Varun Nimbolkar’s Indian Experimental Fusion EP Doubles Down On Emotive Storytelling

Fusion music often slips into the easy tropes of improvisation and ornamental crossover. But Varun Nimbolkar’s Bah Bah Black Sheep is something more deliberate, more composed, and distinctly cinematic. The five-track EP is a collage of genres, or rather, a conversation between them. It's a carefully designed soundscape where Indian classical music, electronica, hip-hop, ghazal, and blues cohabit through narrative.

For Nimbolkar, fusion is a structural principle. “I don’t do the improvised sitar fusion,” he clarifies. “These are not sitar-oriented instrumental pieces but fully composed and produced songs with storytelling at their core.” The distinction matters because Bah Bah Black Sheep treats Indian classical instrumentation as a voice that carries the story as much as the lyrics or rhythm.

Each song in the album bears its own emotional texture, and together they form a kind of sonic anthology of longing. Amrita 2.0, a sequel to a previous release 'Amrita', expands the universe of its predecessor. It's a fusion of psy-trance, opera, and Indian classical. Varun’s vocals are steeped in classical phrasing before ceding space to Shivangi Kale’s operatic solo. 'Maayus', a reinterpretation of Sahir Ludhianvi’s poetry, reimagines the ghazal form within an R&B framework.

Varun Nimbolkar’s artistic vision owes more to composers like Nitin Sawhney than to the traditional “world music” lineage. His approach is compositional rather than improvisational. Each track feels like a score to an unwritten film. His use of the sitar, often central to his arrangements, becomes a narrative device, a throughline that connects the synthetic to the organic. In this sense, his work sits at the intersection of sound design and storytelling, rooted, yet exploratory.

Nimbolkar’s journey reflects the growing space for nuanced independent music in India. For an artist already fluent in multiple musical dialects, the next chapter promises to be one of translation. If there’s a unifying spirit across Bah Bah Black Sheep, it’s that of divergence. The album’s title, half-playful and half-defiant, encapsulates Nimbolkar’s refusal to conform to the binaries that dominate the musical imagination: classical versus modern. What emerges is music that is unafraid to be plural, to sound like more than one thing at once. This is the most honest form of storytelling there is.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

From Empire To Intimacy: Radhika Surana’s Textile Art Explores The Politics Of Indigo

Viraj Khanna's Hand-Embroidered Textile Art Will Be Exhibited In Miami This December

How Helena Bajaj Larsen Is Paving A Bold New Path For Homegrown Textile Art & Design