by Scott Albright
Daily Lobo
Indian Ocean will bring the sounds of melodic emotion to New Mexico.
The band features Susmit Sen on acoustic guitar, Asheem Chakravarty on tabla, percussions and vocals, Amit Kilam on drums and Rahul Ram on bass guitar and vocals. The four members come from New Delhi and have played more than 300 concerts all across the world, Ram said.
The music can be described as ambient and mellow but it is hard to classify into any sort of genre. The band's latest album, Black Friday, is a soundtrack based on the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993 and makes use of other instruments such as the saxophone and clarinet.
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Indian Ocean has been around for about 15 years and has three other albums: Desert Rain, Kandisa, and Jhini. On the song "Nam Myo Ho" off Jhini, Chakravarty explodes on the guitar that almost carries the mind away with it as if on a mystical journey of sound. The song has a calm and soothing feel to it which conjures up emotions and images of ambience.
"This is a band that sounds like no other band in the world," Kilam said. "It's an expression of four people. It's pure emotion."
None of Indian Ocean's songs are in English, but the rhythmic stylings of the vocalist allow the mind to connect to the music despite the language differences. The songs are in a variety of languages including Hindi, Bengali and Bhilali. Several of the songs sound like drawn-out chanting. One could be reminded of Gregorian Monks while absorbing the vocals, but the tabla and drumming add a tone that make the band different in many ways.
"Some people say that we remind them of Santana," Ram said. "We're inspired by whatever comes to us. Life, stuff around us, the environment."
It's easy to see how the environment is influential to their music with songs like "Melancholic Ecstasy" that send the listener riding into the waves of tunes they transmit. Other songs put the listener in a meditative state while almost being hypnotized.
"I grew up listening to Hindi and Western rock," he said. "The mix of these two styles of music have influenced my drumming. There is no name for my style. The listener has to decide for themselves. We hate to define ourselves," he said.
