Parekh & Singh tell us what to expect from their set at Lollapalooza India | Exclusive

Nishchay Parekh and Jivraj Singh

Parekh & Singh, a dream pop duo from Kolkata, is composed of Nischay Parekh, who sings and plays the guitar and keyboards, and Jivraj Singh, who plays the drums, percussion and electronics. The duo will make their Lollapalooza India debut this year, performing on Day 2 of the festival in Mumbai. Ahead of the show, Mid-day picked their brains on what fans can look forward to during their set and how they manage to remotely make music together.

What can the fans expect from your set at Lollapalooza India?

Jivraj: Some research is going into it in terms of what we might do differently because we have been playing this body of work for some time now. We did a tour not very long ago, so I think since we are going back to Bombay to play to an audience where potentially there's some people who have heard us and seen us before, along with a lot of new audience. Regardless, we're definitely keen on switching things up in terms of how we present the music so that it's interesting for the audience and for ourselves, because I think it's important for musicians to keep reinventing how they approach the work to keep things exciting and fluid and interesting.

Nischay: At this point we have, three whole albums worth of material. So we'll be playing music from all our albums. And as Jivraj said, they'll be sort of new, re-imagined versions of some of our older music, along with our newer songs from our most recent album. Along with the music, we'll be collaborating with an artist on live visuals as well. So that's something new, we haven't collaborated with her before. She's an artist from Bombay.

How do you manage to make music together in sitting in different countries?

Nischay: Jivraj still lives in Kolkata. I actually have been living in Dubai for the last three years. Jivraj and I, we have embraced technology from the very outset of our collaboration. So collaborating remotely and over digital media has been part of our process for a long time. So it's easy to do it, even if we're not physically in the same city or the location.

Tell us a bit about your journey and the niche you have carved for yourselves.

Nischay: It's a progression that a lot of bands or artists go through, where you don't really know what you're doing in the beginning and you're just doing it for the sake of finding something or even without much thought into the process, to be honest, just doing it for the fun of it. Then we went through a phase where we become suddenly a little bit self-aware. You start expecting things out of the music industry and yourself, and then you get to a phase which we're probably in now, where we are circling back to the initial feeling of doing it for the fun of it for ourselves, but now with the added benefit of having an audience that is interested in the fun that we create for ourselves.