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 Tell
me about the Ahuja.
It's Indian. I went to India in '92 and heard all kinds of
sounds, day and night: music, people talking through these
PAs in their homes, or in their stand-alone rooms. They're
small temples, really, and there will be a PA horn on top of
it. Sometimes it will be a priest and he's reciting letters
to God. Sometimes they'll start playing this music at 5:30
in the morning, chants to wake up the gods. And it's really
loud. You can hear it, literally, half a mile
away.
So
the Ahuja is the sort of PA system that they
use?
Yeah. I heard it on that trip. On this one night in Jaipur,
must have been about midnight, I heard a PA getting cranked
up. And then another one with music. So there's a guy
chanting and music. And then I hear some more music with
harmonium and little finger bells and violin. And I'm
thinking, "This is wild." So I got up and went for a walk
and I found that it wasn't coming from anything close. I
ended up walking many blocks discovering different uses of
the systems as I went. A private wedding, a man in one of
these little temples reading ecstatically - he must have
been at 110 dBs. Then I got to this house and a man came out
and greeted me and invited me in. I went up to the top floor
and the whole family was up there with these big
[PA] horns pointing out into the city, and, like,
six mics pointed at different members of the family. Someone
jumped up and gave me a pair of finger cymbals. I sat down
and I ended up playing until dawn. When I left they were
still going.
So
they've got spontaneous personal broadcasts
going?
Yeah, right. Well, you get the picture. I had to have one.
So just before I left I went back to New Delhi. I told the
guy I wanted the best one and he said it was the Ahuja, and
I bought a whole system. And it's made its way onto almost
every record I've made since then in some way. Something -
the guitar, vocals.
So
do you send the signal back out through the board and into
the Ahuja for re-recording?
Yeah, or just directly through it. I really like using it as
an amp. But I do use it a lot in mixing. I think one of my
favorite sounds that I've gotten was the first thing I used
it on. When I came back from India, I came back directly to
New York to do Suzanne Vega's 99.9F. and had it with me. And
we used it on the title track. Her background vocals are
going live through the Ahuja - with an Ahuja analog
delay.
It
sounds like your attraction to it is based on both the
unit's sonic properties and the experience that introduced
you to it.
More the experience, actually. If you bought a PA here with
a horn, it's probably going to sound pretty much the same.
But the experience of hearing it 5 times a day was
mesmerizing. I've got hours of recordings of stuff through
those PAs.
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