One of India’s best metal bands Bhayanak Maut’s vocalist Sunneith Revankar is summing up how his friends have reacted to him moving to Bengaluru from Mumbai. He says his Mumbai friends laugh and say, “Okay” when he tells them about his move and his Bengaluru friends say, “Okay macha,” says Revankar.
The vocalist, who has also worked with the likes of prog metal/rock band Skyharbor and Bengaluru experimental metallers Limit Zero, moved to this city two months ago for work in the advertising industry and continues to be a part of Bhayanak Maut. Revankar says, “I lived in Bengaluru for a year when I was 16 and fell in love with it. It’s a little different now because of all the traffic, but it’s still Bengaluru and that’s good.”
Revankar had a busy year between 2011 and 2012, when he lent vocals to Skyharbor’s double album Blinding White Noise: Illusion and Chaos , Limit Zero’s debut album Gravestone Constellations , Mumbai heavy metal band Albatross’s theatric track ‘Uncle Sunny at the Tavern’ and Mumbai post-hardcore band Goddess Gagged’s album Resurfaces . He says it wasn’t “so much a matter of having free time, it was more about being sought out by those bands” that led him to do guest spots. “I was fortunate to have met talented musicians who wanted to work with me. If I had to do it all over again, I would do those collaborations even with my current busy schedule.”
And that he has – with his latest contribution to Mumbai metal band Zygnema’s groove-heavy new album What Makes Us Human Is Obsolete . Revankar growls his way through the track ‘A Design to Choose’, a track he worked on after filling in as frontman for Zygnema when the band’s vocalist Jimmy Bhore suffered an injury. After that, a collaboration was a long time coming, according to Revankar, who adds, “Those guys are really good friends of mine, and I’ve done a whole lot of guest spots for them over the years. I even did a show with them in Hyderabad when Jimmy “had an accident”. In fact, when Inferno (metal festival in Norway) announced that Zygnema will be playing at the festival, Kadadi and I half-joked about pushing Jimmy down a flight of stairs and injuring him so that I could do the show.” Revankar confirms that after his move to Bengaluru, he’s already started working with Limit Zero on a new single and also a new post-rock/trip hop project started by Bhayanak Maut guitarist R. Venkatraman called Old. While he says work, family and Bhayanak Maut take up most of his time, he expresses an interest in working with guitarist-producer Ketan Bahirat from Until “if both our schedules are open enough.”
He’s also looking forward to catching more of his current favourites such as sludge rock band Shepherd and Until We Last live in action.
As for Bhayanak Maut, who released their third album Man to critical acclaim in October last year, Revankar says it’s a different experience working from here on new material. “We had about five new songs ready for vocals even before Man was released. How Vinay (co-vocalist) and I work is, we take the songs back home, write parts, and bring them back to the studio and exchange ideas. Since I won’t have that liberty anymore, I’ll be sending demos from here to the band over the Internet,” says Revankar.
It’s evident that he misses a band that he’s been a part of since 2008.
