The Birth of Mocaine’s New Dimensions
Delhi-based artist Mocaine’s ambitious multi-disciplinary project The Birth of Billy Munro is a dark and nihilistic narrative of music, prose, and film. While an imperfect patchwork of borrowed inspirations, the culmination is still unlike anything else in the Indian indie scene.
We find ourselves deep in the era of streaming music, of a seemingly-endless library of songs available at a simple flick of the thumb, of a wider variety of genres than ever before, of playlists that tug you from one banger to the next, skimming from artist to artist, algorithms suggesting songs-you-may-like and nudging you towards evolutions of new sounds.
But what is often lost in the all-available-all-the-time era is the beauty of a cohesive album, an artist’s connected soundscape of common themes or moods—a narrative in musical form. The best concept albums play almost like melodic novels, with each song representing a chapter in a disparate ‘story’, where even the best standalone songs sound better as part of the continuous larger concept.
Even in its blurry non-specificity, Billy Munro’s music emerges as a Dadaist collaboration on a new canvas. There is blues, grunge, and a progressive ambition to provide the reader doomed companionship on Billy’s ill-fated road trip
With the latest release The Birth of Billy Munro, Delhi-based Mocaine—led by frontman Amrit Mohan—has attempted to take one such leap forward in narrative music. Mocaine brings the listener into a visceral, thoroughly-detailed new world with his multi-discipline art project, including a musical album, a short novella, and a series of visuals that the artist hopes to convert into a film. The Billy Munro story is a dark, rollicking journey in the American south, filled with murder, mayhem, and madness, each chapter a song, a moodscape much larger than a simple streaming playlist.
Following up on the 2018 EP and video album Portrait of Dali, Amrit returns for the Billy Munro project on guitar and vocals with the assistance of Kabir Agarwal on bass, Varun Sood on drums, and the aid of producer Aman Arakh. Though the final product is an imperfect collage of borrowed sounds and inspirations, Mocaine’s work is nothing if not ambitious. The culmination is unlike anything else in the Indian music scene, independent even from the loose conformities of indie music.
Opening with the track “Billy”, the album announces—in an exaggerated southern American accent—a woman’s death under mysterious circumstances. And then, a face-melting guitar riff kicks off the rock opera: part-psychedelic, part-garage, part-Nirvana-esque grunge (Amrit shared that he owes some of his musical inspiration to the Seattle sound). The licks are heavy-metal dirty, but the production is clean, leaving no distortion or spillage from riffs to solos to licks, and to drastic shifts in rhythm.
Cover art: Neeti Banerji
The novella populates the soundscape of his opening ‘chapter’ with the narrative detail. Billy Munro loses his wife Edna—after a full two-hours of marriage—to an accidental death. The calamity—a bitter cherry on top of Billy’s lifelong, suppressed family trauma and rage—sets in motion a feverish and dangerous road trip for the rest of the book.
Amrit noted in an interview with The Chakkar that the most direct inspiration for the prose was Nick Cave’s 2010 book The Death of Bunny Munro (2010), another novel of a journey: a father-son story which also flirts with themes of darkness, pain, and redemption. As Billy descends further into delirium and bloodshed, the songs and interludes that follow in the album provide the theme music to his violent, drugged-and-drunken romp across the American south.
There is a strange sense of dissonance to that theme music; the lyrics (in song) and prose (on the page) come off as inherently foreign and inorganic. The music borrows much from the bluesy narratives of the American south that the story populates, but the final product feels more like a cocktail of derived experiences, particularly in comparison to local artists whose sound and song-writing responds more directly to the tactile energy of world they truly inhibit. In its words and its sounds, Mocaine’s Billy Munro is the product of indefinite storytelling, a collage of ideas lacking in the sensory specifics.
But the art of collage can still be high art; and even in its blurry non-specificity, Billy Munro’s music emerges as a Dadaist collaboration on a new canvas. There is blues, grunge, and in standout later tracks, a progressive ambition to provide the reader doomed companionship on Billy’s ill-fated road trip. With snippets of sampled sounds and conversation, the album fully commits to its motifs, hardly relenting from the chief character’s ongoing sense of abeyance and existential dread.
One of the best songs on the album is “Narcissus”, a progressive track that rises and falls in emotional resonance. Opening with Alec Baldwin’s particularly-haunting monologue from the 1993 film Malice, “Narcissus” is a grand opera that corresponds to the shortest chapter in the novella; much of the emotional doldrum is taking place within Billy himself, a toxic celebration of self-grandiosity that will turn him even more dangerous for the latter parts of the story.
Another standout is “Psilocybin”, featuring a controlled chaos of guitar riffs and head-banging drums. What follows is an instrumental jam session to end the song, truly one of the most-rousing moments from The Birth of Billy Munro. It is in these moments that Amrit’s instinctive feel for the production and progression of music truly shines; the collage reaches its zenith for a flawless fit.
