Trippy Tunes
Gurbax dropped some slick new beats from his new EP Heady Cuts as he performed at the Nucleya Sub Cinema Live in the city
Last June, Gurbax came out with his remix of Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine. He broke the beats up, and brought them back down to make it a super chill track. On Sunday, when he opened for the ‘Bass Raja’ at the Nucleya Sub Cinema event, he dropped another groovy remix, this time of Nina Simone’s Feeling Good. Taking charge of the console after performances by Malfnktion and Raja Kumari, Gurbax stirred up the crowd before Nucleya came on by dropping some slick tracks from his new EP titled Heady Cuts. We caught up with the fine DJ to have a quick chat about his seven-track EP.
“There are two tracks — Boom Shankar, and Get It — which I released in 2015. Apart from that, there are five new tracks. This compilation had been ‘under construction’ for about two-and-a-half to three years. It’s a collection of the type of music I would enjoy listening to myself,” says Kunaal Gurbaxani aka Gurbax.
If you’re trying to fit Gurbax’s new EP into a genre, it’s futile. All the seven tracks on this are diverse. Take Atlanta, My Love which is in collaboration with a saxophonist from the US, which gives you a feel of the funk from the ‘60s with a hint of hip hop, or the trippy Aghori, in collaboration with Mr Doss, which gives you intense chills.
Explaining the title of his EP, he says, “Heady is like a slang for trippy. It’s a ‘hippie’ word. And back in the day, when artists used to record their music on tapes in the studio and it had to be physically ‘cut’ by music engineers, a track used to be referred to as a cut. So basically, the title of the EP really is slang for ‘trippy tracks’ that you can chill to.”
The artwork is quite intriguing. You see Gurbax’s head sliced up and a trishul sticking out on top. “While thinking about the artwork, we wanted to stick to the constant theme but make it more intense,” says Gurbax. The artwork is open to interpretation, but we certainly feel it represents the various facets of the DJ’s personality and the different ways he enjoys listening to, and making, music.
Ending his set with the blockbuster song, Aghori, Gurbax made an exit with a bang. Talking about this fan-favourite track, he says, “Aghori is a step ahead of Boom Shankar. Though it has a similar theme, it is more intense. While Boom Shankar had the theme of sadhus, chilling together, landing up at a music festival, Aghori is a more stronger extension of it, a sequel one can say. If you think of the most intense type of sadhu, you will think of the Aghori. While I was working on the track, I did a lot of research about them, watched documentaries and read up about Aghori sadhus.The psychedelic track has voice samples of an actual Aghori reciting some rituals,” says Gurbax, who is currently working on the music video of Aghori along with a few other projects up his sleeve.
