A few months ago, at a rock music festival organised as part of the annual cultural festival of a city college, the slowly swelling crowd was taken by surprise when five school students came on stage as the event was about to start. The surprise turned to admiration by the time they finished their first song. Over the next 30 minutes, they enthralled the audience with a heavy metal onslaught which almost matched the country’s big names of the genre.
This was the band ‘Absolute Convergence,’ the first metal band to come from Kozhikode in the past two decades and possibly one of the youngest in the country at present. Last week, they released their first single ‘Being a slave,’ the first step towards their debut album. The band was formed in 2011 by drummer Anagh Cholapurath and guitarist Ramiz Sulaiman, now Plus One students at Chinmaya Vidyalaya and Silver Hills School respectively.
But the groundwork for this had started much before they even hit high school. “I started drumming in 2006. Ramiz had already started with the guitar and so had our current bassist Jerry. We were schoolmates and discussions centred on forming a band. In 2007, we formed an alternative/rock band ‘Zerten leos’ and started playing covers of Deep Purple, Scorpions, and Metallica. This continued till 2010 by when we managed to play at a few venues in the city,” says Anagh.
The shift in genres happened with the arrival of vocalist Gautham, the eldest member of the band and the only one among them to have completed school. He brought along his deep throated growls which plays no small part in their aggressive live performances.
“We were concentrating on creating our own style rather than going with the current trends. Bands such as ‘Lamb of God’ and ‘Bhayanak Maut’ did inspire us. But we did not want to be just another band sounding like them,” says Anagh.
The single ‘Being a slave’ has already garnered positive comments from fans and others after it was released online recently. The music while staying true to its metal roots, has more than a shade of Arabic influence, in the main guitar riff and in the soaring vocals. “We were practising at a small room near a mosque. The Muezzin’s call used to blend in with what we were playing. Our keyboardist Don played something which ended up becoming the main riff,” he says. The band has already completed composing six songs and plan to release their album in one year. “We are planning to shift to Bangalore once we complete school. With the amount of gigs happening there it could provide the right exposure for us once we are ready with our album,” he says.
