The New Music Activitsts

  "ACH, ZE, ACH, ze, tre, tsor!” What, you’ve never heard the count off to a rock song in Kashmiri?  

You could be excused for that, seeing as how there’s only one (little known, for now) New York rock band that starts off songs that way. It’s called Zerobridge, and it is composed of Kashmiri brothers, Mubashir and Mohsin Mohi-ud-Din, alongside bassist Greg Eckelman and keyboardist Paolo Arao.

The band opens a set at the Asia Society in May with a song that, except for the count off and certain key lyrics, sounds like a pretty standard rock number. It’s called “Suffering Moses,” off the group’s first LP, and Mubashir describes it as a “journal entry” that was inspired by a 2001 trip to a war-torn Kashmir. The sound is mellow and ambient, with a soft, lyrical quality, but lead singer and guitarist Mubashir has the capability to really wail when he wants to.

Hearing references to Kashmiri Mughal gardens transposed over rock music is at first jarring and confusing, especially for a listener who recognizes the references. But this is the way that the brothers, simply by bringing their own experience to their songs, are forging an identity for a traditionally underrepresented group of people who would otherwise only find those nods in Bollywood songs.

Similarly jarring: the scene at this particular concert. South Asian men and women in saris, alongside seasoned white academic types, pepper the seats of the auditorium in the basement of the Asia Society’s Park Avenue space. The band plays onstage atop a Persian rug that probably cost more than most Brooklyn bands pay in rent each month. The guys had to compromise with the organizers of the event on sound level: The band wanted to rock out, but the Asia Society was concerned about noise. The result is a more muted-than-normal sound for the band. “Havre de Grace,” the title track from their second record, builds slowly from a simple guitar melody and, like many of their songs, moves at a gradual clip to crescendo in a riotous chorus. Other songs are slower, more mournful, with drawn-out harmonies and minor keys, reminiscent of early Radiohead.

What all of Zerobridge’s songs have in common is a completely earnest quality. The band makes music that’s trying to be beautiful, trying to touch people, and its music contains, for the most part, little irony. The vulnerability of the music and message is there, whether the song is about relationships, Kashmir or cultural and religious identity.

The audience, surprised by the music, is mostly into it, but it’s clear that it’s just not for some of the older South Asians in the audience. In fact, only when Mubashir inserts a line of Hindi into the song “Havre de Grace” does he win a knowing chuckle from just this segment of the audience.

Zerobridge’s process is full of these compromises. Artistically, the brothers go by the names Mo and Din, mostly just to make it easy for their non-Desi fans. In a meeting, I mention to them that the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was reported in the Times to have told a student that he “could not be Mohammed in the morning and ‘Mo’ in the evening,” admonishing what he perceived to be impure Muslims.

“What would you say to that?” Mubashir asks, grinning at his brother.

“I don’t know,” Mohsin laughs, then deliberates. “I’d probably just call him a douchebag.”

The way Islam has become an excuse for extremism is something the two are more invested in than that response would indicate.

In the song “The Shake,” off the 2007 record Havre de Grace, the band mocks a mullah for his perceived moral authority: “Is she too sexy for your big beard?” Both brothers seem to have an outsized concern for making the world a better place, with a specific focus on the Muslim world. Their recent and upcoming performances take place at venues as geographically disparate as they come: In May they headed to the World Islamic Economic Youth Arts Forum in Malaysia, then in June they’ll play at Inner City Muslim Action Network festival in Chicago, alongside Mos Def. Mohsin took a Fulbright in Morocco last year, doing music workshops with street kids, and at the close of his project the rest of the band flew out to play villages on the U.S. Embassy’s dime.

Still, the brothers insist that they’re not all about rock flying in the face of Islam, along the lines of the Kominas, and that they are not interested in being human rights activists who dabble in music.

“At the end of the day it’s music,” Mubashir says. “We’re not like ‘Muslim rockers,’ or whatever. Greg and Paolo, I don’t know what the hell they are, we’re all brothers in this band and we want to make the best music possible.”

>> ZEROBRIDGE June 5, Santos Party House, 96 Lafayette St. (betw. White & Walker Sts.), 212- 584-5492; 6, $TBA.