DJ Anish Sood performed at Blue Frog with VJ Ramona Arena. He talks to Iknoor Kaur about the growth of EDM in India and his forthcoming projects
While Delhiites throng jigs of international artistes in full attendance, our local artistes seem to be struggling to find an audience. To our surprise, only a handful of people attended DJ Anish Sood’s performance which took place at Blue Frog. The event was a part of Sood’s Heineken Open Your World tour with VJ Ramona Arena. When we asked the DJ, who is fairly known in the city, he said, “I have played at other places in Delhi too where the response has been amazing. There are times when you get lukewarm response too. I think EDM’s popularity among masses is increasing but the pace is low.” Born and brought up in Goa, Anish has been interested in music ever since the age of 11 when he started collecting music cassettes and CDs. By the time he was 13, he had a collection of around 300 CDs. He shared, “CDs were an expensive investment at the time, so as a kid if someone gave me a CD to listen to I would go and add it to my collection. It was only a matter of time and I had a huge library.
In the past few years, Anish has performed alongside Gareth Emery, Steve Aoki, laidback luke, Fedde le Grand, Felix Da Housecat and directly supported David Guetta on his recent India tour. However, producing music came out of sheer curiosity for the 23-year-old. He said that when he was 17 he went to a club and realised that one person on the console was able to hold the attention of a club full of people, for three hours at a stretch. Once Anish got into college he started hosting parties at home and at small hotels and it was not long till he was playing in small clubs in Goa.
Sood now wants to explore the international circuit. “I am playing in Amsterdam and Prague in October and I will be doing a tour in South East Asia next year. The scene here is great, but personally I need to break out. I will be releasing three more tracks this year.”
He is now headed to five other cities including Kolkata, Goa, Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru. He will also be back in New Delhi at Kitty Su on August 16.