Final December, over 20,000 folks flocked to India’s greenest music pageant in Bengaluru—the Echoes of Earth. It was a two-day extravaganza of artwork, music, tradition and conservation. The sound of music and merriment spilled from the 180-acre expanse of the Embassy Worldwide Using Faculty, because the audiences swayed to jazz, techno, blues, reggae and rock.
The pageant is now again in its sixth version, on December 2 and three. If the theme final 12 months was ‘Circle of Life’, this time it’s ‘Ensemble of the Wild’—an ode to the Western Ghats. The mountain vary has been recognised by the UNESCO as one of many world’s eight ‘hottest hotspots’. Environmentalists might need a job to play in conserving its magnificence and organic variety, however maybe, so do the rockstars. The hills have to be alive with the sound of their music.
The thought for the pageant originated from Roshan Netalkar’s years within the occasion administration trade, which included all the things from home events to exhibitions. By some estimates, the trade will likely be price $7.6 trillion by 2030. That progress has resulted in an alarming quantity of waste, from plastic bottles and unused meals to ornamental objects and branding parts.
“The pageant is woven across the bigger message of accountable celebration,” says Netalkar. “Whereas it might take a month to curate some other music pageant, this can be a year-long train. Final 12 months we did an on-ground audit of the waste we generated. This 12 months we’ll look into the bigger carbon footprint.”
Within the final version, 80 per cent of all pageant belongings, most importantly artwork installations, had been created utilizing outdated, discarded, recycled, and upcycled materials. Plastic water bottles had been changed with RO water filters onsite. Moist waste was composted, and dry recycled.
Round 10 per cent of the pageant’s energy wants this 12 months will likely be met with photo voltaic power. Workshops for kids, brunch with performing artistes, and a rigorously curated flea market with natural, pure, artisanal and handmade merchandise are additionally a part of the pageant combine. And sure, there will likely be electrical charging factors for automobiles.
One may, after all, increase all these gray zone questions, just like the carbon footprint of artistes flying in from the world over. There aren’t any fast and simple solutions. For now, there’s a sapling planted for each ticket offered, however Netalkar is aware of the pageant’s sluggish march to turning into fully round.
This 12 months’s artiste lineup contains the likes of Carnatic musician and music producer Sid Sriram; desert blues band Tinariwen from the Sahara area of northern Mali; Turkish DJ Len Faki; Ukrainian sound producer Iryna Shvydka; New York-based multi-instrumentalist Jitwam; and Sri Rama Murthy, aka Murthovic, an digital music composer, sound designer and DJ from Hyderabad.
There are each Western classical and Carnatic music influences in Murthovic’s work. He traces the ‘pure development’ of his curiosity within the setting as a musical theme, from the childlike marvel of seeing a touch-me-not to the examine of environmental sciences at college. “This connection goes past simply vegetation to issues like percussion devices constructed from pure assets like wooden. It’s a holistic appreciation for the fantastic thing about nature in varied kinds,” says Murthovic.
Sri Rama Murthy, aka Murthovic
There’s all the time a skinny line between entertaining and sermonising that music of this type should tread, particularly with the youth who’ve quick consideration spans. However Murthovic doesn’t discover this a problem “so long as the music has an fascinating groove, rhythm, melodic motif and a few sort of storytelling component”. In keeping with him, you possibly can solely entertain when you may make the viewers really feel what you feel. “When it really works, it goes past being a mere set,” he says. “It turns into a story that exudes core values and tells a singular story. Hanging a stability between storytelling, quirkiness, an off-centre strategy, relevance, and different creative selections is the place the magic occurs.”
Some of the fascinating bands to play on the pageant is Matsumoto Zoku, of Japanese origin. The four-member group does human beat-making, and performs the wind instrument didgeridoo and the hand pan—a spherical bowl performed with sharp faucets.
Band members say that the earth has been an enormous concern of their musical journey, impacting their “inside core”. They are saying that they don’t care who listens to their music, however solely its potential to enhance folks’s lives. For them, the music and the message are inextricably linked. “The message is in our core [at the] unconscious and unconscious degree,” says Reo Matsumoto, the group’s co-founder. “Entertaining [through music] exists on the acutely aware degree. It comes by way of our reside reveals. We entrust it to the viewers.”
For Netalkar, the music should all the time be centre-stage. “Between having an enormous identify related to us or placing music on the prime, music will all the time be our alternative,” he says. A inexperienced pageant won’t be the norm in a rustic well-known for its extra; nonetheless, 4 state governments have approached the workforce to carry it to their areas. The following apparent vacation spot is the nation’s music capital, Goa. However, because the pageant workforce envisages, its sounds of sustainability are destined to journey farther and wider.