Mocaine takes a more bluesy turn in tracks such as “Pistol Envy”, “Fancy”, and ‘There’s Been a Summer”. While the production value is high on the record, these tracks also have the promise of being big stage anthems, the type of songs that can rock a live stadium audience. “Fancy”, in the novella, also throbs with a dangerous sexual energy, where Amrit writes “Billy feels like a teenage boy and a Dionysian god all at once”.
Where the narrative does succeed is in evoking a true sense of old-fashioned pulp fiction, a Tarantino-esque theatre of bloodshed, self-indulgence, dialogue, and musings into various philosophical quandaries. After a certain point, however, even the most graphic and shocking of adventures become repetitive; what’s at stake if there are no consequences?
Late in the story, Billy has already spent a dozen or so days in delirium, reckless and often under-the-influence—from multiple shots of whiskey to ketamine—and a danger to nearly everyone who comes in contact with him. A string of dead bodies has been left behind him, but their evidence is only shared in half-remembered flashes as the anti-hero chases a state of mental blankness, losing all memory and control.
Told from close third-person perspective of Billy—and only occasionally, a few of the other characters in his sphere—the ‘half-remembrance’ is a larger trend in Amrit’s prose. After another night on his bender, Billy wakes up to a strange dissonance with self, “Billy stays in all of the next day, sleeping and smoking and eating very little with the news constantly playing in the corner, like some sort of fugitive, still unable to put his finger on what exactly it is that makes him feel like one” (63). A page later, he feels a sense of unexplained anger, unable now to finger the truth. “The green anger won’t leave his insides alone, and images of the hooker clawing at his wrist in the motel room keep flashing across his mind, though he’s not sure if they’re memory or fiction” (64).
If the character only sees the world through a haze, then—the narrative assumes—the reader must, too. What we’re then left with is a lack of specificity of the world in prose, outside of the reader’s tactile grasp, leaving one often unmoved by the drama on the page. It is the unreliability of the narrative voice that, perhaps, would’ve lent itself better to be told through a first-person’s—Billy’s—perspective. The short distance between character and narrator leaves a yawning gap.
Where the narrative does succeed is in evoking a true sense of old-fashioned pulp fiction, a Tarantino-esque theatre of bloodshed, self-indulgence, dialogue, and musings into various philosophical quandaries. After a certain point, however, even the most graphic and shocking of adventures become repetitive; what’s at stake if there are no consequences? “Ok,” Billy says to a woman he drives around with in the “Psilocybin” chapter, “So if there is some… reason behind all ‘this’, and life isn’t just a long stream of meaningless bullshit, that means some things matter more than others, right?” (69). Like Billy, the reader, too, will feel swamped page after page in this ‘meaningless’ stream.
The penultimate track is “Daylight Sheen”, a soft instrumental led by a groovy bassline—which, suddenly, changes mood for the narrative climax of the story, making way for thumping hard riffs.
It is in the final chapter, “The Bend” that the reader of the prose is finally rewarded with some sense of true self-reflection. Billy is convinced that “the feeling that has been sitting in his chest ever since he crawled out of the fucking river, that he is living someone else’s life, is a premonition, or a sign, or something” (101). A sort of resolution is quickly reached, too quickly, without a more convincing driving force to set him into a new track. It is in the music, however—“The Bend” as the album’s finale—where one feels the character’s more complex emotional journey. The 8-minute atmospheric saga is drenched in the fatigue of Billy’s adventures, growing and progressing like an epic journey through sound, gathering an orchestra of vocals, guitars, strings, piano, drums, sax, and synths, providing a buried iceberg of emotions underneath the aforementioned ‘feeling’ in Billy’s chest.
What seems clear at the end of Mocaine’s Billy Munro project is that there will be more: more music, more prose, and more visuals, too, to continue Billy’s journey ahead. Of the larger film project, Amrit said the lens would turn further inwards, into a meta-verse of the creator. “The film is a single set concept that is shot in Delhi,” said Amrit. “Where the book explores the story of Billy Munro, and the album provides brief windows into both worlds, the film explores the second world, that of the fictional Author, and his questionable writing process as he writes said book, paired with undiagnosed, possibly severe mental ailments.”
And despite some of its shortcomings, the progression of this world—as well as the progression of Mocaine/Amrit—is an exciting prospect for music and art in India. Like Billy Munro on his bender, the artist, too, is allowing the creative juices to take them wherever the road may lead, to ambitious new avenues of music and narratives. In the modern musical world where all we get are disconnected snippets of the same old thing, The Birth of Billy Munro is the birth of something wholly new, a patchwork that still stands high on its unique pedestal.
***
Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose creative work has appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. His debut novel is forthcoming on the Aleph Book Company. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
