BENGALURU: City-based musical duo Bryden & Parth, known for their mash-ups, are out with the music video of their song Yeh Awaaz. The song is part of their first debut album Chameleon World. The duo will be doing a multi-city album tour, which is going to kickstart from Bengaluru on September 29.
The album, which has 10 multilingual songs in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, and English, dropped in June. “We thought that a video like this would support the song really well. The song is about rallying the youth of this generation to speak up on the things they believe in. It’s an anthem for this young generation. While everything is reformed, a song like this fits the entire narrative that’s going on right now,” explains band member Bryden Lewis.
Their single from the album was Rain Chant which features music from the indigenous Uttara Kannada tribe Halakki-Vokkaliga. The duo got to know about this tribal community through a magazine. The tribe, found in the northern foothills of the Western Ghats in Karnataka, has chants about everyday activities. The chant where they called upon the rain gods turned out to be the inspiration behind their first single.
Known for their party-starting mash-ups, Lewis and the other half of the band Parth Chandiramani, first met in 2012, way before their band was formed. “We first met when we joined The Raghu Dixit Project in 2012. While we travelled, we would always find ourselves playing music outside of sound checks. The only common interest between the two of us is Bollywood music.
We both grew up listening to Bollywood in our homes quite consistently. After we left that band, we started this endeavour of our own when we played covers for fans and people and they really liked the sound of the guitar and flute and that really snowballed into something eight years later, when it became a full-fledged Bollywood production,” recalls Lewis.
Adding to that, Chandiramani says, “Music came to us naturally, and we don’t overthink the process. It was stuff that we liked that we put together, to begin with.” Having a Bollywood production in Bengaluru, known for its rock and metal band might have sounded uncommon for many during that time, and Lewis agrees. “We didn’t go about playing Bollywood music in the venue to begin with. We always teased it in our cover set. We would play songs from across the world and would include a line or two from Bollywood. When we started doing Bollywood properly, it was on YouTube.
It was not city-specific at all and the country jumped at it. Our first few exclusive Bollywood shows never happened in Bengaluru. It happened at destination weddings or at corporate shows,” says Lewis, adding that it only picked up later. Coming from two different musical backgrounds, Lewis with his Western music influences, and Chandiramani who had been trained classically, many wonder about the kind of musical shows that the duo would pick.
“We’ve spent so much time together. We also do this exercise where we go to music festivals annually and get experiences together. We just like watching people better than us. So we do this annual pilgrimage of getting jazz festivals in Indonesia,” says Lewis.