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February 15, 2017
People

Hazraat, Hazraat, Hazraat. Gig Alert- FanGirl is churning things up in Surat.

February 15, 2017
People

Hazraat, Hazraat, Hazraat. Gig Alert- FanGirl is churning things up in Surat.

The influx of the Indian independent music into Gujarat has begun. This past weekend, the dunes of Kachchh hosting the first edition of Into The Void festival, marking the beginning of contemporary breed music festivals in the state and, autonomously another movement too has brought itself to life in cities across Gujarat, trying to levitate the music scene here. Fangirl started as a newsletter, a bunch of friends who, relished, and were constantly excited about the upcoming artists from the country who exist outside the realm of main stream, wanting to tell their peers about the music they were discovering.
Fangirl Live is them pushing the envelope a little further, trying to get the artists whom they have drooled over, to play in their backyards.

Haftanama, a Pakistani newsletter was the inspiration for the Fangirl newsletter (Nationalists can take as much offense as they want, but art, will always bypass boundaries.)  Leading publications that discuss Indian independent music have largely failed to create an impact in cities other than the metros and, the newsletter was a response to that.  The idea was to give a subjective take on the music that the writers were listening to, like telling someone, this is a song/artist/album and ‘this is what I feel about the music that I have heard.’ A piece of trivia, Hiren, Meet and Chirag, the founders of Fangirl, have quit their respective jobs and start up to get the Fangirl train going.

 

 

Things began with Fangirl organizing a number of house gigs in Ahmadabad, Fangirl’s base, which was followed by a ‘Sofar Sounds’ gig which ran into some policing issues as people in the residential society were petrified of the idea of forty kids inside a house, playing music for each other. ‘Live gigs were always on the cards,’ asserted Meet while discussing while discussing these events that eventually lead to the soon to be announced festival.

Everything has been immaculately planned. The first step was to do small scale house gigs across Gujarat to stir things up. In the past three weeks, 6 such gigs have been conducted in 5 cities across Gujarat, featuring artists like Tejas Menon, Tajdar Junaid, Aayushi Karnik, Prateek Kuhad and others.

The second tier will concentrate on executing full-fledged concerts in these major cities, the proceedings starting with the gig in Surat on Feb 18th, featuring Madboy/Mink and Komurebi, followed by another gig in Baroda on the 25th.

The third tier, the festival will happen over the course of one day, constituting of two main stages and 14+ artists coming down to Ahmedabad, and a smaller stage which will host upcoming acts from the state. A shot in the arm was InfoAnalytica coming on board as a sponsor, single handedly taking over that responsibility up to this date. Even though, it’s a company that deals with numbers, it pitched in for this fest because the owner, Amit Gupta, is someone who understands music, the vitality of it and how necessary it is to have people being exposed to unknown, uncharted sonic territories.

The journey hasn’t been entirely smooth. The Sofar Sounds gigs slowed down as they simply ran out of artists based in Ahmedabad who perform original material, artists being complacent amongst other things. Moreover, the mainstream bollywood music takes up a large chunk of what is put out there and the space for the independent music is petite. But all of that is what these people are trying to change. Aesthetically curated venues play a central role in the Fangirl school of thought. Special emphasis have been laid on going beyond the cafes and auditoriums in order to locate locations that would enhance what people were feeling while retaining a unique and organic life of its own.

‘We want people to trust us with the music,’ exclaimed Meet while discussing that their objective which  is to build a brand that people belief in and would come for all of their undertakings. The objective is to build a system where in both, someone as huge as a Nucleya and a band that doesn’t even have a facebook page pull audiences equally, a system where it’s the music that speaks and not the line-up.

Quite Utopian. We like Utopian.
Here is the link to this weekend’s gig in Surat.

FanGirl Indiefest Ground Zero

Let’s start building a scene of our own.