Produced by Red Bull Media House, the Mind Behind is a cross-discipline series about the lives and careers of professionals across multiple streams. Started as a three-part video series on Red Bull India’s Instagram page, episode four featured Udyan Sagar, better known as Nucleya, who is arguably amongst India’s most popular electronic musicians. He talks to Mae Mariyam Thomas.

Excerpts from the interview:

Udyan you once said that when you step up to the music console and press the play button, Nucleya comes alive and Udyan takes a back seat. Does this happen during the creative process too?

Well, I simplified the process for people to understand better. But it is obviously a bit more complicated than that. It all boils down to keeping your emotional state balanced somehow. If you’re emotionally in a good place then naturally everything you do turns to gold. Or even if not gold then you have the ‘sabar’, you say in Hindi, to keep pushing for it. But if you’re not doing so well emotionally then the ‘sabar’ goes for a toss.

Do you work better under pressure or do you need a relaxed state of mind?

Not really, but you don’t have a choice at that time. So, you do whatever you can to the best of your ability.

So tell us how are you managing work during Lockdown?

I live in Goa so I’m at home right now. The other day my friend was asking me how my life has changed, and I told him nothing has changed for me. I get up in the morning, I come make music in my studio at home and that’s it. What I usually do is when I go to bed at night I think about the music I will be working on the next morning. So, I try to work as much as I can in my head and have a couple of options ready the next day. This has gotten me into a bit of trouble with my son when he asks me something about dinosaurs and I am absently agreeing with him. It happens to me a lot when I am mentally thinking about my music during conversations with others.

You are known to collaborate with a lot of artists, how are you doing that currently?

Honestly, I am a very shy person in the studio and most of the songs I make are done over the internet. I was telling my friend the other day to send me the song he had been working on through WhatsApp and not bother recording in the studio and before sending. I was reading something the other day and this one line really stayed with me that goes, ‘it’s better to have a bad recording of something really incredible than a good recording of a bad song’.

Do you have someone you can relate to for ideas and opinions with regard to your music?

I have a bunch of people who are brutally honest with me. My wife, Smriti, is one. I bounce a lot of ideas with Ritviz and Vishal Dadlani. They are very honest with their feedback. And if something is not working for them then I ask them what. I think of it as a problem that needs a solution and I work on that. So, if I’m making an album with 7 songs, that folder will have like 40 songs that didn’t make the cut.

So you go with what you have, is that what you are saying?

What happens is that we end up gauging happiness through the lens of success. To be relevant we have to release music constantly. But I believe even if you have one release in two years but it is a good one then it is good enough. Just make music from your heart. If you feel that, then your fans will feel it as well. I feel the right way to do it is to find what you really love doing – and I learned this from Smriti, she paints really well, but she doesn't do it to publish the painting, she doesn't draw to get X number of likes. It's the process, which makes you happy, and we need to keep at it.

So can you explain this process a bit more?

 I look at music in terms of blocks. For example, I say this is very Indian sounding and this block is very electronic sounding and this is a blues jazz sort of thing and if I put all of these blocks together is there a way I can make sense out of it? But everything needs to be vastly different from each other and be unique. So, uniqueness is definitely something that I look for in sounds, rhythms and colours, and even food.

Coming to the lyrics of your music, do you pen them yourself or do you have someone along in your team?

I collaborate with different people for different songs, so Akkad Bakkad, Smriti wrote, a new one coming out called Everything is written by Ritviz. I don’t write the songs. I’m terrible with lyrics. Even my eight-year-old son is better. He has a good vocabulary. But I’m good at making other people sound good.

You also did a collaboration with Dutch duo Yellow Claw, can you share some details on this collab?

I always wanted to make music with Yellow Claw and a bunch of other really big DJs and producers globally. And I used to reach out to them like five, seven, years back, and a lot of them never replied. So, I was disappointed. But then I thought I’d release my own music, and surprisingly everything started working in my favour. Eventually my inbox was flooded with thousands of messages, and I realized I'd never be able to go through all of them. And among those messages was one from Yellow Claw, saying they actually wanted to work with me – but I never saw it! Then they reached out to me through someone in Mumbai and I couldn’t believe it.When I finally spoke to them, they were like dude like we've been trying to chase you for a long time. And I couldn't gather the right words to explain that I never thought they would get it touch with me, so I never checked my inbox! But it’s such an honour to be able to work with them. And now we're actually working on a song together.”

Any other collaboration in the pipeline?

We have one collaboration with Ritviz and Divine and another collaboration with just Ritviz.

You’ve been playing to large crowds since a few years, can you tell us your most memorable live gig?  

Quite a few, the one I did during the Ganesh festival was amazing. My first ever indoor stadium show at NSCI for Raja Baja was really nice.

What advice can you share for young musicians who are just starting out?

It’s important to have some degree of musical education where you know about chords and scales and melodies and how to stitch different melodies together. That kind of helps in a huge way.

Interviewed by Mariyam Thomas. Mariyam is the founder of Maed in India