Tete-a-tete With RejectX Producer Shezan Shaikh

Shezan Shaikh is a music composer based out of Bombay, India. A music graduate from the prestigious Musicians Institute Hollywood, California, he composes music for Video Games, Films and TV.  He is also a part of a heavy metal band called Providence (winners of Rolling Stone best metal band and album 2012) and Team Relentless MMA fight team. His music is majorly influenced by artists like Pantera, Megadeth, Iron Maiden and the likes. As for Film scoring, his influences include Trent Reznor (NIN), Junkie XL, Harry Gregson Williams and the legendary Nobuo Uematsu.

Talking about his stint with Rejectx, Shezan said, "Rejectx was my first OTT show/Webseries. I got approached by Sneha Khanwalkar’s management to produce songs for the show. That’s how I got on board for the project. It was a huge learning curve as I’ve mainly always only done Scoring for films and TV Commercials. And I got signed to produce some 14 tracks…give or take a few."

This was Shezan's first project on an OTT show, "I really took a lot away from this project in terms of experience and working with big teams and units. And how intertwined everything is."

Talking about the timeline of the project, Shezan said, "I think we took 4 months to finish the entire show. For the scenes we did 1 minute versions of the tracks which once approved had to be turned into  3 minute long songs for the album version. The songs and the 1 minute versions are placed throughout the series so there’s no dedicated scene as such."

Discussing the growing popularity of independent music and the subcultures, Shezan talked about how artists can look for other forms of revenue, outside of live gigging and streaming, "I don’t consider myself as an Indie scene musician. I consider myself a part of the Indian Heavy Metal scene. A scene built on the essence of DIY way before there was any other scene. And that DIY attitude is the most important thing if you want to be an artist or a music composer outside of the live gig and streaming areas. There’s a bunch of stuff, from sessions to composing. You can get into programming and arranging. Maybe even assisting some other composer with more experience. I’ve never been fortunate enough to be able to assist someone when I started out, for me it was just a hit or a miss thing. But in turn It really helped me get my chops up in the Composing department along with Programming/Arranging chops."

Talking about Shezan's studio and the other projects he works on, he said, "I’m also the proprietor of Studio Providence named after the band that I play in (Providence). At the Studio, we handle all kinds of Projects, From Bollywood to TV Commercials to Video Games and regional language dubs. Enkore’s album Bombay Soul was done at our facility, Bhaynak Maut’s new albums vocals dubs were done at the studio itself. We handled all the dubs for the ROMP film Mirzia and MPPM. Also handled the entire dubbing for an upcoming movie called Cargo starring Vibrant Massey and Shweta Tripathi. The Studio has also been a part of over 1000 ad films in the course of the last 5 years. Anything from small changes to full product counts."

Concluding with a chat about his upcoming project releases, "As we speak I’m working on the Score for an upcoming film based on a freedom fighter. I also did the Musical Score for Cargo which is due for release sometime this year. Outside of that I’m working on 4 video games which are all due for release sometime next year. I also happened to do the score for this beautiful Indie film based in the premise of Rajasthani folk called Gulabi. And that score for me was very challenging as we were trying to mix Rajasthani Folk instruments with more western pop elements. And I’ll be starting work on another film project by November. Alongside all of this, my AD jingle work is constantly being released every 2 months or so. Also, my debut Synthwave album titled Neon Terror will also be releasing in a few months."