Hear Guitar Spanker Dhruv Visvanath’s Latest Track “Summer”

Dhruv Visvanath. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Two years ago, one-man band Dhruv Visvanath began work a song series he titled Seasons, crafting tracks within three hours.  Says the Delhi-based percussive guitarist, “The nature of these pieces are such that they come about as something little exciting and impromptu.”  After slotting the track “Rain” on his 2015 album Orion and releasing another song called “Winter,” Visvanath has a new Seasons song titled “Summer.”

The instrumental track was composed earlier this year to recreate the spirit of summer. “Summer is the time when people tend to relax and go on a holiday. It’s the time when people choose to unwind. The mindset isn’t always to look forward to the future, it’s just to enjoy the present,” says Visvanath. He adds that the idea was to “create everything as and when I wrote it”. The highlight of the song for him is the high-pitched riff which arrives with the chorus.

The track begins with a rapid plucking of the guitar strings, which is taken over by the lead and eventually blends into a soothing tone. The slowly built rollicking track perfectly captures the essence of the percussive style of playing the acoustic guitar. Visvanath chose the instrumental route because he felt it was “more meaningful”. He adds, “It seems more sensible, because listeners won’t feel that I’m a storyteller. I’m just a guide for the person who attaches their own sort of affection or story to it, and I find that to be a great takeaway. More than anything, that’s what makes people come back to it.”

Visvanath will perform in two cities for the seventh edition of Bacardi NH7 Weekender, in Shillong (October 21^st and 22nd) and Hyderabad (November 5^th and 6^th). He says about the set he’s preparing, “I really want to keep people enthralled with the guitar techniques and things that I put forward. The whole crux of the thing is that people sort of get really engrossed in the way I’m playing the guitar.”

Listen to “Summer”