Premik Jolly

Premik Jolly got two callings before he was ten — a guitar at seven, and, through a Sunday ritual of buying tapes at Bangalore's HMV House (now the Hard Rock Cafe), a psychedelic-trance tape from Goa at ten, in a city with no internet and no way to explain the sound. At fifteen, fresh out of school, he answered a call for a guitar player and took the gig sight unseen; it turned out to be thrash metal, in a band named after a Greek word for a song of grief — one of India's first, going since '96. He had two months to learn twenty songs before a competition stage. A decade later the band released a single EP, and he mixed and mastered it himself, his own bandmates sitting behind him telling him whether it was any good.

Somewhere in there he built a studio — designing it himself, using what he'd learned in the family construction business — and became the room behind a huge slice of Bangalore metal: if you've heard a metal record made in this city in the last fifteen years, there's a good chance you're hearing his room. Beyond it: a metal guitar carried onto a Sunburn headline set (a skull-covered flying-V), synthwave as Tron 1982, a space-rock project called Akashic, signature guitar tones a global brand ships under his name, and Base Camp — his studio and school, where he teaches production and cinematic sound design. He's released more music in the last two years than in the fifteen before it, all of it, by his own admission, going against what sells. This is the conversation about what it costs to be good at something the industry has no word for.

The VIC Fix is hosted by DJ VIC — an international DJ and producer who performs at weddings, corporate events and festivals across India, staged as a signature audio-visual show.