The tunes of Telangana
What musician Chris McGuinness discovered during his travels across the state
Hyderabad: Chris McGuinness was as “naive as any other foreigner” when he started travelling across India. But, a few months of travelling opened up a whole new world of music for the producer. Most importantly, he saw closely how the socio-political scenarios in each region had an effect on the art.
Now working with a full-blown project called The Word Sound Power that focuses on the music for social change, Chris has returned to Hyderabad to finish the Telangana leg of the project.
Chris’ research so far has been a tough one. The challenges includes the fact that most of ‘T’ culture is folk traditions with minimal documentation. “Everything, absolutely everything, is new about Telangana. It is like no other region we have been to so far,” he says.
The Word Sound Power Project that started in 2010 also involves Dancehall artiste Delhi Sultanate and videographer and photographer Kush Badhwar. The trio has travelled to Jabbar village in Punjab for the Bant Singh Project and Kucheipadar in South Odisha for the project titled Blood Earth.
“It is not about showcasing ‘suffering’. It’s about how people’s lives are connected through culturally and materially through music. When I travelled across India, I met so many people and discovered so many sounds that I began to really connect with. And the most significant question for me was to see if music could transform lives,” he says.
The two musicians Chris and Delhi Sultanate share a great chemistry owing to their shared interest in socially powerful music and also the need to go in search of new sounds. They collect sounds and music that is native to a region and turn them into tracks or remixes. These are then released online for free, making it available to everyone.
Music is just a starting point. The project at large goes beyond just music. Through their travels the trio is collecting photographs and even capturing stories of the people on film. The trio, equipped with a mobile studio, goes around recording the sounds and sights of the region. The material also reaches the urban populace through documentary screenings and photography exhibitions.