Khiyo

Bengali heritage music with a London sound.

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Khiyo is a London-based band that gives Bengali heritage music a modern, fresh sound. The band’s repertoire is drawn from Bengali folk, film, protest songs and other traditional genres such as Nazrul and Rabindra Sangeet. Khiyo is fast developing a reputation as a formidable live band, headlining at the Purcell Room as part of the South Bank’s 2013 Alchemy Festival. The band released its debut album in summer 2014.

Khiyo was formed in 2007 as a collaboration between British-Bangladeshi vocalist Sohini Alam and composer/multi-instrumentalist Oliver Weeks to explore new ways of presenting traditional Bengali music whilst preserving its essence. The band’s sound mixes powerful and expressive interpretations of the classics with dynamic and original arrangements that draw on South Asian and Western folk and classical traditions, rock, blues and jazz.

Khiyo is named after a letter of the Bengali alphabet, the ‘Khiyo’ (ক্ষ). It is a unique letter that, whilst being a combination of two letters, has an identity of its own. Similarly, though the band’s members draw on many different musical backgrounds, the amalgamation of the whole has a singularly identifiable sound.

In December 2012, Khiyo released the music video for its version of Nobel Prize winning poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Amar Shonar Bangla. The song, also the national anthem of Bangladesh, caused controversy for several reasons including use of western instruments, seated musicians and vocal stylings – particularly the vocals coming in from the middle of the song. The video went viral among Bengalis worldwide, with Facebook and Bengali blogs taking up the slack for YouTube, which was banned in Bangladesh at the time. Against the backdrop of political turmoil caused by the verdicts on war criminals from Bangladesh’s 1971 War of Independence, Khiyo was accused of sedition for ‘distorting’ the anthem by one of the most well known musicians in Bangladesh. The controversy flared further as more of the biggest names in Bangladeshi music weighed in for and against the band’s version of the song. The band quickly became national news in the country, appearing on most major TV channels, newspapers and on radio. In addition to being on the news, Khiyo has spawned a TV comedy sketch and opened up debate about the song’s place in the hearts of Bengalis in neighbouring West Bengal in India.

participating in

  • WOMEX 2015
  • WOMEX 2014

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Khiyo