The latest band to make their way into the city’s music scene, is an experimental rock band Tamas. One of the very few multilingual bands, the five member troupe has already created a stir by releasing their first single Nitya, which is an emotional outburst at the sad instances of the recent atrocities against women.
In a tete-a-tete with Vysakh Sivadasan, Allen Antony, Bernard Rohan, Heshav Sainath, Anand and Unni Krishnan, we get to know more about the bands conceptualisation, inspirations and everything else...
Tamas is a Sanskrit word meaning darkness. And as the name suggests, idea behind the band was to take all the dark things present in society and talk about it.
“Women have been targeted for a really long time and with the mass molestation in the city on new years, we thought it was high time somebody talked about it,” says Unni Krishnan, the lead vocalist. “There are a number of issues that affect us but we chose to start with this,” adds Keshav, the youngest of the group who plays the guitar.
But all is not dark with Tamas, according to Bernard, the bassist. “We don’t want to restrict ourselves with just talking about dark and deep stuff so we try to balance it out by performing lighter covers of songs in different languages,” says the youngster who doubles as a technical writer.
Still new to the music scene in the city, the band believe they are cut out for it and are even confident that they stand apart from the rest of the upcoming bands! “There are not many bands who are multilingual and perform music from different languages, so I think we are ok,” smiles Anand.
But how did they manage to learn so many languages?“We are from Bengaluru and we come from different backgrounds so we know our mother-tongues and a little of every language people communicate with in the city,” clarifies Allen, the keyboardist.
The troupe are all set to release their next Kannada single titled Baare, later this month. “The song is about very intense love and we are still in the process of recording it. But in the mean time we have two more tracks that we are working on which also deal with issues very close to us,” says Unni, in conclusion.
