Unfinished, on purpose

Aushomapto means unfinished. It is a strange word to build a legacy on — a word that admits, right there on the album cover, that the job is not done. 

And yet an entire generation of Bangladeshi listeners, myself included, grew up inside those two records, going back to them again and again the way you return to a sentence you never quite finished saying.

Forgive the cheap bit of wordplay; the band got there first. I ask Bassbaba Sumon, Ibrahim Ahmed Kamal, Raef Al Hasan Rafa and Shishir Ahmed whether there was ever a sense of "unfinished business" running under their whole journey, or whether that is just the romanticism I am looking for. Bassbaba is quick to interrupt.

"Romanticism wasn't there, for sure," he says, and then grins. "Bro-manticism, maybe."

Rafa cracks up. "Bro-manticism!"

But then Rafa turns the joke over and finds something true in it. "Aushomapto will remain unfinished. That's how I feel. It will never be complete."

Why Aushomapto 1?

The name was never an accident. Years before the album, Aurthohin played a track called Aushomapto at a Rock Links concert, and Sumon walked away from that stage having already decided what the next record would be called.

"I said the name would be Aushomapto 1. Everyone asked, 'Why 1?' Because Aushomapto 2 will come — that's why it's 1."

How could he be so sure a sequel would arrive? He points, of all places, to Helloween. "They had Keeper of the Seven Keys, Part I and Part II. They wanted to release it as one double album, and the producers said no- break it up. I felt terrible; why would producers do that to such an awesome album? So my thought was, we won't listen to producers. We'll do two albums on our own, and both will be awesome."

He saved his best joke for the fine print. Aushomapto 1 contains a song called Fetus-er Kanna — the cry of a fetus — and in brackets beneath the title it reads: this song is Aushomapto 3. "So people ask me, 'Sumon bhai, where is Aushomapto 2? We got 1, and we got 3.' And I tell them — that's exactly why the album is called Aushomapto. It never finished."

Nine days, ninety-six hours

What astonishes you, listening to how these records were actually made, is the speed. Aushomapto 1, Kamal reckons, went from the first clean guitar scratch to a finished, submitted album in nine days. Aushomapto 2 was recorded in ninety-six hours: thirteen songs tracked, three thrown away, ten released — mixed, mastered and gone in four days.

That is not how landmark albums are supposed to be built. It is certainly not how they are supposed to sound.

"This is efficiency, not just talent," Kamal insists, with the modesty of a man who played on both albums while seriously unwell. He arrived at the sessions last, after the heavy lifting was done, to lay his parts over the top. "Kamal bhai actually came in an ambulance and left," Sumon says, deadpan. Kamal laughs: "Brought in on a saucer, taken away on a saucer. But I think I did my part."

Sumon's own method was closer to sculpture than songwriting. He would set a tempo, name a key — "say it's in G minor" — and tell everyone to play as many riffs as they could, one after another, with no structure, just raw material. Then he would sit alone with the pile. "This riff here, that one there. Okay, this goes in the chorus."

When he handed the songs back, the players found their own hands all over music they didn't remember arranging. That, he says, is why the famously interlocking guitar lines on Aushomapto 1 — Shishir and Kamal trading solos like two people finishing each other's thoughts — came together in days rather than years. "I just organised the riffs. I didn't do anything else."

The fifth man

There is one name the band is adamant does not get mentioned enough, and it belongs to someone who was not, strictly, in the band at all.

Aushomapto 1 is the only album in Aurthohin's entire discography to carry an outside co-producer: Fuad Al Muqtadir. "He had a massive contribution behind managing the four of us," Sumon says. "Massive."

Fuad, raised in the United States and back in the country to make music with Bangladeshi musicians, produced and mixed the record and wrote its keyboard parts, becoming the fifth presence in a project built almost entirely in isolation. The band worked from three workstations in three rooms, with nobody quite sure what anyone else was doing.

"Things tire of themselves. If we'd made Aushomapto 3 and it was bad, the whole legacy would've been ruined." ….. Bassbaba Sumon

"In one room, Shishir and Rafa were doing who-knows-what. What Fuad was doing over there, we had no idea. Then we sat down — I made this part, I made that — and we put it together and it just glued." Bassbaba shrugs at the sheer luck of it. "Four musicians, plus a man who'd lived abroad his whole life, and it turned out great."

The anecdote that captures the whole mad method: Sumon walked into the booth to record bass for Aushomapto 1 before a single bassline had been written. "I said, nobody disturb me." He locked both doors and came out six hours later with the bass for every song done. Fuad met him with one note: at the end of Nikrishto, hit a "tek-tek-ta-ra-tek-tek".

"I said, is that so? Went back in, played it, came out. He said, perfect. That's how we worked."

Knowing when to stop

So why these two albums? Why, out of a career spanning eight records, do people keep returning to this particular pair?

Part of it is timing. Aurthohin had vanished for roughly five years between Dhrubok in 2003 and Aushomapto in 2008. Sumon was gravely ill, the gigs stopped, and a whole cohort of concert-going kids never got to see the band. Then, out of that silence, came Chaite Paro 2, Nikrishto and Guti-The Finale — a sudden flood from a frontman who had spent five sick years quietly stockpiling ideas and then kept only the best of them.

But the deeper answer is that they chose to stop. Rafa gives Sumon the credit for the vision — "I'm going metal, metal, metal, and he says, put a human chorus here, it'll sound nice" — and then lands on something close to a philosophy. "Something needs to stop sometimes. That's why, after ten years, you love it so much. If we'd kept going, you'd be sick of our chemistry by now."

Sumon finishes the thought with a shrug that doubles as a creed: "Things tire of themselves. If we'd made Aushomapto 3 and it was bad, the whole legacy would've been ruined." Better, he decided, to leave it unfinished than to finish it badly.

Back to the future

And yet here they are. Last night the four of them walked back onstage together at Rafa's solo album launch concert at the InterContinental — four men who swore the story was complete, reopening it for one night. The day before we spoke, they had picked up their instruments together for the first time in nearly fifteen years. "After one minute," Rafa says, "it was synced. It's the luck factor, and it's a family thing."

When I ask whether they ever want to go back, Rafa doesn't miss a beat.

"We're already back to the future. We're here."

Unfinished, still, but on purpose.