Biography

Vishal J. Singh

Vishal J. Singh is a renowned Mumbai-based multi-Instrumentalist, film music composer, producer and mixing engineer, globally known for his multi-genre/multi-national band "Amogh Symphony" in the world of Progressive Rock and Avant-Garde music.

Grandson of Late Labanya Prabha Hazarika (Assam's first female multi-Instrumentalist, singer and composer recorded by Megaphone and HMV in 1935-1938), Vishal collaborated with several musicians across the globe, into the realms of Prog Rock, Free Jazz, Jazz fusion, Metal, Soundtrack, Electronica, Pop, Hip-hop and World music. He collaborated with some of the biggest names in the American music industry like Marco Minnemann, Hannes Grossmann, New York philharmonic Orchestra, Sean Reinert (Cynic), hip hop producer Wheezy, Jimmy Pitts etc. Recently, Vishal also collaborated with good friend actress/singer/model Preetika Rao and singer Siddharth Basrur by re-producing an old Hemant Kumar retro classic song "Yaad kiya dil ne kaha ho tum", released by Saregama. The song received some great appreciation. In 2012, Vishal collaborated with singer/actress/composer Vasundhara Das and Roberto Narain to score soundtracks for the film "Paranthe wali gali" and also collaborated in a brilliant Sufi-World fusion project called "The Shah Hussain Project" featuring Rajasthani Sufi legend Mukhtiyar Ali. At the moment, Vishal and Mukhtiyar Ali are working on a huge musical collaboration which will be out in 2018. Ad/Jingle Industry: Vishal also composed/produced music for various brands like Mahindra Rise, Jaguar, Tata Housing, Habib, Leopard Balm, Philips, Kent, SBI, HBO, Delhi Daredevil, Complan, Durex, ICICI, Discovery Channel, Bingo, Levi's, Stapler, Giorgio Armani and many more Indian and International brands.

Vishal, in his childhood, started as a very careful listener of music from the age of 5. Originally hails from Assam (North East), Vishal comes from a family of strong musical background. From Western Classical and Indian Classical to Traditional Jazz and Folk music, Vishal was exposed to almost every style of music by his parents (both musicians), uncles, aunts and grandparents. His first instrument was drums that he picked up at the age of 10. After a year of playing and learning drums, he picked up guitar as his second instrument to understand melodies. He joined his first band at the age of 15 to play covers of Led Zep, The Who, Carpenters, Dire Straits, Rush and Deep Purple. Later, he was a part of many other bands including Thrash Metal band Infinite Ashes from Pune. Vishal is a certified and experienced sound engineer/mixing engineer who was trained under the biggest name in Indian music industry called Daman Sood, well known engineers Mujeeb Dadarkar and Vijay Benegal at Digital Academy, Mumbai.

As a film music composer, Vishal started his career with two films — Tandra (A short psychological thriller film written by Niren Bhatt and directed by Tushar Ajgaonkar) in the year 2009 and Dvandva (A crime thriller feature film directed by Chhatrapal Ninawe and produced by Anurag Kulkarni) in 2008. He started producing experimental film soundtracks with the songs "Womaniya", "Keh k lunga feat. Amit Trivedi" and "Bahut khub" for the renowned film "Gangs of Wasseypur Part 1 and Part 2", directed by Anurag Kashyap, with music directed by good friend and popular Experimental music director known as Sneha Khanwalkar. Also produced soundtracks for films "Dishkiyaaon" in 2013 and an upcoming Animated film, in collaboration with Music director Sneha Khanwalkar. He also produced the famous song "Dhuaan" sung by Arijit Singh for the film "Fugly". Vishal, with his Music Director mother Kasturi Nath Singh, scored background music and soundtracks for Indian-American film-maker Vijit Sharma's Psychological thriller "Mirror Game". The film won several awards including "Best feature" and "Best Soundtrack" in festivals like Golden Gate Film Festival. Recently, he scored and directed music and soundtracks for upcoming film "The Window", directed by V.K Choudhary. He is currently working on background music and soundtracks of an upcoming French gore-action thriller movie. Also composed background music in the Swedish film "Fotfilen" directed by famous Swedish D.O.P and Director Niclas Ribbarp Fsf. He composed experimental music for many European art-films as well.

Vishal produced singles, albums and EP's of various popular rock, electronic, EDM, Industrial rock, extreme metal and pop acts such as Paratra (Mumbai), Coma Conscience, Acrophase (Seattle), Paradigm Shift (Mumbai), Zen Method (Tokyo), Daira (Mumbai), Harshad Shetty (Mumbai), M-Sonic (Kolkata), Infinite Redemption (Mumbai), Popibul (Assam), Kevin Marshall (Birmingham) and many more. He also appeared as guest guitarist and guest producer in many records/songs by bands and artists like Mark Hawkins (USA), LVM Trio (USA) with Luke Jaeger, Mad Essence (Ukraine), The Fractured Dimension from USA feat. Jimmy Pitts, Jerry Twyford, Hannes Grossman, The Fountainhead aka Tom Geldshlager from Germany. His remarkable guitar solo which he performed as guest guitarist with Marty Friedman in the song "Celestial" by famous Djent act "Skyharbor" was widely appreciated by the fans of modern progressive metal.

