Anupam Shobhakar: From Slayer Fan to Sarod Virtuoso

The release date of Anupam Shobhakar's new album, Liquid Reality, is March 14, 2025, a date that coincides with the Hindu festival of Holi. When discussing the date with his label, AGS Recordings, they simply needed a good March release date. "We looked at it, and the calendar said 14th is Holi," Shobhakar recalls. "I'm like, oh yeah, let's put it out on Holi. It's a festival of colors. It's a pretty colorful record."

Liquid Reality marks the first full showcase of Shobhakar's custom double-neck guitar, which features both fretted and fretless necks, an axe that is a physical manifestation of the worlds his music straddles, as well as a device that allows him to integrate those worlds into one music. The album brings together kanjeera player Swaminathan Selvaganesh, pianists Utsav Lal and Santiago Liebson, vocalists Ona Kirei and Ben Parag, and percussionists Satoshi Takeishi, Chris Savarino, and Gumbi Ortiz.

Growing up in Bombay (now Mumbai), Shobhakar first absorbed music through his older brother. "It was mostly my elder brother's music," Shobhakar says. "He was into bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple." His brother's record collection featured ‘70s and ‘80s hair metal bands and David Lee Roth, solo and with Van Halen, who left their mark on young Anupam.

Meanwhile, his mother, a classically trained Indian singer, practiced with her tambura every morning. His father spent weekends playing recordings of Indian classical music alongside Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky.

"I started playing in my first band when I was like 12 years old. They used to sneak me into clubs," he laughs. At major festivals in Bombay, he found himself where "every other musician was like 30 years old. And I was this kid playing Metallica."

His listening habits quickly expanded to include progressive rock, jazz, and what he calls "information-rich" guitar music. "I was really into Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and all these shredders," he says. "And jazz and John McLaughlin and Pat Metheny."

At sixteen, Shobhakar had no interest in attending a concert by sarod master Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. His father bought him the cheapest back-row ticket to the event in Bombay anyway.

"He was like, no, you will go," Shobhakar remembers. "Because, generationally, his father knew Ali Akbar Khan. And through my great-grandfather, there's that family, we had connections with them."

Outside the concert hall, fate intervened. Shobhakar ran into the grandfather of his metal band's drummer, who organized classical music concerts and knew Khan personally.

"He saw me and asked, 'What are you doing here?' It's great. You're here, take this front-row seat," Shobhakar recalls. Suddenly, the metal kid in a Slayer t-shirt sat among India's musical elite. "Right next to me is Ustad Zakir Hussain, the great tabla player, and Pandit Kumar Sharma. All these legends in the front row."

The music struck him immediately. "He came out with Swapan Chaudhuri, celebrated tabla player, and they played for two hours. It was just the most haunting musical experience."

Back home, his father didn't seem surprised by Shobhakar's conversion. "I went home and told my dad, and he was like, 'Yep, I knew that. I'm going to get you a sarod tomorrow.'"

Switching from electric guitar to sarod proved brutal. The instrument demanded enormous physical strength with an action so high that, as Shobhakar puts it, "you can run a train through it." More difficult still was retraining his ears from Western equal temperament to Indian intonation with its 22 microtones.

"For the first year, [my teacher] was like, 'No, that third is too sharp. Or that seventh is too sharp,'" Shobhakar remembers. His guitar chops transferred easily, and he could play three-octave scales at blistering tempos, but playing in tune took longer.

"It took me about a year and a half," he says. "I was already flying on the instrument, I could play three octave scales and, in, in whatever, 260, 300 BPM. I have this natural ability to navigate a string instrument with a pick ... but it was the difficult thing was to be able to play really in tune."

His first teacher's methods nearly drove him away. "I hated it initially. To play scales for 10 hours a day," he admits. "You only get a new lesson if you perfect the previous lesson." He did exercises for six to eight months with almost no actual music. "He would keep me interested by throwing in a little music here and there."

This old-school approach stemmed from a core philosophy: get technique out of the way first, then spend your life exploring music. By 21, Shobhakar was performing professionally on sarod, just four years after beginning.

Though the sarod became his main performance vehicle, he never completely abandoned the guitar. The pandemic provided unexpected downtime, and during this period, Shobhakar experienced a pivotal dream about an instrument that could bridge his musical worlds.

"I woke up from a dream thinking, ‘Oh, I should just get this double neck guitar made,' which has a fretless neck," he explains. "With my years of sarod training, I can do the sarod thing, and my Indian classical urges are satisfied. And then the other thing [the fretted neck] I can do everything I do in music."

