Treat from a mix of talents

The line-up for the Bacardi NH7 Weekender Express this Sunday also features a mix of established and emerging talents in the rock circuit.

Indian Ocean, regarded as a frontrunner band in the indie circuit, keeps adding new fans each year they play in this neck of the woods.

Indian Ocean’s music is an amalgam of contemporary rock, Indian classical, jazz, folk music and fusion that integrates themes like spiritualism, activism, environmentalism, the futility of war and mythology.

Formed in 1990, it was the first Indian band on the cover of Rolling Stone.

The band’s lyrics often borrows from many local dialects and folk melodies, best exemplified by one of the staples of their live concerts, ‘Kandisa’.

They also have composed music for movies including Black Friday (2007), Peepli Live (2010), and Masaan (2015).

The band features Rahul Ram (bass, vocals), Amit Kilam (drums, percussion), Nikhil Rao (guitars), Tuheen Chakraborty (tabla) and Himanshu Joshi (vocals).

Skrat is a hard rocking band from Chennai fresh from releasing their fourth studio album ‘Bison’, which portrays a comic-book style universe starring General Bison and his unlikely band of characters battling injustices in their world.

The band featuring T.T. Sriram on guitar and vocals, Jhanu Chanthar on bass guitar and Tapass Naresh on drums has made it a trait to come up with songs about imaginary characters and pit them against relatable struggles of the modern world.

Vivian Fernandez who goes by the stage name Divine, is a Mumbai based rapper and founder of Gully Gang. He broke into the hip hop circuit with ‘Jungli Sher’, an autobiographical take on life in the ghettoes in Maximum City.

Ritviz is a young Pune-based DJ, singer and dance music producer. His most recent and most acclaimed body of original work is a 4-track EP titled ‘Yuv’, which crossed 100,000 streams in less than 10 months of release in 2016. His music is defined as bass heavy, and rich in eastern sounds owing to his training in Hindustani classical music. His debut EP, ‘Vizdumb’ (2014) and a single, ‘Mukti’ (2015) were subsequently released, the latter by High Chai Recordings – the US-based global bass music label.

The show is scheduled to start at 4.30 p.m.