Andrey Sazonov

They have recently finished working on their third much-anticipated studio album with introducing the third multi-Instrumentalist and producer extraordinaire Andrey Sazonov from Russia. In Andrey Sazonov's words — "I grew up listening everything from King Crimson to Death, from Led Zeppelin to Blind Guardian, from Children of Bodom to Gackt. I enjoyed all of it. Being a kid I was taught to play a chromatic accordion, but ended up dealing with keyboards and guitars. Regular people like myself love unusual things. Never intended to write music, but ended up becoming a music producer and game OST composer. I tend to find something interesting in just about each and every genre and style the world can offer. Lots of interesting stuff (music, art, culture, languages) out there. I ended up combining the parts I like in my music. Around 2008 I started Dawn Sanctum project which combined synthpop with all kinds of heavy metal and electronica. The project released several game soundtracks apart from albums and EPs.

Soon enough I got an invitation to become a member of Abstract Deviation which I gladly accepted. I got acquainted with many amazing musicians and gradually participated in the shred project called Robots Pulling Levers with Their Shredding Majesties Mark Hawkins and Vishal J. Singh. The RPL experience was super refreshing for me so I naturally craved for more projects in the same vein. After seeing 'what I did there' with the RPL music Vishal approached me with an offer of becoming a member of Amogh Symphony. Funny enough, I thought he was a pretty unreachable guy when I first heard his music (and I loved Amogh music!). Being wrong has never felt any pleasant than the moment he spoke to me. So that's how I became the part of Amazing Soulcrushers 3 (AS3). Just kidding.

I see myself 99% as the composer/arranger and 1% as a performer. Sometimes it's really challenging to get the technical capacity needed to pull some licks and tricks. Yet I'm trying to write humane music with maybe some little imperfections which make music tasty. That's how I see it. I tend to learn from each culture I encounter, especially Asian culture. On the popular culture side, I am a fan of history/myth/sci-fi/fantasy books (though I would still prefer dictionaries and reference books), anime (especially stuff that came out before 2005), Japanese RPGs, fighting games (Mortal Kombat, Guilty Gear, Street Fighter, Tekken and the related) manga/manhua/manhwa, recent Bollywood movies and many more. I guess my motto would be 'We're here to learn'. Learning is life for me. Not even a single day without learning something new.

Derick Savio Gomes

In 2015, Derick Savio Gomes aka “/Err” from Lisbon, Portugal, an electronic avant-pop artist/singer/producer/engineer, who is known for his very unique skill of using random field recordings to replace sound samples in MIDI and wav for experimental Low-Fi electronic music, joined as 4th new addition to Amogh Symphony line-up. Vishal met Derick during making of Soundtracks of Anurag Kashyap’s movie “Gangs of Wasseypur Pt.1 and pt.2”. Common good friend (also Music Director of Gangs of Wasseypur OST) Sneha Khanwalkar connected them under one roof. Derick is also the main mind behind MTV Sound Trippin’ hosted by Sneha. Derick is into psychedlic artworks and paintings. He compose and produce music for ads/jingles and films/animations. Popularly known for his collaboration work with music composer Ram Sampath in OST of the film "Let's talk".

Tom Geldschlager

Fountainhead is the alter-ego of guitar player/composer/producer Tom Geldschläger. Currently operating from his studio in Berlin, Germany, «the Steve Vai of the new millenium» has appeared on dozens of records as a guitar player, producer & mixing-engineer.

He recorded and toured with artists like Ray Riendeau, Marco Minnemann, Jimmy Pitts, Xell, Hannes Grossmann, Vishal Singh, Christian Münzner and Nader Sadek, has been featured in various music-magazines around the globe (most recently «Guitar Plus» and «Guitar World»), was the lead-guitarist for internationally-acclaimed technical death-metal band Obscura´s «Akroasis» album (to which he also contributed the 15-minute epic «Weltseele») and is a member of eclectic instrumental prog-fusion quartet «Pitts/Minnemann Project». In both bands he used fretless guitars predominantly, making him the figurehead of this otherwise rarely used breed of guitar to a new generation of guitar and metal fans — a «modern day guitar legend» indeed.

He is currently endorsed by Steinberg Software, Loxx Products, Engl Amplification, Soultool Guitars and GoodTone Pickups, from which «Fountainhead signature» guitar models and pick-ups are available.

His solo releases «Fear Is The Enemy» and «Reverse Engineering» (feat. legendary players such as Derek Roddy, Ray Riendeau and more…) received rave reviews and secured him a dedicated following in just a few short years.