It's hard enough sometimes to pin music down to a specific genre. But things get doubly tricky when we deal with niche sub-genres, like math rock. It's a sound that originated in the US in the 1980s as an offshoot of punk and progressive rock, where a regular 4/4 time signature (a term that denotes how many beats are contained per musical bar) was replaced by more complex and asymmetrical ones, layered over dissonant chord structures. This music was never meant for the mainstream. It doesn't have the easily approachable quality of, say, commercial pop or straight-up alt-rock. But over the years, it did find takers across the world, spreading from the US to Europe and all the way to Japan.

And it's this Japanese influence that first caught the fancy of four youngsters from Shillong, who formed what is the northeastern city's only math rock outfit, Sky Level. Their journey didn't start in that direction, however. When drummer Denzil Swer founded the act in 2014, the line-up was completely different and the members focused squarely on indie rock. "But things weren't working out for us, and so we disbanded after a short while. Then, in 2015, I was jamming with a good friend of mine, [guitarist] Sonny Taba. We realised that both of us had similar influences, such as [Japanese math rockers] Toe, and decided to get a new line-up and shift our focus, and that's how we got guitarist Meban Lyngdoh and bassist Pynshai Kharshandi on board," Swer informs.