City’s new-age music producer Onkar Tarkase won the best recording/mixing (Independent Music) award in the Pop Music category at the Indian Recording Art Academy (IRAA) Awards 2024 held at NESCO Goregaon, Mumbai on Friday.
The award was for the song, “I Love You” from Pune-based Upamanyu Mukherjee’s debut album “Negotiating Oxytocin” released in August 2023. The album, which had four nominations, also won for Best Mastering (Donal Whelan) for ‘I Love You’ . The win was Onkar’s second IRAA after last year’s nod for “Sawan Laye”.
Pune music producers and music technicians made their presence felt at the IRAA Awards this year with nine of them picking up nominations as finalists in various categories. Nominated finalists from Pune included Shitalchandra Kulkarni, Onkar Tarkase, Shreedhar Deshpande, Upamanyu Mukherjee, Suyash Kelkar, Piyush Shah, Akshay Sathe, Bunty Pawar and Dawn Studios. Onkar earned seven nominations while Shreedhar had two.
Onkar was ecstatic. “Seven nominations - I was not expecting to be very frank. I always think of myself as a chameleon so being nominated for different genres is exciting as it tells me I am walking the right path. It feels extra fabulous to win this award for ‘Negotiating Oxytocin’ because I believe it is one of my best works in recording and mixing. I had huge confidence that Upamanyu’s songwriting, our production and mixing really worked well for the musical sensibilities the songs portrayed. IRAA is the only national level awards for technical categories in music making with an eminent jury, which makes this recognition sweeter as multiple members vote for the nominations.”
Shitalchandra has been consistently spearheading Pune’s representation at the IRAA Awards. In 2014, he had five nominations as finalist, in 2021 he won best music producer (Independent Music) and in 2023 he had two nominations as finalist for recording/mixing/mastering. “It is always a super feeling when your work is acknowledged and definitely a boost to your artistry and creativity to do more and better. I have huge respect for the team and promoters of IRAA as they are one of the first Indian award platforms to recognise Indian talent on the technical and independent music side of the industry and that is a whole lot of body of work right from collection of data to scrutiny. Proud to be associated with IRAA,” said Shital.
{{/usCountry}}Shitalchandra has been consistently spearheading Pune’s representation at the IRAA Awards. In 2014, he had five nominations as finalist, in 2021 he won best music producer (Independent Music) and in 2023 he had two nominations as finalist for recording/mixing/mastering. “It is always a super feeling when your work is acknowledged and definitely a boost to your artistry and creativity to do more and better. I have huge respect for the team and promoters of IRAA as they are one of the first Indian award platforms to recognise Indian talent on the technical and independent music side of the industry and that is a whole lot of body of work right from collection of data to scrutiny. Proud to be associated with IRAA,” said Shital.
{{/usCountry}}Founded in 2006 by music industry stalwart, Anil Chopra, the IRAA Awards is considered the most prestigious technical awards in India for independent music. This year the awards attracted over 1,400 entries from across the country for skills such as music production, recording, mixing, mastering (among many others) in categories such as Independent Music, film music and OTT/ documentaries.
The jury for 2024 was a veritable who’s who of sound and recording engineers including Pramod Chandorkar, Shantanu Hudlikar, Ashish Saksena, Donal Whelan, Indrajit Sharma, Jim Satya, Mujeeb Dadarkar, Raag Sethi, S Sivakumar, Sreejesh Nair, Subjash Sahu, Vijay Benegal, and Yogesh Pradhan.