BAND OF THE MONTH
How did the band come about?
Antariksh came about back in 2012, however the roots of the
band were laid way before. Founder of the band, Varun Rajput
used to play in a bunch of popular progressive rock bands
Feedback and Under Siege from 2006 to 2010 before entering
the corporate world as a management consultant. Once that
happened, music took a back-seat - however as he mentions,
all through his college years, he had dreamt of and wanted to
explore the possibility of making a career out of playing music.
After having worked in the corporate world for a few years, he
decided to get back and give a serious shot at pursuing music
as a full-time career. Fortunately, at the same time, his friends
Mridul Ganesh and Gurtej Singh also had a similar ideas and
came along. In August 2012, the three of them got together to
write a bunch of songs and kickstarted Antariksh. Fortunately,
Antariksh’s first single, ‘Dheere Dheere’ which was released in
early 2013 did really well, which further propelled the band to
write more music for their first album and take Antariksh more
seriously. However, around 2014 Mridul left for the US and
Gurtej also had to leave the band in 2015 as he was struggling
to manage his day-job along with Antariksh since the band
became more and more busy with touring. After Gurtej’s
departure from the band, Varun has met, jammed with and got
on board some amazing full-time musicians based out of Delhi.
In the beginning of 2017, Varun met a keyboard player and
singer, Joshua Peter who joined the band as a full-time member
and two of them have been spearheading efforts towards
working on Antariksh’s upcoming album. The present line
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up of the band has Varun Rajput on Lead Vocals and Guitars,
Joshua Peter on Keyboards and Vocals, Shrikant Biswakarma
on Guitars and Backing Vocals and Dan Thomas on Drums.
What makes your music unique and how do you describe your genre?
We believe the very fact that we all have such varied
backgrounds and tastes in music brings about something that’s
very unique in itself. For example, Varun and Shrikant have
been long-time Prog heads, while Joshua has a background
in Western Classical and Gospel Music. Dan listens to a lot
of Rnb, Hip-hop, Soul and Jazz artists. So when we compose
and record music together, it always end up sounding like
something we’ve never heard before. As a basic principle,
we like to experiment a lot with our music and don’t like
to restrict ourselves to any particular style. You can hear
influences from so many different styles (pop, rock, prog,
Carnatic, reggae, funk, etc) in our music. However, if we
were to broadly categorize the overall sound of the band,
it would still fall in under the category of Rock music.
If there are artists you’d like to collaborate with, who would they be and why?
Among some of the Indian artists, we would love to collaborate
with Shankar Mahadevan sir for he’s one hell of a singer with
such extensive knowledge and understanding of music. Varun
would love to collaborate with Bruce Lee Mani from Thermal
and a Quarter, for he loves his songwriting and guitar playing.