Young at heart

Mohit Rao

A rather handy barometer for measuring the popularity of an indie musician is the number of likes his artiste page has garnered on Facebook. Given the small-pond stature of the circuit in India, if an outfit has notched up even a few thousand, it means that it's managed to generate a fair bit of buzz within the limited boundaries of the scene (the one-lakh barrier is normally the preserve of seasoned pros like Pentagram and The Raghu Dixit Project). But even so, we did a double take when we checked out the pages of the acts on the line-up for a gig series slated for this evening, called The REproduce Listening Session. Mohit Rao had 777 likes, the highest number. Naar' had 513. Kingro and RSS had only 50 and 51, respectively. And the duo of Ambika and Nirmit didn't even have their own artiste page at the time of writing this copy.

Bhanuj Kappal

So, we called up the event's co-curator, Bhanuj Kappal, to quell our incredulity. He explained, "Rana Ghosh, who runs a booking agency called REproduce Artists, is a friend of mine. And we were looking for shows that cater to experimental musicians who play lesser-known genres like noise and ambient music. But we got sick of waiting for others to do it. So, we decided to take the onus on ourselves and look for artistes who had been underserved by the music industry."

The result was a series of gigs called Listening Room, started two years ago. It involved taking over offbeat venues, like an under-construction building in Bandra. And Listening Sessions is a natural offshoot of that endeavour, where even though the gig takes place in a more mainstream place, the methodology of the curation remains the same, i.e. giving centre stage to artistes who exist on the margins.

Time: 9 pm
At: The Habitat, Hotel Unicontinental, Khar West.
Call: 9833358490
Entry: Rs 300

Catch up on all the latest Crime, National, International and Hatke news here. Also download the new mid-day Android and iOS apps to get latest updates