The year 2020 forced an electronica producer to think out of the box, and come up with a unique concept that marries music with gaming
Apex being performed at Magnetic Fields in 2019. Pic/RC Photography
It’s March 2021, and it’s time to focus on the positives. It’s time that we dug a little deeper and realised that last year’s lockdown did throw up a few pleasant surprises within the music industry. Sure, compared to live gigs, the advent of digital concerts was like serving a paltry meal as opposed to a seven-course banquet. But it’s also true that a whole bunch of musicians started thinking out of the box to overcome their enforced lack of revenue in that period, coming up with technological innovations that they might not have spent time thinking about had it been a normal situation.
A screenshot of what the gaming version of Apex will look like
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One such example is Apex, a project that Mumbai-based electronic music producer Tejas Nair aka Spryk had been meaning to launch in March 2020, before the lockdown threw cold water on his plans. Its embryo was formed in 2019, when the organisers of Magnetic Fields commissioned him to create an exclusive set for the festival in Rajasthan, one which explored the cusp of music and technology. Nair tells us, “I had been sitting on the idea of Apex for quite some time; I had been wondering about how human beings are obsessed with the idea of constantly moving forward without caring about whether it is actually beneficial or not.”
He thus roped in lighting wizard Naveen Deshpande and visual artist Yash Chandak to create a 50-minute performance with holographic embellishments. “That was the first iteration of Apex,” Nair says, adding that when it received a fair amount of critical acclaim, they decided to take the show on the road, planning the first gig of an extensive tour on March 19, 2020. The timing, of course, couldn’t have been worse. And when he realised that the pandemic had tied his hands, Nair went back to the drawing board. He says, “It led me down the path of exploring how I can showcase the project without gathering people at a live venue.”
Tejas Nair aka Spryk
The result is a truly innovative concept that he conceived with the help of his team at Vitamin E, a creative studio that he has co-founded. They built a web browser-supported interactive platform where users can register themselves and book a slot to experience the second avatar created for Apex. In this iteration, the web browser essentially turns into a video game — it becomes a three-dimensional open-world environment on the lines of Grand Theft Auto. You, the user, are the central character in this world that has Nair’s music as the soundtrack, and once you enter it, you use the W, A, S and D buttons on your keyboard to navigate the fictitious place. “You can jump, dance, run faster, whatever. The 3-D landscape comes alive and the environment is built to narrate a story. But even though you are engaged in a video game, there is no mission that you have to complete. It’s about bringing the video-game experience to musical concerts — rather than just consuming the information, you get to immerse yourself in the artiste’s work,” Nair explains.
We, for one, have never heard of such an innovation being previously attempted in India. We had earlier written about Unrated, a virtual immersive 3-D experience launched in July last year, where the viewers were taken aboard a digital space station where a bunch of DJs performed sets as animated astronauts. But Apex is different. It’s a lot more interactive since users become characters themselves. Nair tells us that now that live gigs have started again, he is kicking off the initial Apex tour he’d planned last year, with the inaugural show slated for Delhi on March 6 (the Mumbai gig will be held at AntiSocial on March 26). This reignited tour will witness him returning to his interest in rendering the cusp of technology and music in a physical manner. A scaled-down version of it is already available online, since international electronic gig organisers Boiler Room had asked him to create it for their Self Isolation series. But what we are most interested in trying out is the gaming version of Apex, which, though delayed, will launch in the near future.
And it’s important to note here that the innovation wouldn’t have been attempted had the lockdown not thrown the creative industries out of gear. So, yes, it was indeed an incredibly difficult period. But still, we can thank God for small mercies.
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