Antariksh: A band devoted to making soulful melody in the times of mishmash Hindi music

The story of Antariksh actually goes back to mid of 2012, that’s when we laid down the foundation of Antariksh. I (Varun) along with a couple of friends of mine – Mridul and GT, started the band as an experiment at that point of time. The idea was to bring fresh, edgy and progressive elements from the Western music to Hindi Contemporary music, because we believed that that kind of sound didn’t really exist in our Indian independent music scenario and we thought it might be really cool to create some songs with that kind of vibe. We all used to play for progressive heavy metal bands before that, and we thought in India we have a lot of cool Pop music in Hindi, we have a lot of cool Folk music in Hindi, but no one was doing authentic, edgy Rock Music in Hindi. So that was the idea. It started as an experiment and you know, one thing led to another, and here we are, having completed 6 years as a band. It has been a fun journey.

In my opinion, I think this is the best time to be a musician in India, as the Hindi independent music scenario has been thriving over the last 7-8 years. If you go back 10 years, it was very difficult to have a career in music. There was barely any musician/band taking that leap of faith, and trying to build their careers doing music and nothing else. But that has changed over the last 5-7 years.

I have seen so many people who are doing music full time and doing really well. Also, 10 years ago, there was barely any ‘Hindi’ independent music. All the bands used to be in English, everyone was playing Rock, Blues, Jazz, Metal and such stuff. How it’s transitioned in the last 10 years is that the same people as well as as a lot of young, talented folks are now playing experimental rock, jazz, blues, and pop music in Hindi.

The moment you change the language from English to Hindi, immediately the accessibility that your music has in India increases. I truly believe that at present the scenario is very good for bands to exist, thrive and make a mark. No doubt, Bollywood is still the biggest player in the market when it comes to Hindi music, but I see quite a few bands who are getting a few of their songs featured in movies, and being recognised by independent directors and some really creative people out there. So, yes - overall, I feel this is a fantastic time to be making music in Hindi.

Any band or independent artist, mostly has to take a bottom-up approach. Most of the bands or artists have very limited reach, which is through their limited 4 or 5 social media networks – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. and all their efforts are focused on growing the fan-base bottom up. Hence, it’s very difficult for any independent artist to reach out beyond that network.

You know, you have to spend a lot of money to market your music well. Even when you are ready to spend money on marketing, as bands, most people are not really aware of the right channels through which you should be promoting your music and spending the money. That’s always been a huge challenge for most independent artists I know. While if we compare with what happens in Bollywood, songs are released, there are labels, which already have tie-ups with various promotion channels, marketing media, online magazines, PR agencies, newspapers and all that kind of stuff.

So, when the song is released from that stand point, it has a much better reach, because the distribution network is already sorted. Whilst, being in a band, you don’t have that kind of a network at your disposal. So, it’s quite challenging. You have to spend a lot of time trying to research and find out what the best medium to market your music through is, and how you can get the best ROI. You always have limited budgets, and that’s the biggest constraint. That’ll always be a constraint for any independent artist.

From a very unbiased perspective, it is still largely dominated by film music. I still believe that a huge percentage of the music which is played to the masses is film music. But, when you talk about the music scenario being friendly to albums/bands, all I can say is it’s getting better. It’s far from a perfect scenario, where as an artist you can focus on simply creating the best piece of music and hoping for some meritocracy to be there. Ideally, if the music is really good, it should get through and you know, there’ll be people to pick it up. But that doesn’t happen in reality. Is it friendly to albums? I don’t think so. Albums are not really working that well anymore. As everyone says, it’s the time of singles. Listeners these days don’t have that great an attention span or the patience to listen to an entire album. Also, there’s so much content available everywhere. For example, if you log on to Netflix, there’s so much content - you are confused on which movie to watch, and you spend literally 15 minutes browsing through the stuff, and it’s pretty overwhelming. I feel it’s the time of singles and bands really need to focus on one song at a time. They should try their best to get it produced well, create a good video, as just putting the song out along without the video is also something that’s not working really well these days. So, overall, there’s still a long way to go for bands, however - things are surely improving.

If we talk specifically about Antariksh, my goal is to become the biggest Hindi rock band in the country. Also, we do not want to just limit ourselves to being called a band playing live gigs, we want to be scoring music for films. We want to be producing much more music for advertisements and jingles than we do at present. As a band, the target over the next 2-4 years is to be touring across the world, playing our style of Hindi rock music. Also, writing new music is something we want to do consistently. 15-20 years down the line, I’ll be really proud to have 10-15 albums to showcase. That vision sort of inspires me as an artist.

Remixes – I am not a big fan of remixes. Not a big fan of Bollywood reinventing some their own songs. Bollywood is the platform where with anything they release, they have the reach to millions of people – through radio/TV etc. Some of the recent re-remixes of Bollywood songs from 90s sounded so shabby, I can’t tell you. I understand that it’s really easy to market those songs because they are already popular, but I feel people at Bollywood should focus more on creating good, original music rather than remarketing the old songs in the form of remixes.
Talking about the Riyaz vs Autotune stuff, what’s happened is that technology has made it really easy for a lot of people who couldn’t have been artists earlier on, to become artists. There’s good and there’s bad to it. The good part is that technology allows a lot of room for creativity. Autotune and other things are actually small tools which should ideally be used to only increase the production quality of a song. For example – using Melodyne, (the software used to autotune) to mildly improve the nuances of an already good singer is alright. I’ll tell you, 100% of the songs these days use autotune. Even if the best of singers has sung the song, there’s a tiny bit of touch up required, and softwares like Melodyne are meant to do just that. Fine tune. That tiny touch up is required and if autotune is doing that, that’s totally fine. That’s the use of technology to make a really good product. However - if you’re relying entirely on Autotune and you don’t want to work on your singing skills, or guitar playing or whatever instrument you are playing, then that’s just not cool. It might give you some short term success, but in the long term, I doubt it works out well for anyone.

We’re fortunate enough to have had some received fantastic response to some of our music. So, our first Album ‘Khoj’ was released in 2013, and it got some really great reviews from the music community as well as lots of online music magazines & newspapers, while at the same time it also appreciated a lot by the common listeners. That worked really well for us. More recently, we released our new single – ‘Kaahe Re’, which will later on feature in our second album and it’s got some amazing response. The song was selected as one of the 7 songs, out of 170 song entries to be pitched and played in front of 4 eminent filmmakers from Bollywood – Subhash Ghai, Mohit Suri, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and Anurag Basu at the ‘All About Music’ conference in Mumbai last month. So, I was called on the stage and the song was played to these guys and each of them gave their critical feedback, and we got some really fantastic comments and appreciation from those guys, which truly means a lot and gives us confidence that we’re headed in the right direction.

Overall, we’re truly grateful to our families, fans and the entire music community for all their love and support, which allows and pushes us to continue making new music and treading new terrains. We are looking forward to releasing a lot of new music this year - so, stay tuned and hopefully, we’ll catch you on the road at one of our gigs.