The crowd seated at Art Etc—an art gallery in Defence Colony— looked up in serene rapture as musicians Rahul Jigyasu and Vishesh Kalimero began playing their instruments at the Tribal Sound Healing concert on Saturday. The musical concert was part of the Tribal Music and Art festival, which is being conducted at the gallery over the weekend. The event that also hosts a tarot reading workshop, a tribal art group exhibition, and a bamboo wind chime making workshop has been curated by Noida-resident Ekatmata Sharma. “I was very keen on having this concert. Once that materialised, I thought why not make it like a weekend festival [of art] because Delhi does not have such events. It will be nice for people to come out and have a nice healing session and absorb the art around them,” she shared.
Kalimero and Jigyasu spearhead Musica Medicina, a band that seeks to bring together a mix of sounds and instruments from all over the world in a pursuit to focus on the transformative value of music. They focus on incorporating a blend of folk and tribal instruments, which are usually not used in contemporary music.
“Their music and composition is very meditative since it uses tribal sounds. They [the artists] are the hidden gems of Delhi,” shared Sharma.
Music that heals
The idea behind this music concert was “to create a space where the audience and the musicians can reach an altered state of mind through music”. The music performed by Jigyasu and Kalimero is inspired from indigenous and nature-tradition ceremonies. “We are not playing music similar to indigenous or tribal communities, but we are playing music inspired from such ceremonies. Our music is very contemporary; even though most of the instruments we use are traditional, we play them in a way that they also make sense in the present,” shared Kalimero, who is also a sound therapist.
For the performance on Saturday, the duo used instruments such as the Lyre, a Greek-Indo string instrument; Dotara, an Indian folk instrument from West Bengal; drums from Siberia; Pakhavaj, a two-headed drum from North India; a Kachapi, which is an Indonesian Harp. The vocals, too, were inspired by a melange of global folk traditions. Parul Chaudhary, a keen follower of the band, who attended the Saturday concert, concluded, “I heard them [Musica Medicina] for the first time in 2017 and since then, I have been following them. They just made me go into another world of music and heart which hits you at a different level. Their music almost made me cry.”