TINCTURES - Let Sound Be Sound

Aman Mahajan – Piano
Nishad Pandey – Guitar

Tinctures is a duo from Bangalore and Berlin that explores the nature of consonance and dissonance on Piano and Guitar.

Together, Nishad Pandey (Guitar) and Aman Mahajan (Piano) constitute a compositional and improvisational laboratory, blending tinctures of European and Indian classical music, jazz, and aesthetic, literary and mathematical concepts to create lush and intricate sound-worlds.

Tinctures released their debut album ‘Heads and Tales’ in 2021, with their second album ‘Moments, remote’ created virtually during the pandemic and slated for release in early 2023, supported by Goethe-Institut Germany.

They have performed and conducted workshops in India and Germany at a wide variety of venues ranging from house concerts to auditoriums. In this edition, they are looking to work more closely with smaller batches, and take forward a practical approach to gamified, interactive, abstract music. The workshops are focussed on intermediate musicians wanting to break habits and explore improvisation in creative ways, without the burden of a musical genre.

They begin their Let Sound Be Sound tour with workshops and performances in Bangalore, Pune, Bombay, Chennai, Auroville and Goa, to be continued in Germany later this year.

Origins

Nishad Pandey and Aman Mahajan met in Bangalore in 2013, playing together in various musical outfits before conceiving of Tinctures in late 2016, right before Nishad moved to Berlin. The duo sat together and came up with their first set of co-composed pieces, exploring concept-based writing to create music rich in metaphor, imagination, chance, and gameplay, with a back-and-forth between form and abstraction. They share the seeds of their creative processes in the musical workshops they conduct.

Sound-Worlds and Musical Games

The music of Tinctures is characterised by a compositional approach based heavily on improvisation, often using musical games as creative seeds to create rich and detailed worlds of sound. Spontaneous interplay and narrative are given prominence, often inspired by concepts drawn from beyond the realms of music. Photographs, film, poetry, painting, and ambient sound recordings regularly provide a thematic canvas for improvisations.

Moments, Remote

In 2020, the duo was selected for a Goethe-Institut funded residency to create their second album ‘Moments, remote’ creatively engaging with the challenges faced by musicians attempting to play together online, due to the temporal latency inherent in even the fastest internet connections.

A shared perception of time is fundamental to playing music. Under normal circumstances, both musicians experience time in the same way, allowing them to communicate and interact creatively, expressively and with rhythmic freedom. Playing online requires musicians to try to compensate for the connection lag by intentionally playing out of sync, so that the end result sounds in sync. In doing so, the music and the experience of performing can feel completely unnatural.

How can we as musicians interact with technology, transforming it from being a static (and often limiting) medium, to something that offers new possibilities? It is possible for long-distance co-composition to work, but what about an interactive performance, or musical games and improvisation? How do we bring our physicality and emotions to a performance that is so detached and remote? Can we interact with, rather than be controlled by, latency?
                                                                      
Since its inception, our project has existed across continents, but we have only created music so far when we were in the same room. The current situation has inspired us to explore new strategies, and redefine the way we, as Tinctures, must think about collaboration, composition and improvisation.

The album is slated for release in early 2023.