Together as one

The spirit of collaboration between Indian indie musicians blossomed like never before during the pandemic, and four disparate artistes show us how

Two to tango

Anurag Shanker and Namit Das are long-term collaborators who reached out to people like Rajasthani folk musicians during the pandemic to give their sound a new direction. But for Shanker, he found a collaborator much closer to home in this period — his wife, Malini Hariharan. “She is in the business of music while 
I am more of a creator, but she has always been listening to more evolved artistes than I have. And while we were stuck at home during the pandemic, we decided to start an Instagram series called You, Me and Quarantine, where we did covers of old 1980s and ’90s classics,” Shanker says.

The idea, he continues, was to give people a fuzzy, nostalgic feeling that reminded them that even though things might seem bad right now, they were better earlier, and will eventually go back to being that way. Gradually, friends from college — who are also musicians — started coming on board, including Arfaaz Kagalwala, who is now based in France. So, the husband-wife duo figured out a system to get them on board, and Shanker says that this series won’t stop, because, in his own words, “the pandemic is not stopping either”.

The stars align

(From left) Akash Chanda, Sumeet Thakur, Hinoki and Sarat Rao

The story of Sol Moon wouldn’t have started had it not been for the pandemic. Four individuals — Sarat Rao, Sumeet Thakur, Akash Chanda and Hinoki, a Japanese national — found themselves in Goa towards the end of last year, and by February, they had joined musical forces to make music that is experimental, and yet approachable at the same time. Rao had shifted to Goa from Mumbai and Chanda from Pune. Thakur, who is also an actor, is a bit of a nomad. And as for Hinoki, “She actually got stuck in India when the first lockdown hit, and moved to Goa to set up base here,” Rao says.

It was Hinoki and Chanda who initially started performing as a duo, and then, when Rao and Thakur landed up in the sunshine state, the quartet took shape. It’s a rare story, of people from different cities coming together and forming an actual, physical band during the pandemic. Call it serendipity, but it also encapsulates the spirit of collaboration that we are talking about in this article.

Women to the fore

Ashwini Hiremath (left) with Pratika Prabhune

The burgeoning genre of hip-hop in India has primarily been a male domain. But that started changing during the pandemic, says Mumbai-based Pratika Prabhune aka Prabhuneigh, who is part of India’s first-female hip-hop collective called Wild Wild Women, formed mid-last year. “We have B-girls, graffiti artistes and rappers, and we even had an all-women cypher when  the lockdown lifted briefly last year, with 12 MCs in attendance,” she says, attributing this trend to the fact that women had more time to read, understand and absorb the concept of hip-hop music, which gave them the gumption to actually start putting material out.

Prabhune, in fact, started her own hip-hop career during the early days of the first lockdown last year. She joined forces with Ashwini Hiremath aka Krantinaari to launch the country’s first female rap duo, Won Tribe, and the two have been going strong since. “I would call it an uprising of sorts,” she says about the increasing emergence of women in hip-hop, which, like we said, was predominantly a male bastion before the pandemic.

Electric energy

Before last year’s lockdown, Himay Kumbhani aka Himay, an electronic music producer, had been collaborating with Dharam Intwala for a project that got derailed post March 2020. “There’s always an issue when two artistes are working remotely and we had to find a middle ground. Earlier, when we were in the same room, we could give each other instant feedback, and that flow broke because of the pandemic,” he says.

But the two figured out a way to work around the obstacles. Kumbhani tells us that with time, the process of remote collaboration became so smooth for him that he even released an album called The House Sounds of India, which not only had him experimenting remotely with two Indian classical vocalists for the first time, but also six producers from different cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

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