On his maiden visit to India, Skrillex, leading electronic music producer, manages to evoke the oohs and aahs from a highly anticipative 8,000-strong crowd. Christy Varghese reports
As we were walking on the street, adjacent to Kingdom of Dreams which led to Huda Grounds, a small group of people walking ahead of us were frisked by on duty policemen before being led away for ‘something illegal’. Brisk alertness was on show for everyone on Sunday night as influential EDM heavyweight, Sonny John Moore or Skrillex, as he’s popularly known, was scheduled to play a set of his trademark grimy dubstep beats as part of his maiden India tour.
We felt extremely fortunate to wriggle inside the venue without any major incident. But seriously, at one point we were on the verge of giving up all hopes of viewing Skrillex play as all entry gates witnessed an excessive amount of hustle and bustle with instances of raised voices and needless threats inducing panic in us. But all that chaos was worth the sigh of contentment we let out on gaining access to listen to the opening set played by Delhi-based electronic artist Nucleya, who played some of his famous numbers like Akkad Bakkad and laung Gawacha for over an hour on the turntables, inducing an adrenaline rush to the 8000+ people attending the event, courtesy Vh1 Supersonic Arcade.
As we strolled around the venue, we discovered to our dismay that crawling seems more apt to describing our slow progress. We navigated our way around a young crowd sipping on pitchers of beer while furiously shaking their heads to the beats simultaneously. As we crawled towards the VIP area of the venue, Amber Giles, better known as Mija, her stage name, started mixing her set in preparation for Skrillex’s entry. Two years ago, at an after event party in Arizona Skrillex had come up to Mija and asked her whether she would like to play back to back sets with him. Since then Mija has been opening for Skrillex regularly. Mija’s enthusiasm could be plainly observed, as she also toyed around with desi bhangra beats towards the conclusion of her hour long set, to the excitement of the assemblage.
Although Skrillex adorned his trademark look of an all black attire and nerd glasses, he had a comparatively Indian touch we pondered as he rushed onto the stage. It took us some time to put our finger down on this, but we had a hearty laugh over it when it struck us that Skrillex resembled Circuit, played by Bollywood star Arshad Warsi in the Munnabhai movies, in his black knee-length open collared shirt and a glittery chain dangling from his neck. But we have to admit, as he climbed onto the turntables, waving the popular Skrillex ‘Alienation’ flag, it could be plainly observed that his mere presence charged up the crowd thronging the venue.
After greeting the crowd with a meek, “Namaste Delhi”, Skrillex got down to business by playing a remix of his first single, My Name Is Skrillex, to the delight of the pumped up folks attending the event. The fooling around bit, a given Skrillex characteristic, was at the fore during the course of his hour and ten minutes long set, but not so much as in next song that he played, Breakn’ a Sweat. The entire stage had videos and visualisations projected on to it but while Breakn’ a Sweat was being played, the projected video cheekily featured a retro Chiranjeevi doingdhumkas from a Tollywood movie in sync to the drops of the respective single. During the course of the show, the trademark stage gimmicks of green laser light, fireworks and smoke was accompanied by some high end display pyrotechnics from the mainstream flame projector. Skrillex went on to many of his hit singles like First of the Year (Equinox), Right in andKyoto amongst many other remixes.
He ended his Indian tour with a Bang-arang in NCR while signing off with a typical somber Skrillex quote, “You don’t need to do much to live your dreams.” With the almost unparalleled success of his Indian debut, Skrillex’s fan would be hoping for his return in the near future.