Category: Music

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London Undergound – Nitin Sawhney

I like the whole package. Even though this album is inspired by a tragic event, I think every city/village should have a package of something like this. Music and sounds you hear in the day/night and in the city’s mainstream/underbelly.  Because we all have a story to tell, wherever we live, though music.

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Even though the regional film music is still the favorite of the masses in India, the Indie bands are slowly and steadily finding themselves a place in the Indian and International music scene. Mother Jane, Avial, Swarathma etc are a few popular names among them. Numerous other bands and musicians are making people take a ride in the fresh musical waves. Websites like Uhooroo and Tempostand features a lot of such original artistes and their music. Many of these artistes are yet to cut their first debut album but release singles through their own websites and other music community websites including MySpace Music. You can also find amateurs or semi-professionals creating and distributing music for free through platforms like Blogswara.

The change is visible even in regional languages like Malayalam. The times when you heard only the filmy tunes have now given way to fresh sounds and I’m not referring to those crappy songs which people churn out in the name of “musical albums”, but works like Thaalam for example.

Times of India has a good article on this current music scene in India. Worth a good read.

Sam Lall, editor of Blender magazine, says one of the most encouraging signs over the past few years has been the shift away from covers. “Earlier, the measure of how good a band you were was how well you nailed Metallica. But now, it is all about original material.”

But is an Indian sound the way to go? “That has almost become a cliche. Just putting in an alaap or tabla can sound deliberate and forced. People want to listen to good rock and roll, not necessarily ethnic stuff,” says Lall. But he admits that it does help with a Western audience. “For them, there is the novelty factor.” [Are we ready to ROCK? – Times of India]

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Blogswara has been featured in this year’s annual edition of Malayalam Vaarika, a popular literary weekly in Malayalam by the Indian Express group. In an article about New Media and it’s advantages, B S Biminith has drawn out the possibilities of new media in detail. He has written about Blogswara and original music production in the blogging world. I would like to quote some of the interesting (and valid) points he made in the article. Pardon any translation errors:

There are many people among us who compose and broadcast their songs through blogs. These music blogging efforts cannot be observed as a time pass art. Such popular trends may not please the traditionalists, but it doesn’t walk in the ways of popular music that is targeted at the market. When the concepts like Blogswara become active, it will re-write the very idea of popular music.

Since the current popular music is a market-oriented process they push their music through advertisements and the music programmes in various audio and visual media. But the groups like Blogswara are totally different from this. They don’t have to run after the trends because they don’t have any commercial interests. Also there are many opportunities to accept, reject or suggest changes, as there are no other influential barriers existing between the audience and musicians. In that way, such public platforms provide all the ingredients to form the real popular music. We can also observe that such platforms, which could become a threat to the stardom of the current music scene, as a chance for people from around the world who have musical interests to step to the public on their own. That is how this decentralized model of music challenges the traditionalism.

For those who can read Malayalam, click on the image below to read a portion of the article: