by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Somewhere between the gaudy lowlands of kitsch and the earnest highlands of world music sits the mythic, mixed-up realm of exotica. It was discovered by the intrepid musical explorer Martin Denny when he cobbled together a polycultural band for his Hawaiian lounge gigs in the ’50s. Today, it’s where you’ll frequently find Montreal’s Ram Borcar, aka DJ Ram, aka the guy behind Ramasutra.

Denny brought together players from Asia, Polynesia, Latin America and the States to create a sound that seemed so real yet could never be specifically placed on the map - a musical "interzone," if you’ll excuse the gratuitous Burroughs reference. Likewise, Borcar gathers a United Nations of disparate sounds and sonic colours to create a fantastic but palpably real "elsewhere." His latest EP El Pipo del Taxi, the precursor to his forthcoming second album La Villa Medusa, takes the Denny formula and catapults it into the new millennium, beefing up the patchwork ethnomusicology with a DJ’s dancefloor agenda and a soundtrack composer’s sense of sex, sin, mystery and humour.

"I know there are a lot of ethnic influences in there," says Borcar, "but I don’t really consider what I do to be part of that world-music thing, like Afro-Celt Sound System. On a superficial level, that’s what people are quick to associate me with, but I prefer to look at it more as taking bits of not only different cultures but different genres of music. The last tune has a surf and Esquivel thing but also a bit of tango and something else. There’s also ‘The Losing Hand,’ which is Brazilian and Indian, with percussion from Île de Réunion - then I added in the clavinet and Rhodes, for that ’70s feel. I think that’s more the point."

This way lies madness

Borcar’s strategy has two main features. First, keep as many elements available as one can. "That whole Asian underground thing - it was Indian with electronic. After a while, if you have a limited number of elements, eventually there’s nothing else you can do. Too many of those kind of genres, they stick in it and then after, everyone’s fed up of hearing sitars with drum & bass. So - now what? Personally, I didn’t consider myself part of that - there’s still an Indian influence, like on the first album, but there’s no more Indian influence than there is Japanese. That’s sort of the point, it’s just another colour to add in."

To that end, Borcar’s gathered an impressive palette. "The Losing Hand" features renowned Hindustani slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya, whose unique stylings suggest both Hawaii and India - at the exact same time. The EP’s kickoff track "Kwaidan," named after the eerie Japanese ghost-story film, meanwhile lays trip-hop vocals over a daiko ensemble, abetted by harp and Moog.

The second part of Borcar’s strategy is, make damn sure each of those elements passes the structural-integrity test. In that department, Borcar’s as stubborn as an ox (or maybe crazy like a fox), with results to back it up. Case in point: recording the harp and daiko ensemble on "Kwaidan" at the absurdly expensive studio Celine Dion uses. "In the end that whole day, when you break it down, produced only about 25 seconds of music. The studio assistant was looking at me like I was insane. That’s it?! But when it’s at that point, I’m not thinking about the money or how much time I’ve got. That was what I wanted and there was no other way to get that sound."

The same logic applies to the hopefully forthcoming "Kwaidan" video: "I’m waiting for the right budget, because I gotta have enough bucks behind me to do that the way I want to. If I do it, it’s gotta be like, Crouching Tiger voodoo ninja madness."

Jazz Fest attendees will be able to get a taste of Ram’s vision live, if not the full banquet this time. "It’s the quartet, the Ramasutra Fourplay - me on electronics and keys, a vocalist, upright bassist and a bansuri flute. This quartet is the third option for me, in between DJing and the full band. I’m doing live remixes of all my tunes - they aren’t the album versions because I don’t have all these musicians with me, but it’s more than me just playing the tunes as a DJ. It’s the middle ground where there’s enough live stuff happening but the arrangements are more dancefloor oriented."

With Barbara Brown at Club Soda on Saturday, June 28, midnight, $19.50

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