LURU Brings The Party To The Humming Tree!

The ticket is simply your copy of Issue #5 of LURU: The Music Edit.

“Bangalore is a musical city – and you should be able to find it in our magazine,” states Gaurav Krishna, creative producer at LURU – the print magazine and the newsletter. And the Issue #5 of LURU: The Music Edit – captures the city’s rich relationship with music between its shiny, metallic covers. And through exploring different dimensions of this deep history, the latest print issue becomes “another key to understanding why Bengaluru loves music.”

Take a Bowie

“With every issue, we celebrate through a launch event that speaks to its theme,” says Gaurav. And with music taking over the pages of the latest issue, “we felt the only way to really celebrate the music scene and culture in the city was through a festival,” he says. “Since so many different artists and genres exist in the city, it only made sense to celebrate over a month rather than a single day,” he adds. In order to sidestep the legitimate obstacle of traffic and transport woes, LURU #5: The Music Edit Launch Festival has sprung up at seven different venues that also allow “for people to experience all kinds of music.”

Gaurav points to the spirit of the festival’s curation coming from the stories in the latest print magazine. “In LURU #5: The Music Edit, we’ve got a section called ‘The Listening Sessions’ where some of the city’s musicians talk to each other,” he tells us. “We didn’t interview them but they had a conversation about their musical experiences in the city between themselves. The common thread through these exchanges was that these musicians were all working to push the boundaries of their musical genres,” he recalls. “And that’s what we wanted to capture: this musical play. We wanted to bring it all together in one issue, in one launch festival.”

The Launch Festival kicked off with a live-coding workshop on Strudel by the self-taught musician Azan “who believes anyone can make music if they’ve got a laptop or a phone.” Followed by a listening session on the influences of Indian Electronic with Shivhari at the Middle Room, a live improv evening between DJ/producer Unnayanaa and electronic music producer Nikhil Narendra, and an evening of indie acoustic folk with Abhijith Tambe and his band of indie musicians.

This week: in another nod to LURU #5: The Music Edit, the musical duo Geetha and Gopal Navale and their band Esperanto perform tomorrow, Sep 17 at Courtyard Koota. At the concert, “the enchanting sound of the Saraswathi veena meets vocals, guitars, mandolin, and flute.” A selection of photographs from their archive of Freedom Jam, a long-running music festival in the city are featured in the latest issue. And in the penultimate gig on Sep 18 at DAAK 64, composer-singer Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy leads Here for You, a musical pause in time, space, and thought.

Hit the high note

The finale blowout on Sep 20 at The Humming Tree brings all the musical madness to head! The Monsoon Jam “is a hip-hop competition hosted by B-Boy Shawn, one of India’s best breakers and 12-time national breaking champion and features Jordindian, DJ Ritz, and the Black Ice Crew among 32 competing dancers. And I guarantee, you haven’t seen anything like it,” Gaurav promises. Next act on stage, CBP & Co – a Neelasandra-based crew of rappers, poets, and performers – will pop off. For this set, Kali, Smokey the Ghost, Loud Silence, and Pasha Bhai “will be spitting rhymes.”

“We close out the night with none other than Thermal And A Quarter,” says Gaurav. Bruce Lee Mani, frontman of this band that’s intimately woven into the city’s soundscape, “features in the ‘The Listening Sessions’ section of the latest issue along with singer MD Pallavi,” Gaurav previews. “This Bengaluru band has got a new album and a new sound, so we thought it fitting for them to send us off with their insanity,” he adds.

While the ticket, which is your copy of Issue #5, gets you through the doors, Gaurav hopes that it’ll also feel like returning home “with a slice of ’Luru.”

The details: For our final blowout at The Humming Tree, LURU Issue #5: The Music Edit is your ticket, pre-order your copy here.