From vinyl rituals to retro samplers: Artistes at Sonos Sound Suites Bengaluru talk music experiences

My journey with music started when I was around 14 years old — when I discovered rock and roll music via bands like Nirvana, Pink Floyd, The Beatles and it just opened me up to such a deep world. Some people find their solace in movies, some people find in art and some people find it in crafts. For me, I just knew when I discovered good music, that music is it for me. At that time, like many I had a fantasy of building a life around music, but I didn't have the clarity. But thankfully, some things led me to pursue a career in music. How my journey with vinyl started is — around my first year of college, my friends and I were just roaming in the old Delhi area and I think some shop, not really a record shop but antique shops had antique items CDs and cassettes. So I saw a pile of vinyl records over there and at that time, I didn't even know what a vinyl record is or how it works. I just knew it's a record and that you can play music through it. I didn't know if it was in a good or bad condition, but when you see a vinyl record, it felt fascinating. On your phone, you've got like a small artwork over there, but when you hold a physical piece of music in your hand, it's like a 12-inch piece of artwork, you've got the back sleeve, sometimes you have notes about the music, which you miss fully on a digital access. So there's a backdrop to the music, you've got the track listing, there's also credits to each track, who's the lyricist, you've got a credit to the designer of the cover artwork as well. So it's very personal. Music may disappear from digital platforms at any time, but if you own a piece of music on physical, it's with you. It becomes a part of your life.

I've done a few sessions in Bangalore in the past and the ones I've done before, they're lengthier. It's like one hour sessions and what we do is we usually put the spotlight on one particular album. We talk about the album. I feel like there's been almost like an overload of DJ sets or like loud club music. Gen Z's and young people are moving towards like more silent, more intimate spaces. But today we're doing a new thing. We're having like batches of eight to 10 people and we've created it in sort of a living room situation. During the session, we talk about why a good quality sound is important. And then we'll be listening to three songs in each session and all the songs will be different. We'll have one Indian classical meets western song. We'll have one rock and roll song. Then we'll have one hip hop song to give people a varied sound spectrum. They listen to three songs for completely different genres. So they understand the difference in sound and how a good speaker can make all genres of songs sound good.

I've done DJ sets and listening sessions all over India. And I say this genuinely — I feel like Bengaluru has genuinely the most open-minded crowd when it comes to music. You know, there's a lot of times you play a different sort of music in Delhi. I won't say what kind of music Delhi likes, but some cities are just kind of stuck with one genre. In Benglauru, I feel like people are very open minded. I've seen like people dance to jazz music here, which is not common to see. So I feel like the city has a good mixture of people who are like very open to sound. At the same time, they're collectors of music and audiophiles as well. It's like a nice, you know, very nice, symbiotic ecosystem we're having in Bangalore.

I have been making music for the past 15 plus years but in the recent past I have been experimenting with a lot of sampling devices. Sampling is an art form that involves taking a piece of sound and making it and sequencing it into something of your own and my music revolves around sampling South Indian cinema and merging it with jazz and lo-fi. At the Sono Sound Suites show I am performing with a very iconic sampler called the SP44 and then I will also perform the guitar along with it. Along with me there will be hindustani artist from Bangalore Sahana Naresh contrubuting with her vocals. I will also be performing some of my unreleased music as well along with some of the previously released albums like Raja Has No Friends and then another recently released album called Bangalore Sonic Archives. My music can also be termed as some kind of fusion music. I work with South Indian cinema of the 80s and then fuse it with a lot of jazz elements and my music has a lot of hip hop and electronica elements to it. In these live shows I weave some kind of a story and a narrative with all of these songs that I have composed over a year. This set list, it is a memory of its own. There are a lot of dialogues, samples, sounds from the past, sounds that might be very new, but they all come together and each person present in the audience will have their own interpretation.

In today's modern music production scene we use pretty extensive softwares which are really easy to use. Now my ideology with using too much of modern — I kind of take the other way: I take a step back and then I work with a sampler called the SP-404 — it's a sampler that dates back to like the 90s. This is also an electronic device but it is very clunky. Now there is a lot of human input into it, so I dictate how this machine needs to behave with my music rather than the software correcting it all for you. There are no screens on it, there is one small display. Whatever you hear is exactly what you hear from your ears and the way you chop samples and the way you sequence everything is very human like. There is less and less involvement of external tech rather than me as a human controlling the tech. Alongside sampler, I also use a couple of analogue synthesisers and a few drum machines which are also pretty clunky to use. But then I am the one who kind of controls them. That actually is a very liberating experience for me where I can totally call this music my own.