Being left-handed complicated matters. He found a Kiesel Osiris headless double-neck guitar, then later connected with a luthier from Eskişehir, Turkey, who built what Shobhakar calls "this absolute gem."

The final design features twin seven-string necks—one fretted, one fretless. With a low B on both necks, Shobhakar gets four equal octaves that work perfectly for Western harmony and Indian microtonality.

Liquid Reality showcases what this new instrument can do. The album opens with "Anjaneya," named for the Hindu deity Hanuman, god of wind. "To me, sound translates through air, so I wanted to make that connection," Shobhakar explains.

The track burns with prog rock intensity, drawing from Dream Theater, Shakti, and Mahavishnu Orchestra. "It's the barn burner on the album," Shobhakar says, mixing blazing solos with complex rhythms and jazz harmonies.

For rhythmic foundations, Shobhakar brought in Satoshi Takeishi and kanjeera player Swami Selvaganesh. "That right there is a rhythm section that's a guitar player's dream. You can just swim in it," he says.

"Ladders to the Sky" reveals Shobhakar's Pat Metheny Group influence, particularly their 1984 album First Circle. With Brazilian/Latin elements "steeped in American jazz," the track features Barcelona vocalist Ona K (Ona Kirei) and percussionist Gumbi Ortiz from Al DiMeola's band.

Perhaps most significant is Shobhakar's take on "La Danse Du Bonheur," a John McLaughlin/L. Shankar composition from Shakti's 1976 album Handful of Beauty. Working with pianist Utsav Lal, Shobhakar added harmonies the original never had. "I didn't just want to do a carbon copy," he says.

The track came at the suggestion of his collaborator, Swami Selvaganesh, whose family has a three-generation connection to Shakti. Swami's father, V. Selvaganesh, joined Shakti when it reformed in the late 1990s as Remember Shakti, taking over the role played by his father, Vikku Vinayakram, in the original group.

"We nerd out on that music together," Shobhakar says of his relationship with Swami Selvaganesh. Their musical connection shines on "Formless," a duo piece Shobhakar describes as "a weird mix of ideas between West and East with a lot of mathematical juggling."

After years of international touring, Shobhakar has developed a keen sense of how audiences differ. "The road is the road, whether you're playing in Frankfurt or in LA or in Bombay," he notes, but reactions vary dramatically.

"With American audiences, there's a lot more animated interaction with the music," he observes. "It's more of a festival vibe, even if you're playing a theater."

European crowds maintain a different energy. "They're very quiet. They're very erudite. But when you're playing, you're like, are people even digging this? And after you finish playing, the applause is deafening."

In India, Shobhakar recently encountered his most nerve-wracking audience test in Varanasi, one of the oldest cities in the world and a stronghold of traditional music. Playing his double-neck guitar rather than a traditional sarod was risky.

"They don't suffer fools when it comes to Indian music," he explains. "They're traditional, and they're pretty conservative." But his two-hour concert of fully traditional music on his non-traditional instrument earned what he calls the loudest applause he's ever heard.

Shobhakar tailors his approach based on the crowd. He starts traditionally in older, more conservative venues, then gradually introduces more progressive elements once "people's ears have opened up and the palate's been seasoned."

He can dive straight into his full musical vocabulary with younger audiences at festivals, including more harmonic experimentation.

Liquid Reality comes out through AGS Recordings, the label run by guitarist and composer Joel Harrison, another long-time Shobhakar collaborator. Their connection dates back to 2010, when Shobhakar moved to New York.

"Joel was writing a piece for classical quartet, sarod and jazz quartet," Shobhakar recalls. The resulting project became the album Still Point Turning World. They've been musical comrades ever since, touring and recording together.

Harrison and Shobhakar share an approach to cross-cultural music that avoids what Shobhakar calls "shallow, exotic fusion sort of identity." Instead, they aim for something deeper, where the music comes together "on a more elemental level."

"We wanted to make it very American, very New York, where we have this bilingual musical dialogue," Shobhakar explains.

With his custom double-neck, Shobhakar brings together the kid who snuck into Bombay clubs to play Metallica and the disciplined musician who practiced sarod scales for ten hours straight. Liquid Reality emerges from this personal history. "All of my decisions in music are made from necessity," Shobhakar says. "The tool should fit into what I'm trying to do."

Visit Anupam Shobhakar at shobhakar.com. You can purchase Liquid Reality on Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice.