Agam Conjure A New Dream

The Bengaluru-based Carnatic prog rock band talk about “re-envisioning” traditional music and why they want to present it entirely with music videos

- Anurag Tagat

THEY COUNT CENTURIES OF INDIAN traditional music’s influence, but there’s an unlikely new influence on Agam’s new album A Dream to Remember—Celtic music. The Carnatic prog rock band’s vocalist Harish Sivaramakrishnan says about the song, “It’s been pretty exciting, it just turned out well in our assessment. Instead of using the Indian way of using the 6/8 time signature, we’ve tried to use a very different adaptation of that time signature.”

The romantic, metaphor-heavy “Kooth Over Kaapi” has a full orchestra, a choir and more, all part of the six-member band’s ambitious new album, one that has been prefaced with the idea that they are taking over two centuries of music, enlisted 82 musicians and spent two years composing eight tracks. With that kind of number-crunching, it’s fair to say the album casts its net wide into a space that Agam have owned for the last few years, especially since the release of their 2012 album