The Bangalore Collective is an initiative by Benagluru's artistes - musicians, DJs and producers collaborating in an effort to help raise funds for the souls fighting for survival due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the city. The collective came together to perform Heal the World by Michael Jackson.
Musician Brian Bangera says, "It was a wonderful experience. One morning two weeks ago, DJ Yon, a well known DJ from the city, who is also a close friend, called me and informed about about an initiative thought of by Neeraj Kapoor and himself. The focus of the initiative was to release a cover song with multiple singers and use that to encourage people to donate funds which would be used to help a couple of charity undertakings that are feeding people by the thousands during these testing times of the pandemic. I immediately agreed to produce the song and in a while, a WhatsApp group named, The Bangalore Collective, was created. A number of singers were added to the group and we decided to do the song in parts."
Brian says that they decided to do two versions of the song. "I arranged and recorded the instrumentation and my vocals at my home studio and the others managed to record parts and mail them to me even though not all of them had the studio recording equipment needed. Over the course of the next few days as the different singers managed to send their respective recordings, I pieced the song together," he adds.
Artistes Dheeraj Kumar, Kenishaa Francis, Rachna Ramdin, DJ Ganesh, Martin D’souza, DJ Jasmeet, DJ Clement and many others came together for this performance. The collective also release a Hindi version of the song, for which the lyrics have been written by Sasha Sammbi.
"The biggest challenge really was editing each recording sent by artistes. Each ot it was recorded using a very basic set up, some even recorded over the phone without any controlled recording environment. Handling the noise and audio artifacts along with balancing the levels and equalisation to balance the vocals was the most difficult part. All the artistes were very patient and re-recorded parts when requested to without complaining and in effect, put in a lot of effort," Brian tells us.
"The challenges for the video were as much, if not more, due to the fact that everyone recorded their parts using regular mobile phones, each with varying settings. The video edit was handled by Blueprint Productions whose effort and patience deserves a lot of appreciation. I would like to give a special mention of all the people involved in the background work such as PR, marketing, creatives and co-ordination with the organisations - Neeraj Kapoor, DJ Yon, DJ TT, Richard Mathew, Russ Peterson and more," he concludes.
All the proceeds would go towards the Feed The Needy Campaign of NRAI (National Restaurant Association of India) nrai.org/feed-the-needy/ and The Smally's Foundation.
Watch the video here: