Sand on the dance floor

Priyanka Sharma traces the journey of Goa’s Sunburn music festival which will now be held in Mumbai, Delhi and, perhaps, Bangalore as well

Are you ready to make some noise?” shouts Gareth Emery, Britain’s highest-ranked DJ, standing atop a stage titled “Helia” at the Tulip Star Hotel in Mumbai. With his name inscribed in the backdrop in neon, the electronic dance music (EDM) producer gyrates to his own beats, switching frequencies on his swank audio-mixer. In response, scores of EDM fans gathered in the hotel’s lawns sway and jump to his music. On stage, dancing robots spew laser beams in different hues, while liquid nitrogen is blasted out of cannons. The crowd offers fleeting glimpses of shiny shorts, colourful wigs, oversized sunglasses, funky tattoos and, of course, plastic glasses filled to the brim with beer. Big glittery balls are thrown around. At the Mumbai edition of Sunburn held from April 6 to 8 — the first time the EDM festival, held on Candolim beach every December for the past five years, has moved out of Goa — the only thing missing was sand.

For Shailendra Singh, joint managing director of Percept (Sunburn’s organisers), taking the festival beyond Goa was a natural decision. “Not everyone can make it to Goa during the holidays,” says Singh, citing the steep hike in air fares and hotel prices in December. The festival will also have a two-day Delhi edition in October this year. There are also rumours, unsubstantiated for now, of a Sunburn in Bangalore.

The flamboyant Singh has cleverly pitched the festival as a paradise of sorts. And it’s worked for sure. With an investment of over Rs 30 crore, Sunburn 2011 in Goa was attended by over 100,000 people. Oblivious to the humidity, over 5,000 “Sunburners” thronged the Juhu hotel in Mumbai. Sales of CDs and Sunburn merchandise — T-shirts, bags, mugs — are “robust”. Enjoying a bigger following than other festivals like the NH7 Weekender in Pune, Fireflies Festival of Music near Bangalore and Escape Festival of Art & Music in Naukuchiatal (near Nainital), Sunburn is now the largest EDM festival in Asia. Comparisons of Sunburn with Tomorrowland, perhaps the world’s largest EDM festival held in Belgium, aren’t rare.

Singh started Sunburn in 2007 because he couldn’t find a live platform to listen to electronica, which he loved. Five years hence, he refuses to call electronica — a genre of music without lyrics — a niche. “Today, EDM is everywhere: in clubs, blasting away during IPL breaks and in shopping malls.”

* * *

But to launch, organise and promote a festival of such magnitude, Percept needed someone who understood the music business. And so the company appointed MTV VJ and popular DJ Nikhil Chinapa as festival director and curator. Having travelled to various international festivals with wife Pearl, also a popular DJ, Chinapa recognised EDM’s potential. “The motivation was to share music that I loved with friends in India who couldn’t travel,” says Chinapa. He even coined the name Sunburn.

“Nikhil has a great vision and introduces smaller and more obscure artists in the line-up every year,” says Arjun Vagale, a member of Delhi-based EDM quartet Jalebee Cartel, a regular at Sunburn. On Vagale’s suggestion, Chinapa agreed to give a slot to UK-based Anil Chawla in 2007. Today, Chawla is part of a successful duo with Dale Anderson. While he calls Sunburn’s production standards “world class”, Chawla has a suggestion: “Sunburn focuses on progressive and trance, so it would be nice to see more of house and techno music, which needs encouragement in India.”

In its first year, the festival ran up a loss of over a crore. Singh had also launched Metalfest that year, which attracted a bigger crowd. “But I realised the potential of dance music,” he says. In the next two years, the number of stages increased and Sunburn became a “rage”; by 2010, it was a “movement”, says Singh. Last year, the festival expanded even more — with over 120 artists, seven stages spread out across two acres of beach and over two million viewers streaming the festival live on YouTube.

Judging from the posters and stalls scattered across Tulip Star, it is evident that the festival has no shortage of sponsors — Axe and Gitanjali being two of several. To ensure that Sunburn remains on the minds of festival-goers, several events and pre-parties such as the multi-city Sunburn Hangover tour are held round the year. Percept has also launched music café Sunburn 202 in Mumbai, dedicated to EDM, of course.

* * *

But away from the sun and sands of Goa, does Sunburn retain its magic?

“Nothing can substitute the feeling of sand under your feet but there was ample sunshine to bake you alive,” jokes Leilah Zeenat, 22, who has attended four editions of the festival in Goa and the one in Mumbai. “Most of the fans hadn’t heard of Tulip Star before, so no one knew what to expect from the grounds. But there was ample space to move around,” says Zeenat. “The smoking area had been cordoned off which was a good idea.” With a separate booth to click photographs and a live tweet screen, the festival was “interactive” and “well organised”, she found.

“Sunburn has managed to retain its raw vibe, despite expanding. The scale has grown, but the quality of music hasn’t been compromised,” says Sohail Arora, part of dubstep trio Bay Beat Collective. He remembers “Band on the Bus”, an event organised last year for people travelling by bus from Mumbai to Goa for the festival. “We curated the journey and jammed for nearly ten hours, switching between jazzy electronica to faster beats, depending on the mood.”

The dates of the Delhi Sunburn (October 26, 27) will clash with the F1 Grand Prix, which attracted over 120,000 spectators last year. “Diehard F1 fans may be at the track for all the trial races, but I don’t think those people are our fan base,” counters Singh. Targetting the huge influx into Delhi during F1, he says, “If they want a killer party, they’ll come to us. If not, I don’t think diehard Sunburners will miss having them at the biggest party that Delhi has seen in a long time.”

Refusing to divulge investment figures, Singh remarks, “As Sunburn is India’s first ‘glocal’ dance music festival, we have an open mind and an open wallet to invest in this process of creating music history!”