Down Town Pulse 2014

Keeping the pulse alive:

by Dilshan Boange

What gets your pulse pumping? Does music speak to your pulse to make your senses peak? These are possibly things that would be rhetorical questions to the audience that has built up over the past couple of years who have helped keep alive the musical extravaganza known as Down Town Pulse. The show is now in its fourth year. The annual music fiesta celebrates alternative music in a way that hopes to give those who practise nonmainstream music with an artistic and ideological vision, a better space and stage to come alive.

The endeavour is by a collective of youth who call themselves the Bekariye Kattiya whose camaraderie and fraternity finds its roots centred on the Mahalwarawa bakery and the productive leadership towards activism spurred by Viraj Liyanarachchi the proprietor of the said bakery, who himself is a professional photographer and aspiring filmmaker. With an impressive line up of artistes from the folds of alternative music in Sri Lanka this musical extravaganza is set to unfold at the Old Town Hall in Pettah (Colombo 11) on December 13 at 8 p.m. and will run for seven hours.

One of the central features that will distinguish the threading that brings the approaches to music adopted by the host of performers at the event will show a combination of music, lyrics and distortion. There will be ‘constructive anarchism’ one may contend. There could be ‘reassembling the disassembled’ one may say. There will be ‘order out of chaos’ one may hope. There could be innumerable possibilities as to what the creative interpretations coming out of Down Town Pulse owing to the fact that it hopes to celebrate in mass audience style the beauty of the alternative.

This year’s show will feature Ajith Kumarasiri who is known as ‘Rock Ajith’, Gosha, Paranoid Earthling, Whakan Thanka, Skitzo SL, Wanted, O2, Happy Journey, and Mix Master. It will feature many forms of musical expressions. It will be a place for collective appreciation of nonmain stream music coming alive unhindered and to its heart content.