Vivek and Mervin sleep through the day. And then, at six in the evening, they meet up at their studio at Chinmaya Nagar and start jamming. There’s no fixed schedule, no song situation. Their aim is just to create one musical idea.
“It can be a tune, a riff, a hook line, or just a four-sentence lyric,” explains Vivek, “Every day, we do something that can be added to our music bank. These ideas usually translate into a song. When directors come to us, we pick and choose from what might work for the situation they have in mind.”
It’s a work style that’s gaining ground in musical circles in recent times, and something quite different from the traditional style of composing a tune after the director comes up with a “situation”. “Well, it’s worked for us,” smiles Vivek. They’ve taken it slow — with just four films in four years — but the duo has managed to create a distinctive sound.
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They’re hoping to recreate that in their debut independent effort, ‘Orasaadha’, releasing today. A four-minute song on a youngster’s first love, ‘Orasaadha’ falls in the new-age electro pop genre. “We’ve been wanting to do an independent track for long, and the Madras Gig happened to come at the right time. It’ll be a while till our next film album releases since we’ve just started working on it. ‘Orasaadha’ will hopefully fill that gap,” says Mervin.
On flashback mode
The journey of Vivek-Mervin started when they were in college. Aspiring musicians back then, they teamed up with Anirudh, Leon James, among others, to dish out Carnatic fusion, the in thing then.
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“I come from a Carnatic music background, while Mervin’s music revolved around Gospel and Western classical tracks,” says Vivek, “Whenever we jammed, we realised that our musical influences were so different. We felt that there was a lot to learn from each other.”
They continued their collaboration with appearances in the college cultural circuit and other gigs.
Simultaneously, they also did freelance music production, something they really enjoyed. Anirudh was already a composer by that time and had a few hits, and when he called them “if they were interested in film music composition”, Vivek-Mervin knew they were headed in the right direction.
Tinseltown dreams
Th eir numbers from Vadacurry , Pugazh , Dora have become hits, but the music in their last film, Gulaebaghavali , proved to be the most challenging. “Actually, we locked in one or two songs in a single sitting but the main introduction song was proving to be a challenge,” recalls Vivek, “For ‘Guleba’, we had run through a few options and were getting impatient what to pick among them. We didn’t want it to be a template introduction song. Till the point we hit the last option, there was confusion in the process...but once it happened, things fell in place.”
With ‘Orasaadha’, though, things did fall in place quite early. “Depending on the feedback to this single, we plan to work on more independent stuff in the coming years,” they say.
7 UP Madras Gig, presented by Sony Music and Knack Studios, will see six original independent songs. The line-up includes Leon James, Santhosh Dhayanidhi, Oorka and Sajith Satya.