Fifteen acts. Seven venues. One week of indie talent on display. Sit back and trip over The Gig Week, now rocking in its seventh edition
When The Gig Week (TGW) was launched in Delhi in 2010, the indie music scene in India was more of a toddler than a teenager about to hit puberty, which is what it seems like at the moment. "People back then were highly under-served when it came to independent gigs. There was definitely talent going around, but it was limited largely to the college fest and music school circuits. Suitable venues that could handle the sort of sound we wanted were also hard to come by," says Anubhav Gupta, one of the festival's co-founders.
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"So, we essentially wanted to create a space where we could showcase a pool of gifted independent musicians. And since there was so much of talent to be mined, we thought, 'Why not make it a week-long festival?'" Gupta adds.
That was then. The country's indie music ecosystem has learnt to walk on its own two feet since, and that growth reflects in the trajectory of TGW and some of the musicians who performed in the initial editions. Dhruv Vishwanath, for instance, played his first-ever live gig in the festival's debut season and has since built up a reputation as one of the country's foremost singer-songwriters. He will return to the festival's line-up this year, when TGW comes to Mumbai on Friday evening for its seventh edition.
There are a total of 15 acts on the itinerary, spread over seven venues across every day of the week, from Andheri to Lower Parel. Tajdar Junaid, a singer-songwriter, will play on the opening day at Summer House Café, while electronic duo FuzzCulture will bring the curtains down at Bonobo in Bandra on November 11.
FuzzCulture too has played at the festival earlier and guitarist Arsh Sharma says, "We'll get our own visual set-up for this show and plan to collaborate with Nanok [a DJ who's also part of the TGW line-up]. We also want to ensure that the night goes off on a high point, because we are ending the festival and want everyone to leave having had a good time."
Speaking about how the festival has evolved, Sharma adds, "It started off as a thing done by a bunch of kids who were trying to push what they were doing [Gupta was 18 years old when he co-founded TGW]. Now, they have collaborators and sponsors, and it's become a yearly ritual with its own fan following."
That following, though, doesn't consist only of what Gupta calls 'music fanatics'. "They are the kind who might travel to all the music festivals across the country," he says. "But there are so many other people in the city, going out at night to get a drink or something, who might only have heard of the bands [in the line-up] in passing or not at all. That's also the kind of people we want to cater to, making them more aware about the scene. So, TGW is a festival that operates somewhere in the middle ground," he sums up.
On November 3 to November 11 At Seven different venues. Log on to insider.in for more information and entry fee
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