at home, “My percussionist would come over, and we would just have all these shakers—and then track and layer stuff. He would shake the shakers and scratch on walls; we even put one of the drums on my stove and heated it—and that changed the sound.”

“I moved rooms in between that record, and I noticed how much that changed the sound,” she went on. “At home, there’s an element of being able to go through the bars and the measures and add your own things, whereas in a studio, it’s very on-the-map and timed out.”

One of Mohan’s primary musical influences is American songwriter and poet Ani DiFranco, somebody who is credited with being one of the first to challenge the music industry with a do-it-yourself approach.

“She introduced the whole DIY culture,” Mohan said. “She said no to all the major record labels and started her own record label at 18.”

Not moving forward with a record company because it doesn’t speak to who you are as a musician is something to which Mohan can relate. The summer after her senior year of high school, she was approached by a major recording studio and producer who wanted to record all of her songs.

Although Mohan initially thought this was going to be her big break, she was ultimately disappointed with the resulting recordings: “It ended up being an album filled with my songs, but it just wasn’t what I wanted it to sound like,” she said.

So, she decided to walk away and not release the record.

“I told the producer, ‘Look, I’m sorry; if you’re not going to work on this the way I want to, then I can’t release it, and I don’t want my name on it.’”

Though the experience was upsetting and shook her confidence a bit, resulting in a bit of a musical hiatus, Mohan knows it was an experience she was meant to have.

“I’m glad I went through that,” she said. “Now, I’m doing everything on my own—mixing, editing, and recording. Now, it’s about what I really want.”

Mohan gravitates towards people who have similar convictions—those who know what their priorities are. And so when British recording artist M.I.A.’s drummer, Kiran Gandhi, came to the Berklee campus one day to host a talk, it was no big surprise that Mohan and Gandhi ended up discussing philosophies at a watering hole in Cambridge a few days later.

“I was super drawn to her; we were both so similar as people,” Mohan said, specifically citing Gandhi’s trademark theory for which she is known: atomic living. The philosophy advises picking three to four fundamental priorities in your life—or pillars—and basing every single decision you make around them. That includes choosing to do things that might seem serendipitous and not necessarily aligned with your daily routine.

If you always follow the decision that aligns with one of your pillars, “there’s no room to really regret anything,” Mohan said.

“For me, the pillars are traveling, learning, art, and family,” Mohan added.

She doesn’t really deem herself a religious person, so the theory of atomic living has provided some desired guidance in her life.

“I realized that everyday, I could live and step atomically,” she said.

Well, step atomically—and play music.

“Music is now my religion—every day, I wake up, and I do that. I love it and I learn new things from it, and life lessons are the root of all religions.”