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A music producer who took a creative break of three years has returned with two EPs that are a joy to listen

You can call it a happy accident. In 2010, Rahul Desai had a mishap with his motorcycle, which meant that he couldn’t play the guitar for a while. The Bengaluru-based musician was 23 years old at the time, and had been a member of his school and college rock bands till then. But the fact that he had to rest his guitar meant that he downloaded a software on his computer to toy around with electronic music, to keep his creative juices flowing. That sowed the seeds for Father, Son and Alcohol, the moniker he has chosen for himself as an electronic music producer, under which he launched two EPs recently — Night of the Dead Living, and Die Danky.

Desai tells us that he had been getting a bit bored of playing rock music anyway, which further catapulted him towards the direction of electronic music. He picked up the tricks of the trade and started experimenting with different sounds to find a space he was comfortable with. His former band mates weren’t on the same wavelength as him, which is why Desai decided to branch out on his own. But he hit a brick wall in 2014, creatively speaking, and stopped making any music at all for three years. “I didn’t like the stuff I was making. It was a rage-quit,” the 33-year-old confesses. Then, in 2017, he picked up from where he’d left off, relearning everything that he had abandoned during his break.

Gradually, he started gaining the necessary confidence to release singles on the Internet, before launching Night of the Dead Living late last year and Die Danky in January. Both EPs are soaked in old-school nostalgia, reminiscent of a time when people like Giorgio Moroder were shaping the electronic sound in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Desai tells us that he had wiped out his entire catalogue of singles from the Internet when he underwent his period of disillusionment. But he now plans to release them as a consolidated album sometime in the future. And as for rock music, it’s only something that he enjoys listening to these days because when it comes to making songs on the guitar, that ship has sailed for him.

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