Review Fix chats with The Beatroot Road’s Hazel Fairbairn, who discusses their creative process and more.
About The Beatroot Road:
The Beatroot Road have persevered on their bold, fearless and wholly unique brand of musical expression, which humbly pays tribute to a literal cornucopia of human experience and artistic traditions. An ambitious multi-genre collective spearheaded by Mark Russell and Hazel Fairbairn, the scope and influence of this alternative and world music fusion project continues to widen due to the wide open minds involved.
Their latest release is another refreshingly atypical and passionate choice, a visionary new interpretation featuring Vancouver Indian film singer Sharan Kaur – “Milte Hi Ankhen”. This being The Beatroot Road’s third single, they are continuing a pattern of tapping into the richness of worldwide music inspiration, then humbly sharing a new expression.
Review Fix: This band is super diverse! How did you all find each other?
Hazel Fairbairn: There’s a growing network of independent artists all around the world using the internet to make contacts and swap ideas. Innovative music was more or less discarded by the music industry as unprofitable after streaming services took over from CD sales, but getting access to an enormous global network of great artists is a truly diamond second prize for creatives. We ain’t making money, but we are making music, which to some of us at least is the goal.
Review Fix: How do you mix all your styles?
Fairbairn: Technology and the internet again. Many individual artists now have access to high quality recording setups on their laptops. So as an example, I emailed a recording of the drums to a bass player in the UK, who played along to make a separate recording of the bass part and emailed it back, I mixed it in with the drums and sent that to the rapper in Jamaica who recorded his vocal, and so on. It’s an awesome tool for independent artists who don’t have the budget or time for conventional rehearsals and recording.
Review Fix: You wouldn’t think this would work, but it does! How? What’s the recipe?
Fairbairn: Thank you! If you think about it, all cultures and subcultures make music inspired by the same range of moods and emotions, so if you keep to the one mood in a piece of music, I think you can mix and match styles, genres and cultures without it necessarily stopping from making sense. The intention is to add the power of each genre or culture’s different methods of expression of the same mood to make a universally understood statement. Not sure if that makes sense, but it’s the goal anyway….
Review Fix: What makes this track special?
Fairbairn: This particular track is very special to me in many ways – I first heard Lee Perry and Sam Carty’s version decades ago and, like most of The Upsetters’ work, it totally blew me away. The Beatroot Road is an inter-cultural project, so covering this track seemed like a no-brainer. I spent much of my life in the UK, where South Asian music is played in every Indian restaurant. (There are thousands – curry is a national institution there), so I have loved that singing style and the music for years. Since we’d been experimenting with dub *bodhrán and fiddle for a while, it all slotted into place for this project. This track says everything The Beatroot Road is trying to say about the genuinely multi-cultural world that we are living in right now.
Review Fix: What are your goals for this track?
Fairbairn: We’d love to encourage more music lovers to be curious in their listening habits. Creative music made with passion is out there and available as well as the sea of commercial entertainment, it just takes people like you guys to spread it around. Also, we’d like to poke a few artists into experimenting a bit more with styles, and for more producers to consider instruments apart from bass, drums, keyboards and guitars as being valid.
…But mainly the goal is to celebrate art from the inter-cultural world we now live in – whether we like it or not. We choose to love it, and hope to perhaps make a few wall builders think about putting down their trowels for a while to listen. We all laugh, cry, love, and make music for the same reasons, whatever our backgrounds, politics or cultures are.
Review Fix: Tell us more about your release schedule. It’s awesome.
Fairbairn: Thanks again! It seemed the best way of starting a new project with zero starting fanbase or any momentum. All the tracks sound quite different from each other, so we wanted to build it slowly into a body of work. This whole thing is just an idea – or a road that we are travelling on where we honestly don’t know what is around the next bend. As usual with music it’s already a fair ground ride that we are only just hanging on to!
Review Fix: What’s next?
Fairbairn: We have one more track to release on this schedule – making 5 so far, and then a gap until the album release which will be later this year. The album is called “Humanimal”. – a collection of songs about the human condition, with a title track sung from the observational point of view of an AI. An album is admittedly an old format not really relevant to the internet, but we liked the idea of a collection of songs. I’d love to release vinyl if there was any demand for it, but I’m not holding my breath… We’ve been professional musicians in the past, but now we are just being artists and doing what we do because we love doing
