MUMBAI: One year after the release of his highly successful debut album, Doppelganger, producer, composer and guitarist, Sahej Bakshi, a.k.a. Dualist Inquiry, released his newest single, Lumina. An upbeat track that’s glitchy, bouncy and uplifting all at once, Lumina reveals a new side of the electronica artist. The first single off his next EP, slated for release later this year, Lumina also marks the first track that contains vocals by Dualist Inquiry as well. Sahej said, "I've never thought of myself as a vocalist, and so in the past, I simply never tried. I gave it a shot with Lumina, and when I showed it to several people whose opinion I trust, they asked why I'm still looking for a vocalist when I can do it myself. I responded saying something like "but I'm not a vocalist", and one of them had to point out to me: "Yes you are, you're singing on this". It was getting around the whole mental block, and once I got around that, I was fine with leaving the vocals in." Lumina will be available for free download on the 10th of March.

The release of Lumina constitutes not only the single, but also a music video which was produced for the track in Los Angeles in October last year, as a result of collaboration between Dualist Inquiry and Red Bull. Once Sahej had completed the music for Lumina, Red Bull stepped in to help plan and execute his vision for the music video. This collaboration, he believes, allowed him to plan and dream on a scale that would not have been possible otherwise. The music video for Lumina furthers Sahej’s connection with Los Angeles (LA) – the local rave scene in LA was where Sahej first discovered his love for electronic music. He lived in the city for five years, graduating from the Thornton School of Music at USC, and worked at Capitol Records in Hollywood as a mastering studio assistant. Lumina will premiere exclusively on www.redbull.in 10 March, following which; it will air on Pepsi MTV Indies.

The only official music video Dualist Inquiry released so far has been the one for Gravitat. Bakshi says, "I don't think the two could be more different from each other! Gravitat was made less than one year into starting Dualist Inquiry, and the aim with that was just to capture the fun and energy of the kind of intimate shows I was having those days. We didn't have a script or anything, we just threw a crazy party and had 5 cameras capturing moments all over the place. In contrast, Lumina had a script, plot, production company, professional director, cast of 10 actors, crew of 15 people and used huge amounts of filmmaking equipment."

The music video for the single was shot in 12 hours, and Bakshi says, "We chose a music video style and story that would work well within our budgets. Isaac (the director) told me that he faced a decision of whether to make it a 2 day shoot with less lights and equipment or to get everything at once for a 12 hour shoot. At the end of the day, it was only because the team was incredibly efficient, that they managed to wrap up the whole shoot in 12 hours. The whole team was setting up and shooting scene after scene with surprising speed and efficiency."

Differentiating the his new work with Doppenganger (his earlier album), Bakshi said, I try not to think about where I'm coming from or going, musically speaking. I prefer to just follow my instincts and later see where I've ended up. With Doppelganger, I explore several styles and sounds that I've gotten out of my system, and with Lumina, I was more focused on composing a nice song you can listen to at home, rather than produce a monstrous dance floor banger. I think my new productions are more about the performance of the instruments than some of my older material, which was much more dependent on electronic production and effects. "

Lumina has been directed by the incredibly talented art director Isaac Ravishankara, who has, in the past, also directed music videos for artists and bands such as Ellie Goulding, The Lumineers, KT Tunstall and Keith Urban, among others. Working with him, Sahej believes, was an enriching experience. "Isaac Ravishankara is a really talented and accomplished filmmaker from Los Angeles. I was introduced to his work during our selection of music video treatments, and really loved the look and emotion of all the videos he'd earlier done. We talked on Skype once before I left for LA, and we were both really vibing off the same themes and ideas. That was probably the most comforting thing to me, knowing that the director of the video is on the same page as me creatively, and from then on, I just trusted him blindly. Isaac led the 20-member cast and crew with great efficiency and care, and I could really tell that he's a guy who knows what he wants and how to get it," he says. The entire video for Lumina was filmed within a period of 12 hours, between 5pm and 5am, with a film crew consisting of 15 people and a cast of 15 actors, including a cameo appearance by Bakshi.

The release of Lumina comes close on the heels of Bakshi’s latest project Subterra, a compilation album comprising eight tracks by eight of the freshest and most exciting Indian indie electronica acts. These are, Delhi-based Frame/Frame, whose debut EP release in 2013 made him one of the most popular producers of the year; quickly-rising Mumbai-based producer Sandunes; funk/nu disco duo Madboy/Mink; Pune-based DJ and producer Big City Harmonics; hotly-tipped Mumbai-based DJ and producer Nanok; popular Delhi-based DJ Su Real; Your Chin, the solo electro-pop project of Sky Rabbit vocalist Raxit Tewari; and Dualist Inquiry. Subterra also marked the first ever compilation released under Bakshi’s own record label Dualism Records, launched by him last year with Doppelganger.