Smooth Operator

Udyan Sagar aka Nucleya has been fiddling with the mixing console for over a decade now.  For the greater part of his life as an electronica artist he was identified as one half of the Bandish Projekt. In June 2008 Sagar went solo as Nucleya to allow himself the freedom to exercise his musical aspirations, “I wanted to experiment with sound a whole lot more, work with different styles of music and the Bandish Projekt sound was already kind of established, it was headed in one direction.”

In the short span of a year and a half Sagar has re-launched himself with fair success; besides his solo work he is also know by the electronica project Order of the Essence – his collaboration with DJ Nasha. Now Sagar’s trained his guns on Bollywood. The release of his debut Bollywood remixes album Horn Ok Please and a five-city India tour to support it is testament to the fact that he is serious about expanding his horizons, “I have been remixing Bollywood tracks for a long time but never released any of them under Bandish Projekt, as the sound didn’t allow it. I have other Bollywood projects running parallel right now. I am also headed in the direction of composing background scores.” In the past Bandish Projekt has composed the background score for a Bollywood film Dubai Return and one of the tracks, ”˜Chandan Sa Badan,’ on Horn Ok Please was remixed by Sagar eight years ago.

As an electronica artist Sagar has been instrumental in making the dub-step genre more prominent. His constant need to explore and experiment pushes him to introduce fresh influences, “I was very influenced by glitch-hop which is still very new to India. I wanted to experiment with Indian sounds and glitch-hop. While I wanted a track to be sequenced, arranged and composed in an Indian classical way, the core of the sound lay in glitch hop.” In a lyrical sense Sagar is very inspired by poetry; one of his more recent singles ”˜Pragat Pritam’ features a spoken word poem written by a London-based poet. “With my underground work I keep working with different artists, and not necessarily musicians,” says Sagar who has three singles lined up for release. Sagar is also working on new material for his debut release of original work which he hopes to be out with end this year while also working on a background score for an animated fllm.