Curtain Blue is the solo project of Abhishek Bhatia

Curtain Blue is the solo project of Abhishek Bhatia, the vocalist of Delhi-based alternative rock band, The Circus. His music is skilfully produced, with textural percussive elements and haunting vocals, making Curtain Blue a producer to watch out for this year.
Currently in the UK for a four-gig tour, he’s performing at Brighton for Europe’s leading festival for new music and featuring in a London showcase on alternative dance music from India.“I will perform again in London on May 20 and in Glasgow on May 23, and try to squeeze in a show in Bristol on May 21,” he says. His debut EP Drones was out earlier this year in April. The four-track EP sees Abhishek strike into new and unchartered territory of modern electronica. “I had been working on these songs for the past one year and they were ideas or experiments that I wanted to try out. There wasn’t a conscious sound that I had in mind, these songs just happened. The vibe of the tracks is almost eerie and I have tried to complement that with the music which is slightly melancholic,” says Abhishek.
He has, over the past couple of seasons, performed at a number of festivals in India. It was at a music festival Rajasthan back in 2013 that Berlin/ Los Angeles-based producer Robot Koch saw him perform for the first time. Their initial meeting led to a musical collaboration between the two on Koch’s TSUKI EP, released earlier this year where Curtain Blue featured on two songs, Let Me and Erase. “While I was frontman of The Circus, I was also producing my own electronic music and finally decided to take it live in the Curtain Blue avatar,” he says. Fusing haunting vocal melodies with downtempo and bass sensibilities, he aims to create a textural blend which can uniquely be called his own. He draws inspiration from artistes such as Radiohead, Apparat, Moderat, Jon Hopkins, Mount Kimbe, Four Tet, Burial, Gus, Disuke Tanabe and Trentemøller. “My music ends up being an illustration of the physical space I am engrossed in. I always try to design sounds that reflect those spaces and sequence them in a rhetorical fashion. Being a singer, vocals, to me, are not just identifiable hooks but also mere pieces in the big fat puzzle. I try to use my voice as an instrument, fusing it with sociable sounds. And of course I love to sing on my tracks, everyone does,” he says. He believes the independent electronic music scene in the country is evolving as a very expressive and reachable form, casing music from “habitual pop to incomprehensible peculiar soundscapes”. “People are becoming more responsive towards valiant ideas. It’s nice when you trek online and accidentally stop by artistes who live just 10 blocks away, producing weird and wonderful music, and then you get to see these guys play live in the city.” As for going solo, he says, “What’s challenging is now I’m on my own — from bad sound to travelling, stage mess-ups, social media marketing and so forth. But dealing with these challenges has helped me mature further, when it comes to the musical workmanship in both Curtain Blue and The Circus.”
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