Indie Artist-Producer Avijit ‘Avi’ Misra seamlessly blends bluesy grooves with Indian songwriting elements and electronica experiments to paint a musical world that's human yet contemporary.
His digital music lives exclusively on this website.
Avi's songs are vivid, whimsical, anthemic and strangely infectious - mixing biting social commentary with hymnic, oft surreal meditations delivered in his signature baritone voice. His production ethos is refreshingly organic with the self taught multi - instrumentalist playing guitars, synthesizers and finger drumming on his records to retain a performative feel emulating the raw expression of Woodstock era records while using the freshest tools in music production.
Starting out as a folk rock balladeer in India's rock music scene more than a decade and a half ago, Misra shared the stage with a motley crew of musos that played festivals like NH7 Weekender, Ziro Festival Of Music, MTV Indies Ragasthan, Delhi Celebrates 100 Years, Gulmarg Winter Festival as Avi And The Uprising - morphing from a heavy blues rock band in their early days to a Hindustani tinged psychedelic folk rock outfit that tracked on the record . His album 'Eyes On The Radio' was released in 2014 to critical acclaim and the band hit the road for a 3 city tour partnered with MTV Indies and India’s leading music club - Blue Frog.
Misra first toured Australia in 2012 and then migrated to the land down under in 2015 and immediately made a mark on the Aussie music scene with nationwide radio airplay and a reputation for powerful live shows along the East Coast from The Tote to The Brisbane Powerhouse collaborating with many top notch Aussie singer-songwriters on the same bill and playing music festivals like Nimbin Mardi Grass. Brisbane Fringe, Wonderland Festival, Grounded Festival and The Singers Festival.
Misra’s work captures a time and a place in song and can be split in two phases - first, a liberalising India as an urban Indian and then, a modern Australia as a migrant in the second phase of his discography. In doing so and progressively embracing diverse musical styles and evolving music technology - one may argue that work like his could not have been conceived in any other time but the early 21st Century.
He released a retrospective solo acoustic live CD 'New Delhi Blues (2008-2011)' in 2018 and his Rajasthani folk tinged electronica concept album 'Usha' - (spiced with samples taken from a jam with Bheel and Manganiyar musicians in 2013) with a six city India-Australia Tour in 2019.
He released his Melbourne themed darkwave album 'Sketches By The Birrarung' (his only purely synth based record) at The Tote in February 2020 right before the pandemic hit and returned to an Electronic Rock sound with his fifth album 'Nostalgia' released in 2023 - fashioned from iconic analog synths from the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio Collection and lockdown reflections.
Other notable achievements include teaching at The Delhi School Of Music, performing as a soloist in Giusseppe Verdi's 200'th Year official Indo Italian Celebrations and working in the Australian community arts sector with organizations like Wild At Heart, The Boite and Multicultural Arts Victoria.
In 2022 as Melbourne was springing back to life Post COVID - Misra was invited to play in the City Of Melbourne’s ‘On The Road Festival’ where he experienced the joys of street performance for the first time and took to Melbourne’s vibrant culture of street performance like a duck to water. He has become a regular feature of the evening Bourke Street Mall soundscape since - playing hundreds of shows and selling hundreds of CD’s over the past three years.
Though perpetually underground and under the radar despite almost two decades of consistent work - Misra's innovative collage of songwriting and production ideas have been described as breaking new ground and have inspired the creative direction of many.