INTERVIEW: Keshav Dhar from Skyharbour

As supporters of Australian sporting teams will know, the rivalry between India and Australia is most prominent on the cricket pitch. The two countries enjoy a fierce yet congenial rivalry that goes beyond a shared colonial heritage and an identifiably British influence over culture.

While Australia has produced many world-class rock and metal bands, India is not known as a hotbed for either genre outside its wonderfully diverse domestic entertainment industry… however things are about to change. Skyharbour are positioned to become one of the globes foremost prog-metal outfits due to the strength of the 2018 studio release, Sunshine Dust; a sprawling opus with outstanding guitar work and a Mars Volta knack for vocal hooks.

Keshav Dhar is the driving force and creative genesis for Skyharbour. Joining the writer for a conversation over Skype he had plenty to share about his journey to date. Why don’t we start at the beginning then?

“This goes back to about the early ‘00’s. I was in high school, I was into rock and metal music and stuff. I started getting into that when I was in my mid to late teens, but when I went to college, which was not in New Delhi actually, it was in this remote student town in one of the coastal corners of the country.

The scene that it was, a really tiny town and there really wasn’t anyone around who was interested in making this kind of music because this was around the time I think that the whole underground djent thing was just starting to, it was bubbling under the surface, the guys who would eventually formed Periphery and Tesseract in these bands when I was following them on social media and on discussion boards and stuff and I remember just being like I want to play music, which is like this progressive, weird experimental sort of stuff.”

Dhar mentions that he started Skyharbour as a solo recording project before recruiting band members. He also comments on the lack of human resources available, the tried and tested gig-getting ability of covers bands luring many of his musically able cohort away from the slog of starting and forging an originals project.

“Around me, even though I was in a college town and I was surrounded by people my age, people were mostly interested in just playing in cover bands or in doing little beyond your Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica… just the usual suspects.”

The music that Dhar composes certainly has elements of the djent inspired progressive powerhouses that are Periphery and Tesseract. Worth noting is that Daniel Tompkins, the vocalist in Tesseract was a recording member of Skyharbour for two albums. The brilliance of Dhar’s compositions is that the listener isn’t waiting through lengthy and ‘moody’ pieces that act as bridges before a vocal hook or guitar riff arrives.

“It’s interesting you say that because one of the things we took away from our last album was we sort of just had a bit of a think and we put our heads together and we were like, ‘what do we want to do going forward? What do we want to explore?’ We have two albums down. We’ve put out (almost) two hours’ worth of music. What do we have to say right now that we haven’t seen before?

I think all of us wanted to just get to the point a little quicker. We wanted to make music that was, we didn’t want to dumb it down by any stretch, but we definitely wanted to make it more hard hitting and more concise and more, more engaging. We wanted it to grab the listener like quicker… you didn’t want to waste time getting to the point because we’ve done the whole expansive prog thing where you take two minutes into a song to really get to the meat of the song.”

Sunshine Dust is out now through Entertainment One (eOne) / Good Fight Music

Purchase the album via iTunes here.