Exclusive Premiere: Guwahati Duo Lateral and Songstress Ipsita Bharali Recreate ‘What A Way To Know’

Guwahati electronic music duo Lateral have previously featured as producers on singer-composer Ipsita Bharali’s 2018 song “Noi” but for their second studio collaboration, she picked “What A Way To Know,” a track off their 2019 EP Other Words.

While the original version is fairly buoyant, Bharali and Lateral bring in soul-infused trip-hop and chillwave for the new version. Guitarist Siddharth Barooa tells us, “She’s been a fan of it ever since we first released it. The original song is already a downtempo track, so we went for a very minimal, lo-fi ish version with some neo/soul inspired guitar works.”

Bharali, who has often shared the stage with Lateral, has previously been known for her Assamese pop songs, has only recently begun writing material in English. As for Lateral, brothers Amitabh and Siddharth did have plans to release an EP earlier this year, but it’s not just the pandemic that’s changed things. Siddharth says, “We got under a new management towards the end of last year and we were planning a tour which we’ve obviously had to put on hold for now. Since the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns, things have changed drastically.”

The guitarist mentions that they’ve found “ample time to do more creative work” on priority over commercial projects. This is leading them to write a full-length album instead of an EP, which will be released in parts. Siddharth says, “It’s turning out to be more like a concept album which would tell a story of its own, in sequence. Because of this we won’t include a lot of songs we already had in the pipeline in this album, including songs from the EP. We’ll instead release them as singles in collaboration with different artists as and when convenient.”

Watch the lyric video for “What A Way To Know” below.