The Hot List 2016: Keshav Dhar (Guitarist-Producer)

Keshav Dhar. Photo: Akshat Nauriyal

Keshav Dhar’s bedroom guitarist-producer days are long over and the ”˜go-to metal producer of the country’ tag attached to his name can safely extend to any genre now.

“I also got my Bollywood cherry popped, so to speak,” laughs Dhar, who, picked by composer Amaal Mallik, added riffs on this year’s sports biopic M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story. But he’s far from being sucked into Bollywood session work. If anything, Dhar has reached his goal of finally becoming more versatile in his projects. He’s gone from co-producing and mixing New Delhi acoustic guitar maverick Dhruv Visvanath’s debut album Orion last year and the city-based electronica outfit Komorebi’s EP, to working on alternative project White Moth Black Butterfly’s second album with former Skyharbor vocalist Dan Tompkins and the Utah-based composer Randy Slaugh.

Dhar, who’s also finishing up the third Skyharbor album, says, “It’s been a long time coming. I felt like I was being pigeonholed, and for my own inspiration, I needed to branch out.”