Mumbai/Pune-Based Rock Band Aswekeepsearching Captures the Giddy and Gruelling Moments of Their First Ever Europe Tour

At their first show on their European tour on May 9 in Cologne, Germany, Mumbai/Pune-based rock band Aswekeepsearching were sweating buckets. For a band that’s built its fanbase on impeccable sounding performances on stages across India since 2014, they were about to show a bit of Europe what they were made of between May 9-27 earlier this year.

But then, the band’s guitar processor refused to switch on during soundcheck. Vocalist and guitarist Uddipan Sarmah recounts, “Everyone just went silent.” They were documenting everything exciting on their first Europe sojourn where they performed at the Dunk festival in Belgium and Pelagic in Germany among others, but the cameras had to stop rolling early on. Sarmah regrets they didn’t capture the tense moments on video, though. “No one actually recorded our faces, how fucked we were. I was sweating, because it was 10 minutes before the show and you don’t know what exactly to do. It would’ve been amazing if someone captured it,” he says.

But there’s plenty of other footage that makes Aswekeepsearching’s Europe tour documentary of seven countries—including Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech republic, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria—a must-watch for any fan of the band. Majority of the footage comes from the band’s live sound engineer Adhiraj Singh, who also runs recording studio and video production house Refractor in Pune. Sarmah says shooting and then whittling down the footage for use was certainly a challenge, since all four members of the band—guitarist-keyboardist Shubham Gurung, bassist Bob Alex and drummer Gautam Deb—were documenting the tour. “We came back with 400 GB of data. Everything was shot on the highest resolution possible on our OnePlus phones. We came back with so much and I can imagine how difficult it was for Adhiraj to sit down and figure a story around it, while also limiting everything to seven minutes and keep it exciting.”

The result is something of a not-so-ordinary account of tour life for a band that takes it all in wide-eyed and open-armed. They don’t shy away when the fatigue sets in either. Sarmah says, “It got a bit irritating to even capture everything. Those seven days continuously in the van, we were so done with each other, it became difficult to shoot.”

If anything, the tour documentary shows us that touring isn’t actually close to what this semi-famous meme describes it to be, because there’s plenty of sights and scenes when you’re in a new city every other day. Sarmah says, “I don’t feel like yeh meme wala hum log ke saath nahi hua hai. Not everything was super monotonous. This is about the exciting journey we had.”