Exclusive Premiere: Mixtaped Monk’s Delicate Ode to Earth on ‘Maybe A Bright Future Awaits’

When Arka Sengupta aka Mixtaped Monk moved away from his job as a journalist to the corporate world as a business analyst and programmer last year, it involved shifting to a new city. Currently based in Hyderabad, Sengupta mined the experience of starting over to create his latest concept album, Vacant Earth.

Set to release on August 24th, the 12-track album is Mixtaped Monk’s sixth release ever since Sengupta started the project in 2016.  On Vacant Earth, the artist follows a journey of waking up one day to find that “no human beings are present around you.” Although it starts off somewhat ominous, Mixtaped Monk revels in positivity, euphoria and peacefulness. Sengupta says that after moving away from the deadline-bound stressful world of journalism, he found a sense of peace in the corporate world, which reflected in his songwriting. With that came the rigidity of work, which led Sengupta to take different kind of measures to keep his project going. Sengupta says, “I don’t get a lot of time to sit down and experiment with music like I used to. Believe it or not, I have to take leaves to create music. I had to take a week’s worth of leave to sit down and compose Vacant Earth in one go.”

On his second single “Maybe A Bright Future Awaits,” which appears in the second half of the album, Sengupta walks the line between neo-classical, ambient and post-rock, channeling the likes of Brian Eno, Balmorhea and more. He says about the track fitting into the concept of the album, “I found myself alone in a city where no one knew me and I knew no one. It can get very lonely at times. But then you learn to deal with it and try your level best to find kindred spirits just for the very sake of sharing your life with them. I would say, for me, that is the most elated feeling. And it is this feeling that I wanted to convey through this album.”

Pre-order ”˜Vacant Earth’ here.