Massive Attack’s Daddy G and Midival Punditz enthralled an eager crowd at the 10 Heads Festival with their funky live sets. On the last day, Christy Varghese checks out the avenues which lay undiscovered
After attending the inaugural night of the 10 Heads Festival, we just had to come back here at Dhanchiri Camp, NH 8 to catch up with all the things that we had missed out on. After all, we could not ignore the fact that this four-day family extravaganza is spread across 40 acres.
Raul Chandra, director of the 10 Heads Festival as well as Trifecta Entertainment, was at hand to tell us that the initiative behind this unique venture had been in the plans of his team for a while now. “The 10 Heads Festival was an idea that we were toying with for over a decade. Having created festival properties around music, adventure, art and fashion, I still felt that there is room for something bigger better, something that can accommodate the myriad shades of arts in culture in a larger format,” said Chandra, an artist as well as a creative entrepreneur.
As we strolled at a leisurely pace at the spacious venue, foreign, peculiar bass beats indicated a performance with which we were not familiar. And that was our cue to rush to the stage where Dramarama was taking place. Dramarama, which showcased instances of excellences in the theatrical aspect of 10 Heads, consisted of flickering lights, music which involved ambient sounds as well as grimy electronic beats and unparalleled energetic enthusiasm shown by the people performing which was aided by vibrant colours. As onlookers kept their vision trained on the stage, a narrative cum tale unfolded behind screens of smoke
Dramarama is the brainchild of the festival director of 10 Heads, Anshuman Ghulati. “For the 10 Heads Festival, I was very keen to have a musical that captures the essence of the number 10. The musical performance here is an interplay of planets and their symbolic nature. The musical act highlights their basic element and their conflict and attraction on earth,” Ghulati told us, almost illegible over the music, though the Dramarama was a visual treat we later felt that it did not need any explanation and the experience was very much enlightening and uplifting. This was followed by a 10 minute-long performance from the laserman, a manipulator of laserlights, who interacted with the audience with the illusions of crisscrossing green lasers across the night sky.
Though we had to laze around a while after the laserman performance, we discovered that patience always reaps good dividends as the pioneers of Indian Electronica, Midival Punditz, an Indian fusion group consisting of two Delhi-based musicians, Gaurav Raina and Tapan Raj performed a live-set. This performance, which was part of Band Baaja Bass, the musical aspect of this mega event, featuring flautist Ajay Prasanna and the popular vocalist IP Singh of contemporary fusion band Faridkot along with Vidhi Sharma revolved mostly around jungle beats, electronica and North Indian classical music featuring traditional Indian instruments like dhol, sarod, tabla, sarangi and sitar amongst many others.
There was a lot of shoving and jostling as we discovered it the hard way that you have to hold on to your lives when the people in a massive crowd are moving their bodies to some really good music. To those who are not familiar with the troupe, Midival Punditz have worked with Anoushka Shankar, Kailash Kher Ustad Sultan Khan among many other reputable names.
But to our regret, we had to cut short our visit to the main stage when we heard that Dheeraj Verma had just arrived at the Compow Arena for interactive session with animation aficionados. Compow is the aspect of 10 Heads that deals with Pop-culture and E-Creativity, playing host to the best comics, graphic novels, anime, video games, toys, movies, merchandise and everything pop for that matter. Verma’s claim to fame is that he happens to be one of the most prominent comic book artists from India having provided the artwork for several issues of Marvel Comics' Transformers series.
Verma had a surprise in store too as Daddy G, the main act of the night’s music festival, attended the interactive session, seated along with the audience. “My son happens to be a major Transformers fan and if he comes to know that I met the highly famed illustrator of the Transformer series and went home without a sketch by his hands, he will kill me,” laughed Daddy G, while Verma was autographing his sketch of Bumblee Bee, a character central to the cult animated series, for the musician’s son.
Grantley Evan Marshall, known by his stage name, Daddy G, founding member of the trip-hop band Massive Attack, was here to perform an individual set to the delight of EDM lovers here. When we asked him what did he have in mind for the audience tonight, Daddy G was cryptic with his reply, “I think your going to have to wait and listen to my set to know what's it about, but I do pride myself on my musical selection, I have phases when I'm in to different types of music. At the moment I'm in the mood for some DnB (Drum And Bass), dubstep and I have always loved reggae, but let's see what happens.”
Though he played it safe by starting with some mellow beats, Daddy G showed that he was not out of touch by increasing the tempo and succeeding in the apparent motive of making the people sway to his music. To us, it was a delight to watch little kids shaking their heads and tapping their feet to Daddy G's jungle beats accompanied by their parents.
photo Ashutosh Singh Jadon