Among some of the international artists, it’d be a
dream come true to have John Petrucci from Dream
Theater play a guest solo and Daniel Gildenlöw from
Pain of Salvation to sing on one of our songs. the second album has both Hindi and English lyrics, a sitar
solo, Carnatic breakdowns, and heavy prog-metal riffs. So,
broadly the idea is to keep an open mind and keep evolving.
What’s your take on the indie music scene in India? For our live concerts, we usually have 4-6 members on the
stage. We have Varun on the Lead Vocals and Electric Guitars,
Joshua on Keyboards, Electronics and Vocals, Shrikant on
Guitars and Backing Vocals, Dan on Drums and Sarang/Sahil
on the sound. For a few gigs, Abhinav Jain and Kimberley
Rodrigues accompany us on an acoustic guitar and additional
vocals. We play our entire set to a click - bass guitars and
samples are triggered through a Backing Tracks machine that
we recently bought - it’s called the LP 16 and we’d say it’s a
must-buy for anyone playing samples - bye-bye to the glitchy
laptops and soundcards. Ha! Other than that everyone has
stereo mixes in their in-ears and we have a few floor monitors
just for reference. Here’s some of the gear we play on:
Indie Music scene in India has been growing consistently
over the last ten years and we feel it’ll continue to grow at
an even faster pace as the audiences in India are opening
up to and accepting different styles of music other just
popular music. The ever-growing live music scene in
India has also contributed to it considerably. We’ve also
witnessed a tremendous increase in skill and quality of
musicianship of artists over the last 5-7 years. However,
for Indie artists to become household names, it needs
the contribution from the mainstream media (TV and
Radio). If the radio starts picking up and playing more
Indie music, there’d be no looking back because we truly
believe - a lot of independent artists are creating way
better music than what we’re hearing in Bollywood these
days, which somehow seems to have lost the plot and
originality and is mostly interested in creating cringey
remakes to cash in on the popularity of old Hindi songs.
How has your music been received so far and what makes you stand
apart considering you’re specific to a certain language and genre?
We’re really fortunate to have received an amazing response
to our first album, ‘Khoj’ as well as our single ‘Kaahe Re’
which came out in 2018 which has given us the confidence
to continue pursuing music and helped us come this far. We
recently concluded a 5 city International tour of Mauritius
and Madagascar. We were ecstatic to see so many people
who didn’t even understand Hindi or the lyrics but were
grooving to the music all through the concerts, which truly
reminded us that music has no language - in fact, it is a
language in itself. Those who get it, get it. All we want to do
is be absolutely honest with our own selves, keep improving
as musicians and create the best possible music with our
abilities and the rest will follow. That being said, so far we’ve
been sticking to Hindi as the main language but we won’t be
surprised if we end up writing a bunch of songs in English
for the 3rd album. In fact, one of our upcoming songs from
Tell us about your tech set up
Varun - Ernie Ball Music Man Majesty Guitar,
Fractal AX8, Marshal JCM 900, Shure BLX288/
PG58, Shure SE 535 in-ear monitors
Shrikant - Fender Strat or PRS Custom 24, Analog
pedalboard setup and a JCM 900/Fender Twin Reverb
Josh - Juno DI keyboard, Macbook pro, LP 16, Shure
BLX288/PG58, Shure SE 215 in-ear monitors
Dan - whatever best drum-kit we manage to get :D
Upcoming projects
We are almost ready with our new album. The
plan is to release a new single off it in the month
of February, another two in March and April and
then release the full album this summer.
One of our new songs (working title, Quest) features
a collaboration with one of the world’s top guitar
players. We’re super stoked about it and just can’t wait
to put it out for all the rock music lovers in India
Fingers crossed, we have a few more international
gigs and tours lined up for 2020
The
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