E-Paper
Karma on musical high
Band members of Karma Prateek Sen, Samir Prasad and Nikhil Beri gave a live-wire performance on Monday.
One of the highlights of HTNext Adventure Unlimited, the adventure sports carnival going on at Nehru Stadium warm-up area, was the performance by a band called Karma. Never heard of them? Well, they say they’ve been around since Y2K and if you haven’t heard them, well, it is unfortunate.
At their show this Monday, they made sure their guitar solos and hardcore vocals will be heard for a long time to come. The story of this band is like any other musical outfit. The trio comprising Prateek Sen, Samir Prasad and Nikhil Beri were in different rock bands before they met each other and immediately struck the high note.
But that was, as we said, year 2000 when DJs and electronic music were driving live bands out of business. “People would rather hire a DJ who came cheaper,” said Sen. Their first job then was to devise a way to stand out in the crowd. “We tried to develop our own sound,” said Sen. Here, the expertise of keyboard player Beri who also runs an audio production unit, came in handy. “I put in lot of new age sounds in our music,” he explains.
Not that Karma is a very original band. “We are crowd-pleasers. Whatever the crowd wants we play,” clarifies Prasad, the lead guitarist. Read Bon Jovi to G N R to Indipop, but they play the chartbusters with a twist, remixed with their own set of sounds. What about Punjabi pop? “We haven’t come down to that,” they chorus. After all, the trio began with high-funda rock bands – only that rock refuses to bring them their daily bread.
