How Kolkata’s Aniket Dutta Moved from Indie to Filmmaking and is Now Back to Sound Experiments

It’s a strange but familiar journey that Kolkata filmmaker, visual artist and producer Aniket Dutta has taken to launch his new experimental/ambient project Nim Chimpsky_, now out with the album Feels Like 43°.

Previously making music with his post-hardcore band Tint and then writing electronic music as Oh, Rocket!, Dutta steadily began pursuing filmmaking over the last six years or so. He released his debut feature film Ghost of the Golden Groves and it earned acclaim in different parts of the world, winning an award in 2020. Just around the time of working on his second feature film, Dutta says he took a break from pre-production and writing. “It involves more than just creative work. I simply wanted to take a break as I had a thought block while doing all this,” he says.

Continually involved in the music side of his visual work – which was already worlds away from singing in Tint and Oh, Rocket! – Dutta got his hands on a four-track tape machine and slowly began the experimental, ambient project known as Nim Chimpsky_. “I needed a new way of pursuing a meditative point and working with these tapes kind of helped me reflect and find that center,” he adds.

The 12-track Feels Like 43° – released via Chilean label Archivo Veintidó – is described as “a post mortem into this contemporary hyperreal space as well as an instrument of detachment from it in order to galvanize a meditative state of ultimate contemplation.” There are movements drawing from synth progressions and ambient, field recordings. He says all of it forms an integral part of his “umbrella of work as a cross-disciplinary artist.” He adds, “This time around, I just got attached with it a bit further and accumulated enough material to have an album out.”

The thematic influences of the album – especially the track “And so Art is Dead” – draw from the present times, but specifically concern themselves with the way art has transcended into everything and vice versa. Dutta says, “It is more and more difficult to distinguish between art and non-art just as it is increasingly tougher to distinguish between reality and an image of reality. However, for me this death is the beginning of something new and rather than focusing on the blurred lines between art and everything else, it is the transcendence into everything else that is my area of exploration through the entire spectrum of the audio-visual medium.”

For all the seriousness going into working on Nim Chimpsky_, Dutta does say the project “started off as a joke.” It made him go overboard and spend money of music gear and ended up creating a lot of tracks, he says with a laugh. But at the end of the day, he’s not too attached to keeping it going. There may be another release or two in the near future, but Nim Chimpsky_ remains a way to clear his head. The visual side of the project will come to life too, with Dutta intending to make music videos. “It also gives me an opportunity to collaborate with some of my filmmaker friends whose works I really admire.”

Listen to ‘Feels Like 43’ below.