'The band is still together'

There have been rumours floating around about the pioneers of fusion rock, ‘Indian Ocean’, splitting up — which the band’s drummer Amit Kilam has dismissed as untrue.

Metrolife caught up with him when he was in the City recently to find out more about these claims.

“It’s just that Susmit’s been busy with his stuff and we hardly met in the summer. But the band is very much still together. We’ve worked on two new songs — one for a film and the other a reworked version of a song we did last year, Maaya,” says Amit, brushing off the rumour.

“In fact, we’re releasing a single soon, which is the band’s collaboration with
Pakistani band, ‘Strings’.

Working on the next album is also on the cards,” he adds.For the band’s last album, 16/330 Khajoor Road, they decided to experiment with a new mode of distribution.
The entire album was given away online to their fans for free, after which the physical copy of the album made the rounds.

This was a conscious decision of the band, who seem quite content with the response they got from it.

“I have a feeling that it worked, purely because the internet is the only way forward. The goodwill that the band got because we gave it for free was immense. We didn’t make any money but we didn’t lose any money either,” observes Amit.

He also mentions that another trend he has noticed is the developing music festival culture in the country.

   “As a performing artiste, the festivals mean that there are a lot of places to play and new talent keeps getting a stage to become bigger. But, it’s very difficult to sustain a festival for a few years,” shares the drummer.

According to him, every organiser will face the same problem of running out of acts soon enough.

“Indian music festivals have a flawed approach — they present it as a big festival with 30-50 artistes playing across three days and have to match up to that year after year.

All the major festivals at the moment have 70 per cent of the same bands playing. To me, that’s just ridiculous,” he notes.

When asked about his thoughts on this City, he smiles and wraps up, saying, “I like Bangalore. But the traffic is not good at all. We just like coming back here
because we always get a good audience to play to.”