While Dash Berlin and Nervo were the headliners at Sunburn Noida 2013, the local talent was the real crowd-puller. Iknoor Kaur attended the fest
The sky turned orange, and the whisper of the crowd escalated into a roar. Sahej Bakshi took stage with his guitar backed console and in few minutes the ground at Galgotia University was filled to over capacity. Sunburn Noida 2013 kicked off on a powerful note and lived up to its hype. This time it was not about Dash Berlin or Nervo, but about the music. Where one expected the headliners to grab all the attention with their closing sets, surprisingly Indian artistes like Anish Sood and lost Stories, Dualist Inquiry and NDS and Blue turned out to be the real crowd-pullers.
Joint Managing Director Percept, Shailendra Singh was elated with the response. He said, “People always ask me that you had this artiste coming in last year and that one the year before, who are you going nowIJ I always have one answer for them, ‘Sunburn is not my festival. It is a fest that is by the fans, of the fans and for the fans. You want me to get you an international artiste, so be it and if you want Indian artistes, I will be more than happy to bring them. Sunburn is about the music not the names.”
Amidst the flying confetti and disco lights and the ‘live, love and dance’ slogans, the dual stage setup was a perfect mix of electronic music. While the Space Station stage took all the flashes because of their fancy setup and electro trance music, the Space Jungle stage stuck to more of electro rock. Anish Sood who played at the Space Jungle stage showed us a video on his phone of the crowd dancing to his beats. He shared, “It was such a fabulous experience being up on stage knowing that so many people are dancing to your music. People are paying attention to the quality of music than the artist. Earlier it was always the international artistes that people came to Sunburn for, but we can see a change now.”
Though Sunburn officially ran into its seventh year, this was the second edition of Sunburn Noida and the only thing not there in this edition was the long-known director of Submerge Nikhil Chinapa. However, nobody at the event including the fans seemed to have missed the person who called himself “the man behind Sunburn”.
“I have 178 events of Sunburn that happen through the year and there is a team of over 4,000 people working to make sure it all happens. Sunburn is a collective effort. Nikhil is the topic of the past and I don’t think his absence is going to affect the show at all,” said Singh.
Savneet Bachhal, a regular at Sunburn festivals said that Chinapa’s absence may have actually been a good thing. “The fact that nobody except the artistes are under the limelight is good. Chinapa never let the attention go to the artiste because everyone kept chanting his name,” she added.
Another girl at the event, Shaheen Bhatt shared, “The kind of energy that is there is brilliant. We have just been hopping from one stage to the other.”
In the coming years, Singh hopes to make Sunburn a brand big enough for people from all over the world. “I want it to be such an energetic and vibrant festival that in the coming years people across the world can say, ‘let’s go for Sunburn!’”Sunburn is now headed to Mumbai and Bengaluru on November 15 and 16 and November 16 and 17 after which it will go to Goa in December.
