Four new artists—Dot., Tejas, Dualist Inquiry, and Sheherazaad—share an underlying exploration of genre fusion and the blurring of musical boundaries through jazz, pop, rock, electronic and alternative folk.
DOT.
Aditi wrote her first jazz number when she hadn’t pulled out her salsa heels and gone out dancing for ages. There was a sudden spike in the views and shares of her videos online but she decided to take things slow. Sonically, Aditi’s voice and songwriting edge are unmissable. She has a very solid foundation set in jazz which she bounces off to jump onto other dimensions in music. ‘I had a jazz upbringing so my music naturally became like that. Now, working with other people has made things a lot more different for me. It is heading in a couple of different directions. I’ve started doing some more electronic stuff but the things are still born out of jazz.’ The result of this experiment is her latest work, Girls Night and Indigo.
TEJAS
What singer-songwriter Tejas offers you is an array of different music textures. He has one solid foot in the pop space and the other probably jumping in and out of rock, electronica, synth-wave and Indian classical music. You might recognize his voice as Archies in Netflix’s The Archies and his last album was the highly-rated signature medley of rock, funk, R&B, soul and electronica that won him plenty of accolades and fans. He departs from Outlast for his new EP, Museum which came out this year.
DUALIST INQUIRY
One of our favourite music composers and multimedia artists, Sahej Bakshi’s explorations brought him back home this year. Life came full circle since his third studio album was a moving ode to new fatherhood. He gave us his third studio album this year called When We Get There. ‘My intention with this album was for it to work across a few different contexts and settings. I often think of my music as thinking or driving music. That’s how I often listen to my favourite albums,’ he explained. ‘One of my favourite things is when the music sort of sneaks up on you and gets under your skin, and you don’t even realise it. I try to make the same thing happen live, where the emotional and psychological space is the most important thing. And the groove is almost a supporting character, propping up the rest of the song – delivering an emotional message.’
SHEHERAZAAD
Sheherazaad is an experimental audio-visual artist who blends her cultural influences from the San Francisco Bay Area, India, and New York to create immersive and engaging experiences for her audience. Her latest album, Qasr, produced by Grammy winner Arooj Aftab, explores themes of institutional narcissism, insanity, language violence, and diaspora. Her music on her new record is contemporary, though inherently genre-defiant, and may be described as alternative folk or experimental ballad. Sheherazaad’s original lyricism modernises certain existing Hindi-Urdu poetic forms, channelling questions of displacement, mother tongue, imagined homelands and beyond. Her ethereal singing, character- ised by its delicate chiffon quality that transcends genres and defies expectations, transitions from satirical hymns to erratic vibratos.
Words Hansika Lohani
Date 24.12.2024