I recently came across two Bangla releases, “Mon Akash” and “Kolpona”, within a relatively short period of time. They are very different songs, but both made me curious about something beyond the composition and performance: the way the recordings used space.
“Mon Akash” felt open and almost weightless in places, despite moving into a more energetic rhythmic section. “Kolpona”, on the other hand, began with considerable simplicity and gradually grew into something much larger without losing the sense of space established at the beginning.
That made me look at the production credits.
The same name appeared behind the mixing and mastering of both recordings: Arafat Kirty.
I knew of Arafat’s work as a Bangladeshi music producer and sound engineer now based in London, but encountering these two recordings together gave me a more interesting reason to revisit his work. Rather than asking what his “signature sound” might be, I found myself asking almost the opposite question: why do these two mixes sound so different?
Listening again with that question in mind reveals an engineer who appears less interested in making a record announce his presence than in finding an appropriate sonic environment for the song.
“Mon Akash”: allowing the song to breathe
“Mon Akash” is composed and produced by Menon Khan, sung by Sahil Sanjan, with lyrics by Adib Al Mohsin. Arafat Kirty handled the mixing and mastering from the United Kingdom.
The title can be understood as “The Sky of the Heart”, and the recurring expression “Mon akashe uro” carries the image of asking the heart to fly into that emotional sky.
That image is interesting because the mix itself seems preoccupied with space.
The vocal is not presented inside a dry, tightly controlled environment. There is a deliberate sense of air around it. Reverb creates depth, while delay allows certain phrases to travel slightly beyond their immediate position in the song.
What I find effective is that this does not make the singer feel remote.
That is an easy mistake to make with a ballad. Add enough reverb and almost anything can sound spacious, but the price is often intimacy. Here, the centre of the voice remains comparatively close while the ambience around it extends outward.
The distinction is subtle but important. The singer stays with us; the space around him moves away.
Against a lyric built around the image of the heart taking flight, that feels particularly appropriate.
The rhythmic development of the song creates another challenge. “Mon Akash” begins with a more intimate rhythmic character before moving towards more upbeat drums. As that transition occurs, the obvious mixing choice would be to make everything progressively harder and denser.
The mix resists that temptation.
The drums gain energy, but the vocal does not suddenly become aggressive simply because the rhythm underneath it has changed. Its soothing character is preserved. There is still movement in the natural dynamics of the performance, and the ambience continues to soften the edges without removing the singer’s presence.
That separation of functions is one of the strongest aspects of the mix.
The drums are allowed to create momentum. The vocal is allowed to carry emotion.
They do not have to perform the same job.
This is also where the width of “Mon Akash” becomes more than a stereo effect. A wide mix is not necessarily a spacious mix. Width can simply mean placing information further towards the edges. Real spaciousness also requires depth, contrast and, perhaps most importantly, the discipline to leave some areas unoccupied.
“Mon Akash” generally understands this.
As the arrangement expands, it does not feel as though every available space has to be filled. The mix allows the song to breathe.
That may be its most successful engineering decision.
Finding another kind of space in “Kolpona”
After hearing “Mon Akash”, discovering Arafat’s name again on “Kolpona” made the comparison more interesting.
“Kolpona”, written, performed and produced by Arafat Mohsin, belongs to a different musical world. Mohsin is among the more mature singer-songwriters working within contemporary Bangladeshi music, and this is a song whose lyrical depth asks to be listened to rather than merely decorated by production.
The title “Kolpona” means “Imagination”.
If “Mon Akash” uses space to suggest openness, “Kolpona” uses it in a more psychological way.
The song begins simply. Acoustic instrumentation and the vocal establish an intimate environment without immediately revealing how large the arrangement will eventually become.
This is important.
When a song is designed to grow, the engineer has to preserve somewhere for it to go.
Make the beginning too dense and the climax has no scale. Make it unnecessarily small and the opening feels weak rather than intimate.
“Kolpona” finds an interesting middle ground. Even in its simpler passages, the mix feels spacious rather than empty. There is room around the instruments, but they still feel connected to one another.
