Star Track

That was three years ago. The name has stuck on but their music is anything but alien now. As the band played to a packed house at High Spirits on Sunday,the audience couldn’t stop dancing to the trippy tracks. They collected around the stage and formed a grooving mass of dancers. For the Mental Martians,who are currently on its third anniversary tour of four cities including Mumbai,Pune,Delhi and Vizag,it’s a sign that they’ve “made it”.

“Initially,it was very awkward; people didn’t know what our music was about and it was more like educating the crowd,” says Sarvesh Shrivastava,the band’s frontman,accompanied by Piyush Bhatnagar and Tarang Singhal.

Their music is hard to bracket into a category. The track The Invasion Begins starts with a purely techno sound,building up right to the climax when the percussion steps in. From here,the track picks a new groove that makes your head and feet move involuntarily. The Mental Mix,on the other hand,starts off with a hyperactive percussive theme,and this time,the electronic music works around the beats.

It is in fact this combination of electronic dance music (EDM) and live percussion that makes their music peculiar and sometimes overwhelmingly energetic. Shrivastava and Bhatnagar,who handle DJing and production duties,give the music its electronic bit,while the crazy beats come from Singhal,who uses instruments from across the world to add that extra kick.

Singhal uses the tabla,Turkish darbuka,African djembe,Latin bongos as well as other homemade instruments. “When we’ve performed at festivals such as Sunburn,people learnt about our music. Now,they know what to expect,” he says.