By Kartik Mahajan
Do you remember that moment when your taste in music just flipped? Where you heard a genre or a style that you had never really explored, until that one day you happened to be listening to it and it grabbed you by the collar and just took over your senses? It's a beautiful transformation to be born out of complete unawareness, out of a situation that is completely alien. That is how StarLab came about. StarLab a.k.a Bharat Bindal actually used to be a huge metalhead and rock and roll fan, and was in a band for many years. His transformative moment came the first time he attended a big psytrance party on a beach in Goa. Something went off in his head and that was the beginning. Slowly he shifted to digital production and psy trance inspired sounds and quit his band, whom he had been with for ten years. Synthesizers became more and more appealing and manipulating diverse sounds to bring them together and form coherent tunes that were consistently progressive became StarLabs style of choice. After years of unrelenting hard work and gaining new perspective during a stint in California, Bharat has now started seeing concrete results in the direction that he wants to go. Acknowledgment and appreciation from psytrance overlord Astrix motivated Bharat immensely, and releases on prestigious labels like Yellow Sunshine Explosion from Germany and Ovnimoon Records from Chile are great signs for this promising project.
'Ones Who See in the Dark' is inspired by shamans. Shamans have always had a plethora of stories about them. They have been called evil and good in the same breath since medieval times. Traditionally, shamans are said to have the ability to travel between dimensions or have one step in this world and one step in the spirit world. Think about it like the ability to have one foot in candy land and one in Timbuktu and then finding common ground for both to converge effectively. Altered states of consciousness and the acknowledgment of the ability to exist on multiple dimensions may sound like mumbo- jumbo, but it has formed the backbone of psytrance and its audience over the years. It has restricted the audience and kept the entire genre 'underground,' much to the delight of its followers. Regardless of what your opinion is about the much stigmatised view that the music and the parties are excuses to get together and do drugs, the fact is that the genre has promoted the peace and the 'live and let live' vibe far more than anyone or anything else these days. It's sad that the genre gets judged based on conditioning and people's perception that is based on stigmas rather than what they can see and assess for themselves. Go to a psy trance festival at least once before you judge it. Bharat believes you haven't lived till you've been to at least one. I couldn't agree more.
Presenting 'One's who see in the dark' , to be released on Yellow Sunshine explosion in March 2014.
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