Then comes a particularly revealing moment around the second verse, following the organ passage.
The use of delay here caught my attention on repeated listening.
Instead of functioning simply as an audible echo, the delay briefly changes our perception of the space around the vocal. A phrase appears to leave something behind after it has been sung.
For a song called “Imagination”, the effect is almost conceptual.
A thought occurs, then part of it continues.
The word has gone, but its trace remains.
This could very easily have become an engineer showing off an effect. It does not. The delay is noticeable enough to alter the atmosphere, but not so dominant that the listener stops following the song and begins listening to the plug-in.
That distinction matters.
Good effects processing should not merely demonstrate that an effect has been used. It should change how a musical moment feels.
Here, the delay contributes to the slightly unsettled, reflective character of the song before the arrangement begins its movement towards something much larger.
From intimacy to a grand ensemble
The final development of “Kolpona” is where the earlier decisions begin to make sense.
What starts with relatively simple acoustic textures eventually opens into a grander ensemble. More information enters the recording, the rhythmic and harmonic weight increases, and the song becomes physically larger.
Yet the mix does not abandon the spaciousness of its opening.
This is harder than it sounds.
When drums, guitars, keyboards and vocals all begin demanding more space simultaneously, the easiest way to create excitement is simply to make everything bigger. The result can be loud and impressive for a few seconds, but often loses depth.
“Kolpona” takes a more controlled route.
The ensemble grows into the space that the mix has been establishing from the beginning. The climax therefore feels connected to the earlier sections rather than sounding like a different production attached to the end of the song.
The contrast is not simply between quiet and loud.
It is between internal and external.
The opening feels like a thought being formed. The middle begins playing with that thought. By the final ensemble, something that began internally has expanded into a much more physical musical statement.
For a song called “Imagination”, that journey feels appropriate.
Whether every listener consciously notices the engineering behind it is almost irrelevant. In fact, they probably should not.
They should simply feel that the song has travelled somewhere.
The same engineer, but not the same mix
Returning to these two recordings together is what ultimately makes Arafat Kirty’s contribution interesting.
The tools are familiar: dynamics, stereo placement, reverb, delay, tonal balance. There is nothing exotic about the vocabulary.
What changes is their purpose.
In “Mon Akash”, reverb and delay help create an emotional horizon around the vocal. Space suggests openness. The intimate rhythm can develop into more upbeat drums without forcing the voice to surrender its soothing character.
In “Kolpona”, space serves a different function. It gives the arrangement somewhere to develop. The delay after the organ passage briefly plays with our perception of the vocal environment, and the restrained beginning makes the eventual ensemble feel genuinely larger.
The same engineering technique therefore does not necessarily mean the same artistic decision.
That is worth emphasising because modern mixing can easily become formulaic. Once an engineer discovers a successful vocal chain, reverb combination or mastering approach, there is always a temptation to repeat it.
These two recordings suggest a different instinct.
The song comes first.
I later looked further into Arafat’s background and found something that helps explain that instinct. Before the studio and the mixing console, he spent years learning tabla. He also studied guitar and piano from an early age.
That does not automatically make someone a better engineer. Musicianship and engineering are separate disciplines.
But it can change the way an engineer listens.
A musician is likely to hear dynamics not simply as numbers on a meter but as part of phrasing. Rhythm is not merely transient information. Silence is not necessarily empty. And an effect is useful only if it contributes something to the musical thought.
Listening to “Mon Akash” and “Kolpona”, I am less interested in identifying which processor Arafat used than in the fact that he appears to understand why the two songs should not be processed into the same shape.
Perhaps that is the more useful measure of a mixing engineer.
Not whether we can recognise the engineer in every record, but whether the engineer can recognise the record in front of him.
I came to these two songs first and found Arafat Kirty through the credits afterwards.
Having listened again, more critically, that order seems appropriate.
Because the most convincing thing about his work on “Mon Akash” and “Kolpona” is not that the mixes continually remind us who engineered them.
It is that each song is allowed to become more completely itself.
Milu Aman
writer, critic and researcher