For Your GRAMMY® Consideration
The Ascension
Agam
Best Global Music Performance
Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals
A 200-Year-Old Prayer for the Moment You Cannot Carry Life Alone
Agam's The Ascension reimagines Marivere Gathi, a 200-year-old Telugu-language South Indian classical (Carnatic) composition by Syama Sastri, as a modern rock-orchestral journey through surrender, struggle, strength, and release.
Built from the melody, rhythm, and emotional world of a famous South Indian classical (Carnatic) song, the single brings together electric guitars, choral writing, featured acoustic instruments, and orchestral strings recorded with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in Prague.
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In The Press
“AGAM keep raising the bar for themselves and for what independent music from India can look like at its most ambitious.”
“There are plenty of bands that call themselves fusion, but very few manage to make two completely different musical worlds feel like they were always meant to exist together.”
“AGAM elevates ancient devotion into contemporary progressive rock on The Ascension.”
A South Indian classical tradition, carried at global scale.
Carnatic music is the classical music tradition of South India, carrying centuries of melody, rhythm, devotion, discipline, and emotional force. Agam does not treat that depth as something to simplify or flatten for wider audiences.
Instead, the band keeps the classical source at the center, then builds a larger contemporary frame around it with progressive rock, choral writing, orchestral scale, featured acoustic instruments, cinematic arrangements, and the physical release of a live show.
The Ascension is that larger story in one song: a 200-year-old prayer carried forward as something rooted, immediate, and alive.
Keep the depth
Change the container
Let rooted music travel
Live Energy
Agam's music comes fully alive on stage, where classical precision, progressive scale, and audience participation become one shared experience.
The scale of the room
Light carried by the audience
A large-scale live sound
Rooted music, open-air scale
Audience, light, and lift
A devoted live following
Shared energy in the room
Classical fire, rock scale
Built for the stage
Movement and intensity
A room moving together
The band and the community
The collective
The band behind the ascent
The Work
There are moments when strength quietly runs out. It can happen late at night, when the house is silent and the mind will not stop. It can happen after months of pressure, after loss, illness, anxiety, loneliness, or burnout.
At some point, every person reaches the same quiet sentence: I cannot do this alone. That feeling sits at the heart of The Ascension.
The piece is rooted in Marivere Gathi, a 200-year-old South Indian classical composition by the revered composer Syama Sastri. Written in Telugu, a South Indian language, the original is a prayer to the goddess Kamakshi. Its central cry can be understood simply as: Who else is there for me?
Agam's version stays connected to that sacred source. It does not treat the original as just material for a new arrangement. It carries the prayer with respect, while opening its emotional meaning to listeners across cultures.
For someone who does not know Telugu or Carnatic music, the song can still be felt clearly. It is about the moment when a person has done all they can, and reaches for strength beyond themselves.
The song begins with one voice, bare and alone, like a prayer rising in the dark. Then the orchestra rises around it. The private prayer becomes larger, as if the weight someone has been carrying is finally seen.
Then progressive rock enters. The music starts to push, fight, and climb. This is the sound of moving through difficulty, one step at a time.
Plucked-string colors from the rabab and saz, instruments associated with Middle Eastern and Central Asian musical traditions, widen the journey alongside South Indian percussion. The song travels across cultures and time, but it also returns to its source.
By the end, the music opens into release. Not because everything is suddenly fixed, but because something inside has shifted.
That is why the song is called The Ascension. It is not about escaping pain. It is about rising through it.
A 200-year-old prayer becomes a modern song of survival and release. A plea for protection becomes a journey of strength. A moment of surrender becomes an ascension.
The Journey
Invocation
A quiet vocal opening frames Marivere Gathi, the source Carnatic composition, as a plea, keeping its emotional center clear before the arrangement expands.
Melodic Tenderness
The source melody carries the feeling of devotion, longing, refuge, and release, even for listeners who do not know the original language.
A Seven-Beat Pulse
A seven-beat rhythmic cycle, roughly the organizing pulse of the composition, gives the piece its sense of movement, tension, and climb.
Orchestral Ascent
Strings recorded with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra widen the scale while leaving the band and composition at the center.
Collective Voice
The choral ensemble transforms an individual prayer into a shared human expression, surrounding the lead vocal with breadth and lift.
About Agam
Agam is a multiple award-winning Carnatic progressive rock band from Bengaluru, India, formed in 2003. The band is known for bringing South Indian classical music into conversation with progressive rock, global instrumentation, and contemporary production.
Agam has built a devoted live following through large-scale concerts, immersive visuals, and arrangements that turn classical source material into a shared, high-energy performance experience.
Across studio recordings and live performances, Agam's work is rooted in classical composition while speaking through electric guitars, keyboards, bass, drums, percussion, choral voices, and ensemble arrangements.
The Ascension continues that dialogue through a single built from Marivere Gathi, placing a Carnatic classic inside a large-format recording that includes choral voices, featured acoustic instruments, and orchestral strings.
Featured Collaborators
Czech National Symphony Orchestra
Orchestral Strings
Recorded at CNSO Studios in Prague, the Czech National Symphony Orchestra strings bring symphonic scale to The Ascension, expanding the composition's emotional arc without replacing its South Indian classical foundation.
Vagu Mazan
Rabab and Saz
Vagu Mazan adds rabab and saz, plucked string instruments associated with Middle Eastern and Central Asian musical traditions, extending the recording's palette alongside Agam's rock instrumentation and classical source material.
Sajith Pappan
Maddalam
Sajith Pappan's maddalam performance adds a barrel-shaped, hand-played South Indian percussion voice, connecting the arrangement's scale back to the physical force of traditional rhythm.
Sai Shravanam
Chief Mix and Master Engineer
Sai Shravanam leads the mix and master from Resound India, Chennai, shaping the recording's balance between voice, band, chorus, featured instruments, and orchestra.
Creative Team
Agam
- Vocals: Harish Sivaramakrishnan
- Keyboards, Additional Programming: Swamy Seetharaman
- Guitars: Praveen Kumar
- Bass: Aditya Kasyap
- Drums: Yadhunandan Nagaraj
- Percussions: Sivakumar Nagarajan
Choral Ensemble
Aavani Malhar, Amal C Ajith, Anila Rajeev, Anu Thomas, Ashima Manoj, Aswin Vijayan, Bharath Sajikumar, Pavithra Padmakumar, Sadhika KR, Sruthy Sivadas, Swetha Ashok
Featured Artists
- Rabab, Saz: Vagu Mazan
- Maddalam: Sajith Pappan
Recorded At
- K7 Studios - Kochi by Aswin Kumar
- The Space Station - Bangalore by Harish Sivaramakrishnan & Praveen Kumar
- Audiokraft - Bangalore by Aniket Mohanty
- Studio 6 - Bangalore by Sidharth Kamath
Production Credits
- Orchestral Score: Enrico M.R. Fallea
- Scored by: Czech National Symphony Orchestra - CNSO Studios, Prague
- Conductor: Vladmir Marti
- Live Orchestra Sound Engineer: Cenda Kotzmann
- Live Orchestra Music Producer: Alex Palmer
- Chief Mix & Master Engineer: Sai Shravanam, Resound India - Chennai
- Music Arranged & Produced by: Agam
- Chief Associate Music Producer: Aswin Kumar, K7 Studios - Kochi
- Chief Drums Producer: Sidharth Kamath, Studio 6 - Bangalore
- Melodyne Engineer: Mithun Jayaraj
- Mixed by: Martin Muscatello & Andres Mayo
Connect With Agam
For media inquiries, please contact agamtheband@gmail.com.