28 July,2025 08:27 AM IST | Mumbai | Mohar Basu
The quartet comprises a vocalist, guitarist, drummer, and bassist
Imagine a band performing on the stage at a concert as you cheer loudly. The only difference - that it's an AI rock band. Trilok, touted to be India's first AI-powered rock band, was launched in early July by Collective Media. The four-member band comprises vocalist Arjun Varma, guitarist Aditya Rao, drummer Karan Tripathi, and bassist Viraj Rajan, all digital avatars developed by the talent agency's in-house innovation team. It's designed as a band that fuses devotional music with rock distortion.
Its debut track, Achyutam Keshavam, dropped online on July 9 and has a familiar devotional phrase reengineered with layers of rock instrumentation, electronic textures, and AI-generated production. Vijay Subramaniam, the talent management agency's founder and the man behind Trilok, shares, "AI in music isn't about deepfake vocals. It's about rethinking performance, identity, and format from scratch."
Subramaniam asserts that, unlike other virtual influencer experiments that transpose human traits onto avatars, Trilok is being treated as a band. "We're not cloning the influencer model and slapping it onto music. That would be lazy. The idea is to treat it like a real act: unique sonic identity, defined visual grammar, a real fanbase. It's something new," he says. That "something new" involves not simply digitising existing devotional content, but using it for reinterpretation. "Trilok isn't doing spiritual chants verbatim. It's reimagining them through the lens of rebellion, distortion, and modern identity."
In this new paradigm, where does he see human musicians? "Depends on the artiste," says Subramaniam. "For some, AI might just be a faster beatmaker. For others, it could be a co-performer. I see AI as a creative multiplier - it stretches what's possible. It's not about replacing human energy, it's about augmenting it. The ones who'll win are the ones who know how to build with it, not fight it."
