Bengaluru-based music duo Bryden-Parth recently released their debut album Chameleon World. The album is a multilingual release that explores everyday realities of life that have been experienced by the band members, individually and collectively. The 10-track album has guitar and flute influences with drums and percussion. The album features tracks in Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi and English and we catch up with Bryden Lewis, one half of the duo, to find our more…
Can you tell us more about Chameleon World?
I’ll start with how we decided to name the album. Parth and I have been professional musicians for the past 12 years and we have been touring quite extensively. Because of that, we got to experience different cultures and styles of music. We realised that everyone behaves in a certain way in different circumstances and that behaviours are almost always Chameleon-like. That led to the title of the album.
Your first single from the album is called Rain Chant which features music from the indigenous Uttara Kannada tribe Halakki-Vokkaliga. How was that experience?
We chanced on this tribal community in a magazine. Parth and I were really intrigued by their story. They are a singing tribe, they have these chants about the daily activities of life. They are found in the northern foothills of the Western Ghats in Karnataka. We heard them chant about the rain, where they called upon the rain gods. We pursued this collaboration for over two years and to get in touch with them was a huge task. We had no clue if they would be hospitable to us or hostile. To our surprise, they were the most friendly people we met and the feeling of meeting them was like going to the source of life and music itself. They are so in touch with mother earth and nature. It was a very overwhelming experience. They were very happy that we were talking about them in the song. I don’t think they have even heard the song, but we would want to meet them and show them the music and music video.
What were some of the learnings you took away from that experience?
I think, it taught me to be present at the moment and to also express gratitude for little things that we take for granted. That’s the way they live. They look at everything as an opportunity. We found that very interesting. We took some of our biggest cars over there to shoot the music video and then we realised there is so much more to life. It felt like we went to the fundamentals of living.
How did the idea of working on a multilingual album come about?
Honestly, nothing of it was premedi tated. We have experienced so much in our own lives, with the friends we worked with, and the languages we were introduced to. It was only befitting to write songs in all languages because we find those languages very interesting. Parth and I don’t even understand half of them. We got very good lyricists on board, who would translate our topics and themes into actual songs and who were an extension to our ideologies. We aim t o incorporate as many languages as possible in our songs in the future.
What can we expect from you in the upcoming months?
Bryden-Parth is a commercial voutfit. We play commercial music. We compose commercially as well. So, there is a lot of film work that we intend on doing. There are a lot of jingles that we intend on composing. But now this album release has opened up a lot of possibilities for us. Now, we have two avatars, one which is a commercial and the other is original music.
Chameleon World is now streaming on all major audio platforms and on YouTube.
Email: alwin@newindianexpress.com
Twitter: @al_ben_so