Songs sometimes turn into repositories of our memories. A memorable song from another time, heard repeatedly and forgotten, often lets one relive that period when played years later.
Electric Gypsy, a Kerala-based experimental rock band, turns this idea on its head. In the band’s second album ‘Dragoons Wander at Night’, released in streaming platforms earlier this week, the band’s frontman Nahaz Ravi has written songs which are a collection of some of the memories of his formative years.
The memories are invoked not just with the lyrics, but inventively using field recorded soundscapes from Kerala’s farmlands, which are then blended with traditional country, blues and folk music. The resultant songs have the unmistakable flavour of the backwaters and paddy fields of Alappuzha, from where Nahaz hails from.
