Watch: Dualist Inquiry's New Music Video 'Violet' Evokes A Moody Dreamscape

If you’ve ever found yourself smack down the middle of India’s electronic music scene, you already know who Dualist Inquiry is. Arguably one of the country’s best known producers and live performers, Sahej Bakshi’s rare combination of consistence and persistence has him constantly reaching for his next ‘release’. Over the past couple of days, that’s meant a volley of purple-tinged teases surrounding his new music video ‘Violet,’ the first visual addendum to his recently released Dreamcatcher LP.  The wait is finally over so we tracked down both Sahej himself, as well as director Misha Ghosh to find out what it took to make this happen, and how Sahej’s sub-conscious mind factors into it all.
Carving a niche in the wide colour spectrum, violet coloured the mood, thoughts and the insides of Sahej’s mind as he worked on the song, naturally lending itself to the name. The idea of the video, Sahej tells us “was to try and capture some of the subconscious snapshots that stay with you after you wake up from a strange dream. I tend to have a lot of those lingering images in my mind, and after collecting them for long enough, I decided to make a video about them.” The process started with a brainstorming session between Sahej and Misha where references and inspirations were shared until the right tone and aesthetic was found.

Misha, most recently lauded for her fantastic directorial work for Parekh and Singh’s “I love you baby, I love you doll,” is inspired by Michel Gondry and Hiro Murai. For Violet, however, the canvas was wide open and blank. She tells us, “We went into it thinking anything is possible! The idea was to travel through dreams and of course, with dreams you can really go anywhere. We wanted to give it a mood and a colour and a feeling and we wanted it to feel like you’re moving through dreams and through worlds of endless possibilities where everything is real and everything is not.”
The brainstorming process went on for over a month, Misha says. “We did many versions till we came to this. Sahej is also in a place in his life where he is discovering the wonders of video so it was actually a lot of fun bouncing ideas off each other till we reached a place that we were both happy with.” The video fascination is evident even to the most casual observer. For those of you who may not know, Sahej has been uploading videos onto his facebook page as part of something he likes to call Dualist Diary and it’s already making a mark where it counts most (audience’s hearts) with its sharp edits and personal, yet humorous tonality--all handled by Sahej himself. When asked about it, he says “I’ve been really enjoying working with videos lately. The making of this music video was, in fact, a hugely educational experience for me. I’ve always really admired Misha’s work, and getting to work with her helped me understand a great deal about the process of filmmaking. Since then, all the travel videos, etc have just been about me learning to film and edit, and to have fun creating short-format videos.” Their roles of duality eventually led to clarity of an idea, and the concept was sent to the producer - at which point it all morphed into serious production. “A team was assembled, and everyone who came on board brought their share of expertise and creativity, which made the whole thing happen” Sahej tells us.

The musician almost always has a fleshed out vision of what they want their video to look at. Where it get interesting is when that idea is translated to the director--and we were curious about Misha’s process. She explains, “I hear the song many times and let the visuals come to me. Of course my starting point is always to brainstorm with the musician. It’s important to know what he/ she thought while he wrote that piece of music. I like the thinking process to be collaborative and I take ideas from them to build the story bit by bit.” As most envisioning processes go, there is an idea one goes with but what happens at the shoot is often unpredictable. Misha says, going further into the making of Violet, “some of the stuff we wanted to achieve we actually didn’t even manage and a lot of the other things came together post shooting. We knew we wanted the graphics but we didn’t want to over crowd the film with it, we only wanted it to come in the right moments.”
Watching the video, it is hard to miss the imagery of masks, duality, change and a general air of dreamscape. Sahej reiterates that all of this comes from his subconscious--the images, the tones, all of it. In terms of actual production, Misha mentions that Anandita Kamani’s contribution to the video was immense considering she hand-painted every mask, strange doll and painting on the set essentially bringing this dream to life. Watch the video below to immerse yourself into a beautifully dark and twisted violet dreamscape.Words: Tansha Vohra