Recently, I have been seeing posters across MTCC of a music band named Muthu & Co, hosted by Illinois Tech’s Office of Student Life. It is an event of its first kind, a live performance by a student band, happening at the BOG on April 25, 2025.
“So who are these people and what do they do? Furthermore, what is expected in the event, and where might one of us witness them perform before?”
I have managed to get into contact with the lead members of the band to get a few words on them and what have they been cooking up lately. As far as I know, they are a bunch of graduate students from the Mies campus and the Downtown campus who are great music enthusiasts. The band is named Muthu & Co, after the band’s lead keyboard player and musical coordinator, Muthu, who is a first-year Grad student pursuing his Master’s in Computer Science. He is commonly known as “Music Muthu” by his friends for his heartly passion towards music and how he uses music as a cope up to deal with academic stress. He says, “Music is his drug.”
The next question to ask is: how did a bunch of students with no common connections come together and pull up an act, managing to be the only active band at Illinois Tech?
Apparently, Muthu’s passion for music made him connect with students from Illinois Tech that he had met at events like the Talont Show, Karaoke Night, and Freshman Orientation, after which he connected with them via Instagram and other social media platforms. They all came together this January and dedicated an entire studio room at a nearby apartment called Lake Meadows, where they practiced whenever they found time away from classes. The members stated it took a lot of effort to make a fully functioning bachelor house to a studio room and the bandmates shared a huge shout-out to their friends/roomies for putting up with the tremendous number of noise complaints received and the invasion of their personal space. Furthermore, their friends Suhail, Muzamil, Steffi, Abhijeeth, Bhavesh and Kiran have oftentimes helped them record videos, load instruments for their shows, offer encouragement, song suggestions, and opinions and pushed Muthu to share sample videos of their performance to the authorities of the OSL and other student orgs such as the Indian Student Association (ISA).
So what happened next?
The organizers of the ISA’s Valentine’s Day event were thoroughly impressed with the band’s mock videos and called them in to perform for their Valentine’s Day event, “Carnival of Love”, which was held at the MTCC auditorium on February 15, 2025. The audience were thrilled to witness a live performance by one of our very own student band and audience stated that saying the vibe was wild is an understatement. The band managed to perform a huge variety of songs ranging from classical Indian music to Rock and rap songs.
The band did not just stop there and set it as their goal to reach out to broader spectrum of audience and that was when they got in touch with one of the members from the Office of Student Life. After a few failed attempts, the band managed to get a mock show where they presented an entire set of songs following the theme “The Cycle of Life” and won hearts.
I had a brief introduction to the band members when I went to visit them in their studio. Currently, they have a keyboardist, Muthu Nageswaran; a lead guitarist, Abishek Venkat; a drummer, Marcus Durairaj; three vocalists named Anantya Jayakumar, Sindhu and Meenakshi Sundaram. They are currently planning to go big for their upcoming event and looked busy trying to manage their academics and their practice in parallel. This article is a huge shout-out to the band and their members along with their group of six friends who had put up with their practice sessions patiently. Watch out for their promotion videos on Instagram from the OSL’s official account, their posters on MTCC and the main show at BOG on April 25 at 7 p.m.
