Music is only a part of Fox Traveller's forthcoming show Sound Trek. Uday Benegal and Sahej Bakshi shared their contrasting experiences with I Kaur
luxurious travel, exotic food, surreal music and aimless gallivanting are only the few of the things in store for you. Fox Traveller’s forthcoming series, Sound Trek is all about masti, music and sightseeing. It comes after a series of fusion music shows like Coke Studio, The Dewarist and Sound Trippin. All set to start on August 29, the show will feature 18 Indian musicians who travel to different parts of India to collaborate with local musicians in order to reinvent their old hits. The idea of the show is to “explore” new as well as folk sounds. Sharing their personal experiences and contrasting collaborations were Uday Benegal from Indus Creed and Sahej Bakshi from Dualist Inquiry.
locally new
For Uday Shankar, it was not a big deal collaborating with a local electronic music artiste in Mumbai. What mattered to him was the opportunity he got to explore the city. He said, “It was a fun experience and full of nostalgia. The show is all about exploration. Our idea was to revisit our forms in Mumbai.”
Uday took the song Take it Harder from his album Evolve and worked with a local artiste to reinvent it. While doing so, they went through unvisited areas of Mumbai. “We went to Rang Bhawan, which was an iconic venue for rock music in 80s and 90 till it was shut,” he shared.
He elaborated on the collaboration, “The idea was to take the song and reinvent it. We kept the structure of the song the same but the sound around it was changed. We gave it a new approach in guitar and drums and I (as a vocalist) kept the melody intact. The electronic sound gave the drums and the bass roots.”
Classical electro
The snowcapped mountains, sparkling waters and a house boat were all Sahej Bakshi needed to bring his creative self out. He described the show as, “the individual journey of a musician.”
Being his first ever visit to Srinagar, Sahej was on cloud nine the minute he set foot on the city’s soil. He said, “It was all so well planned out. We were in a house boat hotel which was right in the middle of the lake. There were shops floating next to us and kebabwallas coming upto our boats. I think the place was so mesmerising that I didn’t need anything else.”
He called the format of the show a way of experiencing another artiste’s philosophy. Sahej has collaborated with a seventh generation santoor player, Mushtak Shah Nawaz on his song Isoterra. He shared, “The performance was the highlight of the trip because we were on the deck of the house boat and that was one of the most intense settings I have ever played in. I met with Nawaz ji in the morning and we sat down and jammed a little bit just to see how we play. So I started by playing acoustic and later brought in the electronic bit.”