Photo: Ashraf Uddin Apu
After a short hiatus Fuad reemerged into the music scene with his new record Hit Factory. This album reflects the last five years of his life as a musician. A lot of these songs were just demo mixes he did with different artistes he came across. The album is basically a compilation of the songs he produced for the sake of making music and most of them are not even mastered. Although the album has technical flaws, it holds a lot of emotional value for Fuad. He shares, “There’s a song I recorded in my studio titled Shundori Furi, a Sylheti track. Despite having a lot of noise in the background, I included that song in the album.”
His comeback album has gained a lot of enthusiasm and appreciation from fans. Fuad states that one of the reasons for releasing under Incursion is due to the tension he faced with the previous labels. “Our batch of musicians notably Habib, Hridoy Khan, Balam and others including myself helped out these labels, but it backfired on us. So I decided to stop working with them and collaborate with Incursion. While making this transition, digital distribution of the album really helped in boosting its popularity,” adds Fuad.
Fuad realized that the amount of time and the effort required to create an album had immense pressure on him. This break was necessary and worked as a healing and learning process. “When you produce a song it represents you, how that song is received by the audience obviously takes a toll on you. So I took a break from this and made jingles; the corporate side of music which didn’t represent me. This also helped me gain perspective on the business side as well. The break also enabled me to learn new music software, watch tutorials on YouTube and acquire other valuable resources. If I worked on an album, I wouldn’t have gotten this opportunity.”
Hit Factory features a mix of new artistes as well as his original group of musicians. The latter consists of those who Fuad believes influenced his career as a music producer and singer as well as bringing about his commercial success. Through this album, he wanted to bring back the likes of Upol and Anila. He has also worked with new people like Tahmid Jamal Diaz, Mouri and Nazia. Hit Factory features an array of genres ranging from pop, bubble-gum pop, folk to rock. Another unique aspect is the album cover; normally Fuad’s album covers feature him sitting in his recording studios. This time the cover had Fuad and the participants as animated characters.
Saadi Rahman the founder of Incursion felt that the album was something from the vault and it represented years of what Fuad has been doing. Saadi states that although they don’t sell large numbers of CDs like before, digital sales are covering for that even from international audiences from Germany, Australia, UK as well as the US.
“Saadi always had a niche market and he always wanted to do this for the love of music and to promote the youth. We discussed and I pushed him to make it into the business. I wanted to see him create a mainstream record label. So I insisted on releasing this pop album under Incursion,” Fuad further added that he received tremendously positive response from a lot of people regarding Hit Factory. The musician jokingly said, “I guess it’s a mutual thing, as we are both going to the next level. Two years down the line, maybe I will send him a hefty bill!”