SuKhush

If you’ve spent time with them, you’d also know that they’re extremely picky about everything: from the DJs they book for their parties, to the people they work with, to the people they befriend, to the types of restaurants or bars they go to, to the wine they drink. But all of it goes to this inexhaustible quest for quality, refinement and perfection—a bar they’ve set for themselves and hold everything else in their lives up to.

Vish now manages money for himself and a few friends and is working on opening a bar focused on psytrance music, while Rachel does independent public health consulting. This allows them the freedom of making their own schedules and traveling whenever they want to. They used to take off to Goa, the mecca for psytrance, in the summer and now play gigs at music festivals in Europe. They recently got back from playing festivals in Germany and Bulgaria and sat down with me at a cocktail bar in Williamsburg (they’ve introduced me to some of the best cocktail and wine bars in the city in the time that I’ve known them) to take me through their journey.

A: How long have you been playing the flute, Rachel?

Rachel: Since I was 9. I’m 42 now. I played classical music in a school band, like everybody else. I was good at it, but I wasn’t really into it at the time.

Later, when I was living in Asia, I played it more on my own and it was like suddenly discovering a new instrument. The first time I did anything with it, other than playing classical music, was when I played it with a percussion band in Manila. That was a big deal because when you train classically, it’s really hard to do anything else. No one thinks about the flute as anything other than a classical instrument. When I was growing up, even my own flute teacher, who was a well-known jazz musician, said you can’t play that on the flute; the flute is not a jazz instrument. So I had all these doors shut on me. It took a really long time to get out of that mindset. But once I did, in my 20s, I started to play with bands, and then I learned to DJ and I started to integrate that when I was living in Thailand.

When I moved to India, I started to DJ and play my flute at the same time. No one was doing that in Bombay in 1999, so it was a wide-open field for me. I was able to take advantage of that. I did a lot of studio stuff back then, but I was mostly trying to explore this realm, where I would play with house music back then. And that leads into why we opened the club.

A: Tell me more about the club…

Rachel: I met Vish at a time when I was playing all these gigs around Bombay, but there were no clubs for good, clean sound. There was this one club called Jazz by a Bay that played “jazz” (quotes, hers) that had the worst sound on the face of the earth. It was very frustrating to play those gigs. So when I met Vish, we decided to open our own club.

Vish: It was called Tres Botas (three boots). We had it for three years. It was India’s first tapas bar and performance space. We wanted to do something completely different and we found this ambitious young chef, who wanted to work with us. And Rach wanted something with the vibe of a downtown Manhattan bar, something rustic. Everything else in India was very cheesy and white at the time.

We did different types of music nights there. Monday nights we did psytrance, but we steered clear of it the rest of the time because the club was very unique to its concept. It was also about getting live musicians with electronic sound. We introduced Bombay to a lot of things: tapas, house music, San Francisco dub step, among other things.

Rachel: Cheb I Sabbah, one of the original global groove DJs out of San Francisco, did the opening party. We played with David Starfire from Los Angeles. The Dutch consulate got a jazz group down. Tuesday night was a gay and lesbian night, which was the first ever in India. Gay sex/sodomy was illegal then. We were in the papers all the time for that. We were threatened a few times. But Vish had a good relationship with the police, so we benefited from that.

We were also the first club to do different kinds of music every night. We had hip-hop on Wednesdays. Thursdays was our cosmic down-tempo/global-chill night. It featured me doing a version of what we really focus on now. First I played with DJ Sarikah, who is still active on the Indian scene. It was also the first all-female line-up in India and it was the first real ethno-chill night with live instrumentals. This night kind of laid the groundwork for SukHush.

Vish: Friday was house music, Saturday we did mainstream and Sunday was the live jazz night. We kept switching it around, too. She was the music and I just wanted to do something groundbreaking and global in Bombay.

