Music
My musical journey started with playing the piano at a summer camp. Fulfilling every teenagers fantasy of playing in a rock band, we formed a band in school to play at an Inter-School band competition but realised we needed a drummer from our school. Since there was no one there, I decided to give it a shot & well, here we are today.
Over the years, I’ve been lucky to have been associated with a number of great bands & in turn have made friends for a lifetime, travelled the world & played for audiences bigger than I could’ve imagined. My memory might be a little fuzzy, but as far as I remember, my musical journey has been :
- The Nobodies (2005) - A cover band which played it’s one & only gig at the original Cafe Mocha in GK.
- Half Step Down (2005 - 2014) - A blues rock band which was a huge part of my formative years. We literally lived together for long periods of time, released an album & had a lot of fun. You can listen to the last batch of songs we were working on on this episode of Art Talk. You can also watch a different live version of one of my favourite songs, Knocking at the back of my head here.
- Soap (2006 - 2008) - A blues band with Gaurav, who’s been one of my closest friends ever since (you have to hear his sons first single, it’s adorable) & Arjun, who now runs The Piano Man Jazz Club & Michelle & Siddhant, who is a music composer for films (he most recently did the music for the Netflix show, Jamtara).
- Cyanide (2006 - 2011) - An alternative rock band which was pretty popular at the time. We released an album & two EP’s, some of which you can hear here. We were also one of the finalists of Channel V Launchpad & you can see snippets of our performance here. Funnily, even though the band is not active any more, all members are still involved in music somehow.
- Parikrama (2007 - now) - One of the oldest rock bands from India, Parikrama has been active since I was 4 years old. We’re now in our 32nd year & over my time with them, I’ve played some spectacular concerts with them. This included opening for Iron Maiden twice when they came to India, the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC & playing at the Coronation of the Crown Prince of Bhutan amongst many more that I fail to remember. You can watch a video of our recent release, Tears of the Wizard, here, listen to a Lo-fi version of Vapourize which I produced during COVID here or watch some drum-cam footage of Am I Dreaming here. The band is still active, but we lost Sonam, our lead guitar player & a very close friend in 2020.
- FuzzCulture (2011 - 2018) - This electro-rock act was a return to my roots with Arsh, my childhood friend and band member of the first school band that I played with. It was also the stepping stone of me getting into music production & composition & in the few years we were together, we released quite a bit of music. You can hear some of the music we put out & the newer material here.
- Shubha Mudgal & Koshish (2012 - now) - A very different genre of music that I’d never played before, this Fusion project is the brainchild of Dr Aneesh Pradhan & Shubha Mudgal. We’ve also collaborated on some performances specially curated for the Serendipity Arts Festival, snippets of which you can see here.
- Studio Fuzz (2012 - 2020) - A music production studio that enabled me to spend a lot of time composing for the visual medium & working with great artists producing their songs. We did music for the feature film, MCream, the trailer for which is available here while the songs are here. A lot of the television work I’ve done with Studio Fuzz & independently is available here.
