Skyharbor credits its diverse musical talent from all over the world to the Internet. The Indian-American progressive metal band that kicked off six years ago boasts of having worked with talents such as Marty Friedman of Megadeth and Daniel Tompkins of Tesseract. Skyharbor has been pretty popular for its djent sound, a rather modern form of progressive metal, which makes use of a distorted, heavily palm-muted sound over the years that its been active. In conversation with Keshav Dhar, founder and guitarist of the band on Skyharbor’s music, favourites and wishlist:
As people who come from such diverse geographical backgrounds, how did you first come to collaborate as a band?
I started the project as a solo outfit, with little more in mind than just uploading music online for free and seeing where it took itself. As it happened, with the Internet being the amazing thing that it is, the tracks happened to catch the attention of some really wicked musicians around the world, who expressed their desire to collaborate with me. Slowly, over the period of a couple of years, we talked and mulled over the idea of taking the project to the live stage and developing into an actual full-fledged collaborative band, and eventually were able to make it happen.
And that’s how the collaboration with Marty Friedman (ex-Megadeth) happened?
Yes, quite like that.
Your current vocalist Eric Emery replaced Daniel Tompkins only last year. How has it been working with him so far?
Working with Eric has been great. He’s brought out a whole new side to the sound of our music, thanks to the background he comes from and influences he represents. We’re also exploring some very cool new directions as a result of Eric being on board.
Your recent single Chemical Hands has become pretty popular. What inspired the track?
The song’s lyrical content deals with substance dependency. With the video, we wanted to depict that, but as opposed to an actual person, it would be this massive, sentient mega structure that is dependent on a constant intake of chemical fuel to stay alive. It goes on to show how the dependency eventually leads to self destruction.
Your last full-length album, Guiding Lights, was in 2014. When can we expect your next album?
It should ideally be in the first quarter of 2017, if all goes well!
Apart from your own band, are there any other djent bands you enjoy listening to?
Besides the usual favourites, there’s Kiasmos, Radiohead, Tomáš Dvorâk and Floex, Tycho, The Internet, Bon Iver, M83, Cloudkicker, Team Sleep, Birds of Tokyo, FM-84, and so many more.
So, who’s on your wishlist for future collaborations?
There are so many of them! But there are some electronic composers I know we would absolutely die for a chance to work with; Tomáš Dvorâk and Floex — whom we mentioned earlier — Trentemøller, and Brian Eno, just to name a few.
