A recap at last about the 1st World Mouth Harp Festival of India… -And it’s time to dream about the second one!

Hello All,
This is Neptune writing;
The last World Mouth Harp Festival of India took me four months to conceptualize, plan, and organize, and as one man with a vision, it was a full-time, always-on-call project, with innumerable sleepless nights connecting with artists, musicians, media, and my small team of close friends to work out all the logistics for a two-day Mouth Harp festival, the first of it’s kind in India.

The festival turned out to be a pure success.
We had two full evenings of performances; every act on stage was of a different genre with both Indian and International musicians, and every group included at least one or several Mouth Harpists in their music.
With talented performances, workshops, Mouth Harping jams and even a marketplace, we kept the venue small and cozy; yet up to a hundred and fifty or two hundred spectators showed up for each of our concerts, and the positive feedback post-festival was amazing.

After the festival ended, I personally was obliged to withdraw from anymore input into anything related to the festival and take some serious recovering time. Then I took off on another World Harps tour, and for the last five months I have been traveling through Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine to find and meet Mouth Harp makers in each of these countries, and acquire a whole new collection of Mouth Harps for my upcoming market season at the Saturday Night Market in Goa.
I will be back in India in this end of October, and now I am already thinking about what’s next.

Some friends have advised me not to do a second festival next year, as the last one took up so much of my time and energy for so many months. But in the meantime, I have been asking myself: Why did I do this the first time? Was it to be able to say Hooray, I organized a festival?
No. I created the World Mouth Harp Festival of India to establish a platform in this country with a time and place for Mouth Harpists and musicians from India and all countries of the world to connect and bring their creativity together for the love of this instrument, and in doing so, demonstrate to all that the Mouth Harp is indeed a contemporary instrument just like any other, along with any genre of music.

And so, I have decided to continue what I have begun.
I plan to organize the 2nd World Mouth Harp Festival of India.
Beginning with it’s nascent, conceptualizing stage, I now wish to call out to each and every person who would like to assist me in continuing this dream. I need help, I need friends, people with organizing skills, people with passion to join me and assist me in getting this project off the ground for 2014.
If you would like to be involved in any way at all, please, contact me at worldharps@gmail.com.
Thank you!

With love, Neptune.

Special thanks to: Gavin Noel Methalaka, Simon Larralde, Anthony Soni, Kunal Naik, Stephan Ebertshäuser, Natasha Rathod, Kel Sherpa, Philip Zuzarte, Shaun Williams, Shreta Arora, Sailee Hemmady & Pankaj Anand.