On a humid evening in Auroville, the music starts without warning. A bass line emerges in the corner of a rooftop courtyard, answered by the shimmer of cymbals and a piano phrase that seems to bend the air. This is the sound of the Auroville music scene: alive in the moment.
In this small experimental township on the Coromandel Coast, a distinctive music scene has been slowly blossoming — one that blends improvisation with idealism, rooted traditions, and open-ended collaboration. In a place where people from around the world gather to explore alternative, often radically creative ways of living, it’s only natural for music to thrive.
Given that the concentration of artistic minds here is unusually high, the sounds that emerge from the community tend to reflect the openness of the place itself. Here, music isn’t confined to clubs or formal concerts. It flows through homes, rehearsal rooms, gardens, farms, and makeshift stages, moving between projects, friendships, and ideas. In many ways, the music mirrors Auroville’s own dream: borderless, intentional, and fluid. From the open architecture of the town to the organic rhythm of its days, everything invites deep listening. Improvisation becomes second nature in a place where certainty is rare and collaboration is essential.
At the heart of this movement is a web of interconnected ensembles — Emergence, Refuge, Sage for the Ages, TRAK, and Beginnings — each reflecting a facet of Auroville’s evolving sonic identity. They share more than just overlapping line-ups: they share an ethos of fearless experimentation and deep listening. Musicians span continents, idioms, and generations, and their instruments — voice, guitar, piano, bass, drums, saxophone — become portals for dialogue.
Krishna McKenzie’s Emergence, shaped by the ecological and social principles of Solitude Farm, fuses jazz, acoustic rock, and Indo-pop into music that is both lush and grounded. Over a long career, the band has seen many incarnations, inevitably featuring some of Auroville’s most prolific performers — Suresh Bascara, Mish’ko M’ba, Matt Littlewood, and presently the rhythm section of Dhani Muniz and Raul Mattia. Their new album Cage, released on Aug. 18 and produced by The Paper Factory as a collaboration between Muniz and Navneeth Krishnan, captures McKenzie’s heartfelt songwriting coupled with these musicians’ raw, improvisational energy (as well as that of Edmund Held on trumpet).
Muniz and Mattia also make up the rhythm section of Sage For The Ages, a neo-soul/Latin R&B band headed by singer, songwriter, and guitarist Kirtana Krishna. The band reflects a distinctly Auroville aesthetic: cross-cultural and deeply collaborative. Their compositions are eclectic and passionate, covering the lyrical spectrum from the metaphysical to the political. Featuring Aman Mahajan on keys, they are releasing their third album, R-evolution (also produced by The Paper Factory), this winter.
Mattia, Mahajan, and Navneeth Krishnan also form the rest of the lineup of TRAK, Dhani Muniz’s group, and his primary outlet as a guitarist. They are an avant-nu jazz ensemble that has grown out of his previous group, Suite; the expatriate and their album, Chimu Fiesta. Previously featuring musicians such as Suresh Bascara (ex-drummer for Emergence), saxophonist Maarten Visser of Chennai, and local bassist/guitarist Jules Arindam, their new, renamed dual-drummer incarnation is an edgier, genre-fluid statement from a group that walks the tightrope between freedom and groove.
Krishnan himself is an integral cog in much of the South Indian independent music scene. As a producer, drummer/percussionist, live audio engineer, photographer, videographer, and the more technically gifted half of The Paper Factory production team, Krishnan oversees the documentation and recording of much of the bioregion’s new emanations, as well as many of his own.
Aman Mahajan’s project Refuge, meanwhile, explores an evolving sense of home, which complements the Auroville spirit. Ranging from solo piano to trio and quartet lineups (many of which have featured the previous Emergence rhythm section of Mish’ko M’ba and Suresh Bascara) along with the saxophone talents of Matt Littlewood and, more recently, Muniz’s bass playing, it is a Bengaluru-based project whose main contributors have often come from Auroville — forming an inextricable link for over a decade.
Also a great fan of the duo setting for piano, Mahajan is the other half of the riddle that is Tinctures, playing irresistible cat and mouse games with the (currently) Berlin-based guitarist/producer Nishad Pandey. Both musicians have also recorded slightly more experimental duo albums with Muniz in Auroville called Quos Ego. Set to release in October, it is a film-based project recorded by him and Mahajan on a quiet day in CRIPA (Centre for Research in the Performing Arts). “Jugaad,” a series of eccentrically off-kilter vignettes put together by him and Pandey, will be out soon.
Raul Mattia, one of the youngest yet exceedingly accomplished players in the scene, is also the drummer in Matt Littlewood’s revolving-door lineup of Beginnings — a project dedicated to his own original compositions and an outlet for his instrument of choice, the piano. Playing hypnotic, non-stop sets, Beginnings connects decades of Auroville jazz history, with Littlewood collaborating with musicians such as Mattia, Muniz, Holger Jetter, Sankarshan “Shanks” Kini, Txuma Prat, Rolf Bosbach, and Suryan Stettner to bring his works to life.
A testament to the vibrancy of the local scene, Auroville continues to attract some of the most forward-thinking independent musicians in India, even without the financial incentives one might find in more metropolitan music scenes. Arjun Chandran moved to the area a year ago after being loosely based in Bengaluru. His unique style of slide guitar pays homage to the traditional American folk blues, combining that with more traditional Indian and worldwide folk styles collected on his travels around the country.
Meanwhile, Akshada Krishnan, a jazz pianist and student of Mahajan who was formerly based in Goa and Bengaluru, has also recently relocated to the area, citing the great allure of creative dialogue with like-minded artists as reason enough to make the move. Her arrival is evidence of just how alive the Auroville music scene really is.
And this is just scratching the surface: there are so many more wonderful musicians actively contributing to this scene in the area. Performances happen in spaces ranging from CRIPA and Bharat Nivas to the Kalabhumi Music Studio, Solitude Farm, and Dorian House. Musicians appear on each other’s albums, form one-off duos and trios, and come together for special events, creating a fluid creative ecosystem where boundaries between genres, roles, and cultures are constantly re-negotiated.
In a region where music often leans devotional or commercial, the Auroville music community holds a rare space: valuing improvisation without ego, lyricism without cliché, and politics without preaching. It is less about virtuosity for its own sake than about conversation — between instruments, between cultures, between ideals and lived realities.
What emerges is a body of work as diverse and dynamic as the community itself: a pulse between the notes, sustained by the people who call this place home.
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