Imagine you're inside a factory. There's a person slicing wood with a chainsaw in one corner, making a screechy sound in the process. Another man is hammering away at metal, his blows producing a steady clink. There's also a worker drilling a hole into a wall and making a whirring noise with his tool. And a fourth person is unloading boxes; making a thud as he drops each one to the ground. Now, take all those different sounds together and imagine someone making a song out of them. That's how you'd define industrial music, a genre that invokes the sonic atmosphere of the age of machines.

It's also what Mumbai-based Aditya Virmani aka Nivid increasingly turned towards as the guitarist's career progressed more towards the synthesizer and computer softwares. The result is that he's now ready with his first album, Merna, which he'll launch at a gig tonight at a Khar venue. It's a record that's so aggressive that an MMA fighter might as well listen to it before entering the ring. Even the lyrical content is decidedly harsh. Virmani tells us that he actually sat with pen and paper and wrote down a narrative about a character named Agent 2344 before composing the music. This person is someone who's blinded by religious fervour and nationalism. The media has dulled his brain into believing whatever he'd fed with. He's angry. He was lost. But his newfound beliefs have given him a sense of identity, which he now goes about stuffing down other people's throats like a pukka zealot. There's no point in drawing any parallels with only the current political climate, though. Virmani tells us, "If you look at Indian history, you'll constantly find some sect fighting against another. We have witnessed chaos and stupidity in our society for centuries."