Bandland 2024

So I was on a business trip to Bangelore, India, expecting nothing special and avoiding the weekend tourist trips to catch up on sleep instead. And I hadn't even bothered to look for local music events as I usually do, because I have no idea which concert venues in Bangalore are accessible for unexperienced foreign travellers, and what are the chances that a band would play where I have any idea what's going on, on one of the two weekends I happen to be there?

And then a local colleague casually mentions that Bloodywood (one of the one-and-a-half Indian bands I've heard before) is playing at a festival called Bandland. So we got one-day tickets for Saturday and went there straight away.

First band was a really good in-your-face deathcore outfit called Bhayanak Maut from Mumbai, a lot of fun (circlepit, wall of death and all) and highly recommended.

Then we listened to guitarist Sutej Singh, a man with an impressive stage presence with a tallguy with black beard, black turban, black shirt, black trousers, black ankle long coat, supported by a professional drummer and bassist for what was essentially a 40 minute blues rock guitar solo. Truly fascinating performance, and so exciting when instruments can sing like his guitar.

As though the coincidence of getting into this event wasn't big enough, I even ran into a German colleague and his wife who were stopping over in BLR to visit friends on the way home from a vacation. They even made it to the Insta page of the event.

Bloodywood played to a home crowd who appreciated all of their themes, from the  songs about overcoming depression and fear tbat I remember from their gig in Germany to the pride of Indian culture expressed in their song about Indian food.

And I have never heard a crowd sing along so loud as in the final headliner performance of Avenged Sevenfold. Wow. They apparently were in India for the first time, but judging by the many AX7 t-shirts in the crowd, the even larger number of smart phones capturing every moment and the hugeamount of people singing along they must be very popular in India.

And they had a really impressive multi media show on the big screen behind the curtain (dark for a moment when I took the photo below), where live pictures of the musicians were overlaid with flames, real faces mutated into zombie and skeleton figuresin real time and more.