Our First Show

Beloved Patrons,

Karan here. I write this to you sitting in the balcony of a hotel in the wonderful city of Bangalore. The weather is far more forgiving than Delhi. Yesterday we played our first announced show here, kicking off the Raj Against the Machine Tour.

Sing-alongs, pits and the world's first bhangra-mosh (that continued throughout the set lol). None of these were planned, the crowd did it themselves. It is a strage feeling watching people recognize and connect to your music infront of you as all we've known are comments and messages.
The crowd absolutely loved it and there were moments of pure magic, but I personally have very mixed feeling about the show.

We are still sruggling with sound issues as we have a mixture of extremely loud and extremely soft instruments and vocals. Even though it is getting better every time we get on stage (we played a secret unannounced gig last week and also rented an old venue out for rehersal with a full PA system a few days later just to get our live mix right) it is still not satisfactory, atleast to any of us. Hoping these issues will soon be resolved. I have faith in our engineer.

Here's a video of Jee Veerey live:

https://youtu.be/3WbptdaUVpc

We play Delhi next, on the 4th of July and leave for Germany on the 10th. I know it has been super quiet here but the only reason we havent been able to post updates is because each and every one of us is working their asses off for this tour and I'm very proud of all of them.

To give you an example, the bass side of Sarthak's dhol ripped in half during soundcheck yesterday. Authentic dhol is rare as today people mostly use plastic skins. Authentic dhol skins are made of (dead) goatskin and take almost a week to fix onto the dhol and get proper intonation. When I walked up to him the moment it happened he seemed visibly distressed. I offered to go with him to find a new dhol, even though I knew on the inside it was futile. All he said to me was "Just take care of what needs to be done here. I'll be back before we get on stage." He was back in an hour and a half with new skins on his dhol. How he managed to do something that takes a week within one hour, I am yet to ask him (he kept using a hair dryer on it between songs lol). Isnt this the stuff of champions? And this is just one of the bazillion things that have been happening every day in the past two months.

Because of things like these I have no doubt in my mind that even though we might not look and sound like the best band right now, we will be very close it very soon.

In other news:

1. One of our shows in Germany (Weishloch) got SOLD OUT!
2. Paris is ALMOST sold out!!
3. We signed a management deal with Rob McDermott - the person who managed Linkin Park for the first 10 years of their career. It's still in a "trial run" phase for 6 months before we actually sign but it is something!

At this point I just want to wholeheartedly thank all of you. You're the ones who took us out of the bedroom studio to the stage. Without you, we do not and cannot exist. Thank you for having faith in us. Thank you for helping us give form to our dreams and make them a reality. We will not disappoint.

Tons of love,
Karan