BENDI’s Heartspace starts off with the rumbling of clouds, a distorted voice and an unleashing of electropop – as the first track, THUNDERSTORMS IN MY CHEST opens up onto you. The sensibility that becomes apparent, is that the artist is a sucker for stimulating, speedy patterns of arrangement – and his neo-synthwave soundscape is solid enough evidence for that. Co-produced with long-term collaborator sudan, this is his first release in three years – under his current moniker, and this project, his press release states, is meant to show his capabilities as a producer.
This is not Hyderabad-bred Siddharth Bendi’s first rodeo with music. He has an impressive roster behind him. An alumnus of the 2022 Berklee College of Music Summer Programme, BENDI has marked his presence with over 1000 solo performances across India, three national tours, stand-out gigs at NMACC, G5A Foundation, and many more to name. In addition to this, he has also fostered a deep sense of community through intimate, self-organized house concerts. Navigating the music scene since he was 18, his projects from 2017-2019 set the pace, earning him the chance to share the stage with indie luminaries like When Chai Met Toast and Prateek Kuhad. Eventually, tracks like ‘Newness’ and ‘June’ accumulated 200k+ streams online. However, this clearly is a change of pace.
The 5-song, near-13 minute long record navigates through strands of alt-pop, and there is a sense of urgency in BENDI’s work. While the EP opens with “I’ve been on the run, feeling so unloved” as his voice loops and distorts — he almost sounds like he is trying to outspeed himself. It has the effect of a flashing strobe light, brilliant and blinding in its familiar dichotomy. The second track, calm, simpler in its keys and still in the continuum of rain and drowning, has distant group-chaos embedded, and it functions as a semi-interlude till the tracklist picks up a metronomic speed almost immediately on bad mannerz. There is one more trough, on the first half of Mother – which is gentler, even in its polished economy of sound. It almost feels like the rowing of a symbolic boat, or perhaps a raft where BENDI coasts through and trudges periodically.
The EP ends with the titular Heartspace, and the last minute of this track is extremely fun – which has an almost communitarian side. The artist’s music is rooted in the people he loves, be it romantic, familial, or platonic – and its shows, especially in the last chant on this track and sudan’s stylistic imprints at places. A lot of this record reminds me of work by multiple (alt) pop artists – which stretch from the more indie MUNA to some parts of Ed Sheeran’s discography (where he is not heavily leaning on market-trend analysis). BENDI, also, roots his work in those of artist-producers like Lauv, Jeremy Zucker etc. — and that is not misplaced, you do hear them in his project. However, that does not dissolve him as the creator of this — and Heartspace is a good start at redefinition, and it is quite exciting to await him break his sounds down further, and branch out further into his Carnatic classical roots – or whatever he envisions as his craft.
