Raahie stops in the city

It was during his college days from 2005 to 2007 when Anshul Singh discovered the singer within him while he was performing as part of his college band. “I was not a trained singer then. But whenever I performed, I used to receive huge appreciation and encouragement from the college crowd, friends and people around me,” recalled Anshul while he was checking the sound with Ashwin, his music partner and other touring members of their band just before their performance at the Hard Rock Café on Thursday night. The other members were Suzuki Naidu on drums, Navneet Sing, lead guitarist, Gopalan on rhythm guitar and Biswajit Chakravarty on bass.

Ashwin, a passionate musician from Mangalore, was working from his early days on Konkoni music and performed with musicians like Remo Fernandez, Lucky Ali, Usha Uthup. He met Anshul during his college days when he was doing MBA in Mumbai. Both started their musical journey from February 2012 and called themselves ‘Raahie’.

“Raahie means traveller. All of our original songs are stories of our musical journey, thoughts and influences. Since we are trying to establish a fusion rock sound, we write songs in Hindi to reach out to maximum people and feel that the name is apt for our band,” said Anshul.

Within a year of their inception, this duo has already received ‘Radio City Freedom Award’ after releasing their first single ‘Manva Re’ in September.

“Till now we have been getting a good response from listeners. But we would prefer to take a little more time to compose and re-work on all of our tracks and reach out to people with live gigs before releasing our debut album,” said Ashwin.

As these two musicians have different listening habits, their musical influences reflect on their compositions. While Ashwin grew up listening to Konkani music of Chris Perry, Lorna and rock and country music of ‘Poco’, ‘Gn R’, ‘Scorpions’, ‘Dream Theater’ etc, Anshul’s listening habit is more into Indian classical, semi-classical and film music. So, while their composition ‘Tumhi Ho’ came out as soulful, the instrumental arrangement of ‘Sunoh’ reflects rock and other western musical influences.

“Well, through ‘Sunoh’ we wanted to convey our words to people. You have to be a little loud to reach out, isn’t it?” laughed Anshul. They energised the audience with most of their original songs including ‘Sarhadein’, ‘Manva Re’, ‘Sunho’, ‘Tumhi Ho’ and ‘Raahie’ . They also performed some of the cover versions of Bollywood songs with a different instrumental arrangement blending their own rock sounds. “Let’s face it, Bollywood songs are highly dominating and an integral part of our popular culture. So it’s an easy way to reach out to people.

But the best part of present scenario is that youngsters prefer to listen music online, where we are available. So we are able to connect with our music to our target audience,” Ashwin signed off.