Moksha Base practices regularly to keep in tune with the best (Photo Supplied)
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Hamilton, February 4, 2022
The Tamil Harvest Festival of Pongal became sweeter as ‘Moksha Base,’ a Hamilton-based musical band went across the Continents virtually to a power-packed performance.
The two-hour show was premiered on YouTube on January 15, 2022.
Moksha Base joined hands with ‘Arasan,’ a vibrant multimedia platform to present the Concert, which came in the ‘Beyond Continents’ series.
Band of passionate people
Sivakumar Sangameshwaran (popularly known as Siva) of Moksha Base said that four bands from as many countries (New Zealand, India, Malaysia and Canada) participated in the event, each performing for 30 minutes.
“The Concert of this magnitude was aimed at entertaining Tamil music lovers around the world on the Tamil traditional festival day of Pongal. With the current world in turmoil, there is no better time than now to bring the people of the world together to celebrate our unity in diversity through music. This is exactly what this Programme achieved,” he said.
Moksha Base is a band of passionate individuals based in New Zealand. They have performed in most cultural shows within New Zealand since 2012 and their music includes their own compositions, cover numbers, classical fusions in western, hip-hop, rock genres to name a few.
Siva said that the ‘Beyond Continents’ was conceived, directed and staged over three months, involving coordination, scheduling and other aspects of production.
“Moksha Base as a band is ambitious to bring musical groups from different countries together to serve as a musical treat for the audience of all the bands involved and entertain the Tamil community around the world,” he said.
Moksha Base at a Concert (Photo Supplied)
Prasanna Kumar writes:
We have had the opportunity to get Keba Jeremiah (Guitarist for Music Directors A R Rahman and Anirudh Ravichander) involved by contributing classical guitar and bass to this track. Keba himself will be mixing and mastering this track.
We have worked tirelessly and experimented much with this track over the last few months. We feel that we have finally hit the sweet spot with this track and we cannot wait to share the final version with music lovers out there.
The arrangements have been kept simple with love and we aim to release this song in Tamil, Hindi and Malayalam.
Having released a few singles in the last few months, plans are underway to release the first album of Moksha Base.
We are all busy with our jobs and family life. However, music is our passion and we thought, “Why not release an album in 2022?.”
Debut Album
We have written enough songs for an album and have started to put them all together like a jigsaw. The exciting bit is that besides Keba, we are privileged to collaborate with Chris Jason (another Session Guitarist for A R Rahman) on a number of our original tracks.
We also have plans to collaborate with Sharanya Srinivas (Singer Srinivas’s daughter) on a future original track. Collaboration seems to work well for us as we learn from all these professionals and we keep improving as aspiring musicians.
Our debut album will offer a bit of everything in Rock, Easy Listening, Sufi; all in Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi. We are proud of our achievements and we hope that our listeners will appreciate our music.
The Artistes
The fourteen-member group should not be taken lightly as just melody-makers. Among them are high-end IT professionals, engineers, medical practitioners, consultants, accountants, biotech and biochemistry experts and other providers who keep the wheels of the economy moving.
The artistes include Abhishek Raj, Anjali Abhilash, Ashwin Ramesh, Aswathy Sasidharan, Ayesha Bint Ahmed, Joshua Nirmal Shodavaram, Maathangi Parthasarathi, Prasanna Kumar, Shankar Narayanan, Seyorn Arunagirlnathan, Shalen Sharma, Shelin Shelz, Sivakumar Sangameshwaran and Vasanthan Raghuveeran.
As a measure of self-preservation and honing their music skills during Lockdown Level 4 (from March 25, 2020, to April 27, 2020) to prevent the spread of Covid-19, members of Moksha Base released two singles, one each in Malayalam and English.
The Malayalam single entitled, ‘Cheru Meghamay’ (Small Cloud), connects Nature and everything it offers- peace, confidence, satisfaction, tranquillity, stillness, the dynamics, and most important of all, universal happiness. If every drop of water holds a flower, then let a million flowers bloom. This would lead to the blossoming of lives with the fragrance of happiness, goodwill and understanding.
And the title could not be more appropriate to New Zealand – Aotearoa- the Land of the Long White Cloud,’ that holds people of every disposition from everywhere.
Shankar Ramanathan (our version of T M Soundararajan, S P Balasubrahmanyam, Yesudas, Hariharan, Haricharan, Karthik and many other modern singers), has set the tune, challenging Aswathy Anand to write the lyrics.
Among the vocalists of Moksha Base are Maathangi Parthasarathi, Anjali Abhilash, Ayesha Bint Ahmed, Shankar Narayanan, Siva Kumar, Shelin Shelz.
Acoustic Guitar/Rhythm Guitarist/Bass Guitar: Prasanna Kumar; Acoustic Guitar/Keys: Vasanthan Raghuveeran; Lead Guitarist: Joshua Nirmal Shodavaram; Keys, Programming: Ashwin Ramesh; Drums: A J Moke Tabla/Percussions: Shalen Sharma; Flute/Violin: Seyorn Arunagirlnathan
Please follow these links:
https://www.waikato.ac.nz/academy/venues/gallagher_concert_chamber
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrNl20DMH9A
https://www.boosted.org.nz/projects/beyond-boundaries
