Skyharbor To Make UK Debut

Skyharbor at Euroblast 2012. Photo: Patrick Häberli

For a band that started out as a bedroom studio project, Delhi’s Skyharbor has managed to earn an impressive following. Among their fans are Dutch prog metallers Textures. “They came down just to see us,” says Skyharbor guitarist and founder Keshav Dhar of Textures, who had dropped by to watch the Delhi band perform at the Euroblast festival in Cologne, Germany last year. “I remember Dan (Tompkins, former TesseracT vocalist) was taking the piss out of Olly Steele (guitarist of Monuments),” adds Dhar in a telephonic interview.

The camaraderie between London-based prog metal band Monuments and Skyharbor will play itself out on stage this July when the Delhi band makes its UK debut at Tech Fest. Tompkins has roped in Mike Malyan of Monuments to step in for drummer Anup Sastry since Sastry will be on tour with Canadian instrumental metal band, Intervals. “Mike said yes straightaway,” says Dhar. Familiar prog metallers on the Tech Fest lineup include Scar Symmetry, TesseracT, Monuments and Sybreed, who also played at Euroblast festival in Cologne last year.

It was in December 2012 that Skyharbor last performed in the country. But the band has always been choosy about the gigs they play. “We get mails every four or five days asking us to play. But touring involves so much of the band’s own expenses for food, transport and everything, I just don’t want to go into it half-assed,” says Dhar, adding that a tour could be planned if Skyharbor performed as a support act as part of a six or seven-city tour. “We decided that since we’re a young band in terms of shows, tours should take precedence over one-off shows.”

While Dhar’s inbox still gets clogged with performance requests, he’s going to be turning down most of them to focus on their second album. The new album, the follow up to Blinding White Noise: Illusion & Chaos, has five to six completed songs so far. “We’ve got four demos ready ”“ one is my own, one is Devesh’s (Dayal, guitarist) and we wrote two songs together,” says Dhar, who adds that writing the album is the band’s priority, along with working on a music video.

This story appeared in June 2013 issue of ROLLING STONE India.