Pathaan: Traveling the globe with a musical rickshaw

In the past few years there has been a flurry of down-tempo chill-out compilation releases that followed the amazing international success of Paris (read: the original) Buddha Bar owner/dj Claude Challe's self-titled series.

The reasons for this phenomenon are manifold and surely related to the rise of urban yoga-going. I'll save further exploration and explanation of that previous sentence to a future piece (sorry) as the focus of this one is a curious chap who goes by the name of Pathaan...

Launching his DJ career in East London's experimental music scene at the end of the 1990's, Farook Ahmed Khan (aka 'Pathaan') dropped chilled beats at Talvin Singh's Anokha gig on Hoxton Square. It was there that David Bowie invited him to tour his new Earthling album in 1997, which may have directly led to Pathaan's full-hearted commitment thereon to a career in music and honing his musical tastes.

As means for expressing the flavors of music that please his palate, Pathaan has worked for nearly 8 years as a music journalist - reviewing albums for DJ Magazine until recently when he changed camp to iDJ:

"the two [working as a DJ and writing about music] go hand in hand as far as I'm concerned. Everyone has opinions about music and being lucky enough to write about music I'm sent as well as play is great, and over the years labels and producers have realized what tickles me and also know I won't write about something I don't like. Also it allows me to listen to artists and sounds I otherwise wouldn't have realized, exist."

Like many musicians who begin their careers as Djs, Pathaan has recently spent time in the studio working on a collaborative project called the Punk-a-Wallahs:

"Myself and Switch have been mates for years from my days when I was projects manager at KICKIN MUSIC and Switch had his studio adjacent to our main offices. We'd been talking about a collaboration for many years and so when the offer from WARNERS came through about doing a remix of KRONOS QUARTET, we jumped at the chance to forge a studio partnership.

Very pleased with the results we continued to experiment with ideas and have to date produced our own version of Ananda Shankar's Streets of Calcutta and Peter Gabriel's Passion, both receiving rave reviews and plays, with Worldwide requests for release dates. So our intention is once we have set some time aside from our already busy schedules, we'll come together and produce an album that'll appeal to many taste buds. We have a deal on the table, just need to produce the results.

As regards the aim; we want to have a lot of fun as we have with our name."

I expect Pathaan to continue work in the studio and keep producing a high caliber of tunes though I don't think he's one to lock himself in a studio and become wholly occupied with dreams of winning oodles of awards... his laid-back nature seems to feed his creativity and push him to exploring diverse avenues in his musical career.

You see, in addition to disc jockeying and producing music, Pathaan's been hosting a show called the 'Eclectic Mix' on Ministry of Sound Radio and though that has recently ended, he's realized an amazing accomplishment in bringing his sound to the BBC Asian Network this past June. The Asian Network's Head of Music recently announced a host of new shows including 'Pathaan's Musical Rickshaw' that all bring 'Specialist Djs' to the forefront of their programming:

"I think what Mark Strippel means is that my sound is not the usual norm you'll get on the BBC Asian Network as I'm into most genres and tempos from around the globe...I'd like to thank everyone at Ministry of Sound that's helped me along the way...I suppose it's prepared me very well in terms of being committed to doing a weekly show and making sure the listeners keep tuning in..."

Conscious of the need to house his creative exploits under one roof, Pathaan's recently launched his own record label as well called Globetronica:

"[the label] is all about a sound that pushes, ‘producers from around the world producing electronic world influenced music.' In this world of ours where there is war, crime, famine, racism and other human right atrocities the aim of Globetronica will be to magnify just how small this world of ours is, through music; by highlighting the talent that is out there whilst bridging the gap between world folk and electronica. In short we believe ‘music is a means to strengthen and revitalise the spirit ‘ no matter where it comes from.

This aim may have been tried before but it's a niche market that still hasn't been exploited, distributed and channelled correctly. We have DJs & Artists waiting in the wings, ready !!! Globetronica intends and can be this label with everything else in place.

The first release is out and is a double mixed/unmixed package by yours truly, called City Hippy."

- More info:
http://www.pathaan.com/