Making Sound Waves

recently. At the beginning of the year,about 40 albums/EPs were slated for

release in 2013. While a few of them have been delayed,there’s still a lot of music that has been launched. While popular names such as Scribe and Raghu Dixit Project have returned with new material that will release over the next couple of months,new bands,too,have been garnering most of the attention. Here are three of them at Weekender that one must check out:

Nischay Parekh

Vijay Nair,founder of Only Much Louder,co-organiser of NH7 Weekender,is an unabashed fan of Nischay Parekh. And for good reason. His band’s chilled out synth-infused pop is a refreshing new sound to emerge from the indie music scene. Its dream like landscapes in Ocean,the debut EP,has been given form by producer Miti Adhikari,who has worked with the likes of Radiohead and Foo Fighters.

It’s easy to mistake Parekh for a singer-songwriter act,with its minimal music and prominent vocals. But the 20-year-old joins hands with Berklee College of Music alumni Jivraj ‘Jiver’ Singh of Skinny Alley and Gandu Circus fame,and Dylan Varner-Hartley. “We don’t play in a classic live band set-up. There are analogue instruments that we use,such as delay pedals,old drum machines,tiny toy-like keyboards,among other gadgets,” says Parekh,who has opened for Norah Jones,and will play at all four NH7 Weekenders this year. Their live set,Parekh says,is very different from what you hear on the album.

Frame/ Frame

There are a growing number of electronic music producers who can play their music live and Frame/Frame (pronounced as Frame by Frame) is one of them. The project by Nikhil Kaul,a 26-year-old musician/producer,released an incredible,difficult-to-classify downtempo EP,Swimmers,earlier this year. He combines glitchy sounds,housey high-hats and claps with dubstep and drum ‘n’ bass influences. Kaul has been a part of various bands as he grew up in Delhi but got “sick of these failed projects”. “I grew up listening to different kinds of music. My music has a rock sensibility,which I mix with bass,and put that in an electronic music environment,” he says.

Bone Broke

Dinkar Dwivedi’s project Bone Broke has been bagging all the right kind of gigs — he has played at The Scene,Control Alt Delete and will now play at Weekender,Pune. There’s a lot of intrigue surrounding this 25-year-old’s music. His band line-up has changed almost every time he has played a gig,and if you weren’t at one of them,you have no idea what it sounds like.

That’s because out of the bands we have previewed,he is the only one who has not released an EP yet and has uploaded just one of his tracks online. But that has added to the what-the-hell-is-everyone-talking-about buzz that surrounds his band. “I wrote these tracks when I was still doing the rounds as a singer-songwriter,but I soon realised that they did not work as mellow folksy songs. I don’t think I still have the final sound down,and I have been road-testing them with minor tweaks with arrangements at different gigs. As soon as I am confident I will record an EP,” says Dwivedi,the vocalist of the garage-rock outfit.