RaGa Bag-Bhim

RANJIT MAKKUNI Sitar
Mithilesh Jha Tabla

This song is composed with each line alternating between Raga Bhimpalasi and Bageshree, both minor scales with the same notes, but which have different ascending and descending patterns.

Genre = Sitar, Classical Indian Sitar crescendo

Bag Bhim sampleRanjit Makkuni

00:00 / 01:04

RANJIT MAKKUNI

The practice of music and the pursuit of sacred arts lie closely near to attainment of divinity.

Geometric compositions, Intricate fret work, cross rhythms produce deep exhilarating energies, and the audience is beyond the realms of “here and now” to the higher states of consciousness.

Part of the challenge for Ranjit, against the backdrop of contemporary speed and global capitalism, is to maintain concentration and not sacrifice the pursuit of perfection of pitch for surface level presentations. Resisting contemporary forces of speed, creating intensity in slowness, focusing on the evolution of the scale and the ability to evoke subtle emotion are the unique elements of Ranjit’s presentation.

Mahamaya-Music

After designing many successful museums, Mahamaya's founder, Ranjit Makkuni turned towards a musical trajectory and created experimental works under the band Mahamaya.

The band’s music spans a variety of diverse musical genres: classical Indian, South-East and East-Asian. Mahamaya’s music is performed with predominantly string instruments, featuring sitar, guitars, harps and others, with world music rhythms. The songs span expression in the genres of opera, funk, pop, rock and classical Asian.

The term Mahamaya in Sanskrit means “mesmerizing illusion,” and usually refers to how people become entrapped in the rapture of beauty without knowing it. Musically, Mahamaya refers to dynamic improvisations, changing themes, shifting tonics across time (without the listener’s knowledge), cross rhythms, and others. Psychologically, the term refers to displacements from the ‘true-self’.

Many songs attempt to show the hyper-connected, update-addicted, privacy-less, cancel-culture, and vulnerable-to-info-war Man, alternatives to the emerging inhumanity caused by excessive rational determinism and the resultant world of inequity, injustice, clutter and environmental chaos. These compositions explore a 'pause' for reflection, and ways to re-imagine a way out of the ‘suffering’ outside and inside.