Niche Guys To Know

Mumbai-based DJ duo Indian Hipsters aren’t Indian but they sure are hipsters. Meet the Frenchmen behind Bandra bar’s monthly DJ night La Fresh.

Dimitri Mathieu and Paul-Henri Moal.

Over the past year, our city has become home to French restaurants, French confectionaries, French department stores, French furniture makers, even French social clubs. And now, we’ve got a pair of French DJs. Is this a subtle yet foolhardy attempt to turn Mumbai into another Pondicherry? “The population here is anything between 12 to 20 million people depending on the source, and out of that, there’s about 500 French people,” says Paul-Henri Moal, one-half on French DJ duo Indian Hipsters. “In Paris, out of 1.8 million people, there’s something like 30,000 Indian people.”

Touché. But Moal, 26, and Dimitri Mathieu 23, his best friend and partner in both Indian Hipsters and their jointly founded advertising agency Do Future, didn’t come to Mumbai to hang out with other French people. They decided to move to the city two years ago, after Moal came to India for a holiday. “I wrote Dimitri a postcard saying, ‘Come and live here, you will like it’,” said Moal. “We have the same tastes.” The relatively healthy state of the Indian economy was another incentive. “We’re very young, and in Paris, it’s very expensive to create your own agency,” said Mathieu, who wants to stick around in India for at least 10 years. “Mumbai has many opportunities.”

So far, Do Future, which is an advertising, communication, design and web agency all rolled into one, has just a handful of clients, including BMW and online wine store Wine Stories India, but Indian Hipsters has already garnered a following for their monthly ‘La Fresh’ nights at Bandra bar Zenzi. They started La Fresh in May because they couldn’t hear the music they liked in any of Mumbai’s bars and clubs. “We’ve been to Prive, Olive Bandra and Trilogy,” said Moal. “We like their look but the music is too mainstream or us. David Guetta and The Black Eyed Peas is not our thing.” Fortunately, within three weeks of their getting here, a friend told them about Zenzi. “Even when we come here as customers, people are more easygoing,” he said. “At the other clubs, people are more closed. If you are not introduced to someone, it’s difficult to talk to them.”

At Zenzi, they found people who were interested in their kind of music, people that could perhaps be described as Indian Hipsters. “We were called hipsters in France, because we were working in media and music and were into underground culture,” said Moal about the idea behind the name. “The cultural background is always a bit different but there’s always a commonality between hipsters everywhere, whether they’re in China, Brazil or Japan. They see the same movies, listen to the same bands.”

While their fan base may be small—the gig space at Zenzi feels crowded if they are more than 40 people in the room—it is loyal. “It’s better to have a few people [who are listening] 100 per cent than [to play in] a big club with people doing their own thing,” said Moal, who started a blog called IndianHipsters.com the day he arrived so that he could post “cool music videos”. Now, he plans to turn it into a full-fledged website. “We’re looking for people to write about the underground scene,” he said.

This Friday, July 29, Mathieu and he will play the fifth edition of La Fresh, where the music can go from “old school garage rock from the 1960s to new wave and disco from the late 1970s to hip hop from the 1980s”. While this weekend’s set will have more “disco, house and electro” unlike last month’s which was “more rock n’ roll”, they guarantee that the one thing that remains common to every La Fresh gig is that there’s always plenty of new music. “This time, 80 per cent of the set will be stuff we have never played before,” said Moal.

When Mathieu and he aren’t working or DJing at Zenzi, they can be found at other Bandra hipster joints like Janata or Bonobo. One place you’re unlikely to spot them is at the Novotel Hotel in Juhu having Sunday brunch with other French expatriates living in Mumbai. “We like to sleep on Sunday morning,” said Moal.

Zenzi

Location183 Waterfield Road
Opposite Subway
Off Linking Road
Bandra (West)

Phone6643 0670

Relevant DatesFriday, July 29

Hours10.30pm onwards

Ticketing & Price InfoFree