Meet Brandon Colaco, the didgeridoo wizard

Ahead of his first international tour with stops in France and Portugal, Bengaluru-based Brandon Colaco talks about his attempts to bring in more awareness of this instrument

Although Bengaluru-based Brandon Colaco has been playing the didgeridoo since 2011, he stopped performing around 2019. “I decided to stop performing and start learning music, working with friends and other musicians,” he says over a phone call.

It eventually built up to the didgeridoo dance music act Two Eyed Wizard, which had its debut show in 2022 at club venue Fandom at Gilly’s Redefined in Koramangala. “We saw almost 350-400 people there, which was a super turn out,” Colaco says.

There were a few upheavals, including family losses along the way that led to the artist to “rethink” Two Eyed Wizard. It resulted in presenting the droning, mysterious boom of the didgeridoo in a more “interactive and relatable form” for audiences in bars, festivals, restaurants and other venues.

Now, after playing across India — and more recently, nearly 80 shows in Goa — Two Eyed Wizard is going international. Colaco will be performing solo at the Tribal Elek Festival in Andilly-les-Marais, France on August 10, followed by another set at Fatt Festival between August 29 and September 1 in Odemira, Portugal. While Two Eyed Wizard has no doubt been a regular live performer, Colaco says it was the release of the project’s album Tuwakituwa in 2023 that helped garner global attention.

Across five songs, Two Eyed Wizard use the didgeridoo to draw in other styles including trance, psychedelic, ambient and Indian classical music. It helps that Colaco also pairs didgeridoo with the konnakol (the art of performing percussion syllables vocally in South Indian Carnatic music), which has most likely never been heard before around the world.

He says, “I have my own style of playing the didgeridoo which I’ve developed over the years, mostly because I craft the instruments. Creating different types of instruments needs you to have the diversity to play all of them and then there is konnakol which just came by me. Applying it to the didgeridoo is such a wonderful thing because you get complex rhythmic compositions in a new sound.”

Colaco always considered the didgeridoo a “sacred instrument”, to the point that he would often feel annoyed, put off or disconnected if members in the audience spoke during his performance or ate or drank during his set. Taught by the late Mukesh Dhiman, a famed didgeridoo maker and teacher in Rishikesh who had DIY workshops since the 1970s that attracted musicians from around the world, Colaco says he also learned to craft the instrument early on. “He used to say just close your eyes, think of God and play.”