Goa to host biggest music festival

All roads lead to Goa to witness United Kingdom?s biggest festival - The Big Chill - to be held in India for the first time. The two-day event of multimedia, art, dance, film and music will be held along the picturesque Aswem beach in north Goa district on April 14 and April 15.

Founded in 1994, by Pete Lawrence and Katrina Larkin, the Big Chill transformed from a Sunday all-dayer to one of UK?s most respected and innovative two-day festivals garnering a minimum of 5,000 big chillers per performance.

Having staged events on the Greek Islands, Cairo, Helsinki, Budapest, Prague, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, Big Chill?s foray into India took two years to materialise.

Besides great music, the two days of Big Chill anti-drug revelry will also be a platform of visual art. All the stages have screens with artists drawing on the screens alongside bands and DJs. "We have people to see The Big Chill as akin to going on a holiday with a large number of like-minded people. For me the essence of this lifestyle is to create a microcosm of the things we love about this world," Pete told Business Standard.

Goa is no stranger to elaborate music gigs, most of which however centre on trance. But at The Big Chill there is no room for trance. "Trance never had any relevance whatsoever to us," Pete informs.

"The Big Chill to India, we could both see the incredible potential of a unique event in a country, which was moving forward fast on a creative level," says Pete, a well-known DJ, who is set to perform here.

Tickets are priced at Rs 3,000 per adult and Rs 1,500 for those between 14 and 20, while the under-14 will be allowed free entry, if they are accompanied by an adult ticket holder.

The event will start at 12.30 noon and conclude at 10 pm.

The Big Chill offers a highly evolved, all-round experience that is completely unique, with a wide variety of music and performance, art, dance and film, technology and its relationship with nature; identifying artists and nurturing their creativity.

"It is about synergy, energy, community and fun...," says Katrina, founder of The Big Chill.

Music being an integral part of the Big Chill vision, the festival became a tastemaker of sorts, skewing towards anti-genre pigeonholing.

The line-up for the festival includes electronica, house, reggae, folk, ambient, hip-hop, funk and classics even. "We seek artists that bend genres to create fresh and uncategorisable fusions. We were the first club event in the UK to allow DJ's to break away from the straight jacket of continuous 4/4 beats and electronica," he said.

The festival also takes pride in presenting the most eclectic music from around the world. Some of the musicians being featured this year include Sheila Chandra, Shri (of Shri and Badmash fame), DJ Norman Jay, The Bays and many more.

"We have also invited artists who haven't performed with us before. Sheila Chandra has been on my wish list for 10 years and finally got in touch this year as she hadn't visited India in over 20 years," says Pete, whose own Chilled by Nature project, is set to perform here.

Pete cites Ananda Shankar and A R Rahman as his biggest influences, besides listening to some authentic Indian classical music. And for Pete, The Big Chill is life. "Our biggest strength is we weren't born out of an obvious commercial enterprise. This was a bedroom operation run by two of us with no finance in the early days," he adds.

The artists performing under the Big Chill Goa tent include dance music biggies Coldcut, The Bays and DJ's Norman Jay, Jose Padilla of the popular Cafe Del Mar, Tom Middleton, Hexstatic, Pearl, Nikhil Chinnappa, Jalebee Cartel and others.