I am part of an instrumental progressive band from Mumbai, India called Pangea. It started as a studio project that Akshay Rajpurohit of Scribe started cause he was interested in  making music he wouldn’t get to create with his band. Akshay and I know each other since the 8th grade and while we never spoke much in school, he is responsible for giving me my first Red Hot Chilli Peppers CD. It put me in the right path. There were two main things that made us the close friends we are. Our love for Mountain Dew and Ambient Music. Winning combination!

We decided to keep it a two member studio project where we would create and release music for free. We never had the intention to make it a live band or release a full length album. We just wanted to make stuff we liked. Although I was in America for almost a year, we always shared ideas of tracks and when I was close to returning home we spoke and we decided to release an album and take Pangea more seriously. How and when we decided to call this band Pangea is a lost memory for me. It just happened.

Akshay had written a couple of riffs and our friend Kuber Sharma was getting into producing bands and his enthusiasm towards our music was very encouraging. I didn’t know Kuber that well but he had a lot of ideas and seemed very interested in the whole process. The three of us instantly got along and started making an album. Kuber is EXTREMELY OCD about things but is genuinely one of the most hard working people I have known in my life.  His interest in the band was what made us ask him to be the third member of this project. Thus began our regular every day journey to Vera Desai Road. Sleepless and exhausting nights, juggling our day jobs with our second lives. I honestly don’t remember how the days passed but at that time we had no clear picture of what we were planning to do. Were we going to release any album? Were we planning to ever play these songs live? Who would be the vocalist of the band?

We had a lot of questions but unfortunately we had answers to none. We spent a lot of days just thinking about these things until one day we said,

“F*** it! Lets just finish the album.” While writing the music, we started layering the guitar parts a lot to make every sounds thick and melodic. By the end of it we were so happy with the way a couple of guitar tracks were sounding that we decided to not have any vocals in the album. Also, we had absolutely no money to pay a vocalist. I think by end of October, 2011 we had the album ready. We released it the next month. The response was quite overwhelming and we did not expect the kinda response we received.We have received praise from international audiences as well. Our album has been bought mostly by people not living in India and Alexander Milas from Metal Hammer UK as well as Ben Sharp aka Cloudkicker have liked our music.

This was the album we released :

Its been quite an exciting journey since then. We transformed from being a three member studio project to being a 5 piece band. We have the awesome Jai Row Kavi playing drums for us and we have Krishna Jhaveri playing bass who is a ‘flying’ bass player and also plays for the awesome Skyharbor. We have been very lucky to have had the opportunity to play with musicians of this caliber.

Since we became a live band, we have played 5 live shows. We also got to perform at the NH7 Weekender which got a lot of new people into our music. We are currently working on our next album and our preparing for 3 shows in November. On the 8th we perform in Bangalore at the NH7 weekender, 16th we play at Richardson and Cruddas Industrial Estate in Mumbai and on the 29th we perform at the Delhi leg of the NH7 Weekender. Hope to see you there. I leave y’all with a performance video of one of our newer songs.