Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, (IITB) has made its college festival bigger. UK band Porcupine Tree will perform as part of the Mood Indigo festival this year. The festival holds an event titled Livewire, which sees rock bands from all over India compete. The competition is topped off with a performance by a professional band.
This year’s performance by a professional band, or Pro-night as it is called in the IITB campus, will see an international band on stage for the first time in the event’s history; Porcupine Tree is scheduled to perform here on 21 December.
Third year engineering student of computer science at IITB and Mood Indigo’s core group member for media, Aditya Gandhi, says, “Porcupine Tree has never preformed before in India. They have a huge following here, especially in the IIT campuses. Many of my friends are crazy about Porcupine Tree. I don’t think anything this big has happened in the 38 years of Mood Indigo.”
It is not only Livewire that is adding to the lure of this year’s Mood Indigo. Ishank Gupta, Overall Co-ordinator of the festival, says, “We are planning new things to make competitions in Mood Indigo more prestigious. We are focussing on encouraging talent.” He adds, “We are also planning on holding eliminations of the rock competition in other cities and thus make Livewire a nation-wide event.”
Every year thousands of college students from all over India attend the Mood Indigo festival. Colleges have to register and passes to events are issued on the basis of college identification cards. While tickets to Porcupine Tree concerts in London cost upwards of £25, students of IITB will get to attend the concert on producing their college IDs. All the logistics to the mammoth task of freighting the band’s equipment have been figured out by IITB’s students, most of them are in their early twenties.
Porcupine Tree has been nominated for a Grammy and has released 10 albums in their career spanning two decades. The progressive rock band has been noted for making music that is album-oriented and their records are conceptual with many songs relating to each other.