A: Tell me about the genesis of SuKhush…

Rachel: When we owned our club, I used to DJ and play my own sets. Then I would collaborate with other DJs, first playing house music and later moving into psychedelic c - Anais Dreame

If you’ve spent time with them, you’d also know that they’re extremely picky about everything: from the DJs they book for their parties, to the people they work with, to the people they befriend, to the types of restaurants or bars they go to, to the wine they drink. But all of it goes to this inexhaustible quest for quality, refinement and perfection—a bar they’ve set for themselves and hold everything else in their lives up to.

Vish now manages money for himself and a few friends and is working on opening a bar focused on psytrance music, while Rachel does independent public health consulting. This allows them the freedom of making their own schedules and traveling whenever they want to. They used to take off to Goa, the mecca for psytrance, in the summer and now play gigs at music festivals in Europe. They recently got back from playing festivals in Germany and Bulgaria and sat down with me at a cocktail bar in Williamsburg (they’ve introduced me to some of the best cocktail and wine bars in the city in the time that I’ve known them) to take me through their journey.

A: How long have you been playing the flute, Rachel?

Rachel: Since I was 9. I’m 42 now. I played classical music in a school band, like everybody else. I was good at it, but I wasn’t really into it at the time.

Later, when I was living in Asia, I played it more on my own and it was like suddenly discovering a new instrument. The first time I did anything with it, other than playing classical music, was when I played it with a percussion band in Manila. That was a big deal because when you train classically, it’s really hard to do anything else. No one thinks about the flute as anything other than a classical instrument. When I was growing up, even my own flute teacher, who was a well-known jazz musician, said you can’t play that on the flute; the flute is not a jazz instrument. So I had all these doors shut on me. It took a really long time to get out of that mindset. But once I did, in my 20s, I started to play with bands, and then I learned to DJ and I started to integrate that when I was living in Thailand.

When I moved to India, I started to DJ and play my flute at the same time. No one was doing that in Bombay in 1999, so it was a wide-open field for me. I was able to take advantage of that. I did a lot of studio stuff back then, but I was mostly trying to explore this realm, where I would play with house music back then. And that leads into why we opened the club.

A: Tell me more about the club…

Rachel: I met Vish at a time when I was playing all these gigs around Bombay, but there were no clubs for good, clean sound. There was this one club called Jazz by a Bay that played “jazz” (quotes, hers) that had the worst sound on the face of the earth. It was very frustrating to play those gigs. So when I met Vish, we decided to open our own club.

Vish: It was called Tres Botas (three boots). We had it for three years. It was India’s first tapas bar and performance space. We wanted to do something completely different and we found this ambitious young chef, who wanted to work with us. And Rach wanted something with the vibe of a downtown Manhattan bar, something rustic. Everything else in India was very cheesy and white at the time.

We did different types of music nights there. Monday nights we did psytrance, but we steered clear of it the rest of the time because the club was very unique to its concept. It was also about getting live musicians with electronic sound. We introduced Bombay to a lot of things: tapas, house music, San Francisco dub step, among other things.

Rachel: Cheb I Sabbah, one of the original global groove DJs out of San Francisco, did the opening party. We played with David Starfire from Los Angeles. The Dutch consulate got a jazz group down. Tuesday night was a gay and lesbian night, which was the first ever in India. Gay sex/sodomy was illegal then. We were in the papers all the time for that. We were threatened a few times. But Vish had a good relationship with the police, so we benefited from that.

We were also the first club to do different kinds of music every night. We had hip-hop on Wednesdays. Thursdays was our cosmic down-tempo/global-chill night. It featured me doing a version of what we really focus on now. First I played with DJ Sarikah, who is still active on the Indian scene. It was also the first all-female line-up in India and it was the first real ethno-chill night with live instrumentals. This night kind of laid the groundwork for SukHush.

Vish: Friday was house music, Saturday we did mainstream and Sunday was the live jazz night. We kept switching it around, too. She was the music and I just wanted to do something groundbreaking and global in Bombay.

A: Tell me about the genesis of SuKhush…

Rachel: When we owned our club, I used to DJ and play my own sets. Then I would collaborate with other DJs, first playing house music and later moving into psychedelic c - Anais Dreame