The ground reality

A new compilation album seeks to revive interest in the Asian underground genre, which was a rage in the ’90s

There are a whole host of new-fangled sounds - including glitch, trap, folktronica and what have you - that have infiltrated the Indian electronic music circuit these days like outgoing US President Donald Trump supporters infiltrated Capitol Hill earlier this week. But the scene was a lot more pared down in the 1990s. That’s when pioneers such as Talvin Singh, Trilok Gurtu and Karsh Kale started introducing Indian elements like the tabla to the global electronica soundscape, giving birth to a genre known as Asian underground. Technological advancements and changing tastes meant that it took somewhat of a backseat after the turn of this century. But a new album called In Other Words seeks to turn the clock back, aiming to highlight how those influences remain relevant even today.

Indo-US duo Anhad+Tanner are the brains behind it, and the record consists of a musical menu of homegrown electronic songs that they have flavoured with Hindustani classical ingredients. Anhad Khanna, the Indian half of the act, tells us that they handpicked tracks that the current crop of Indian electronic artistes have created, before collaborating with them online to give it their own spin. He says that these artistes - including Komorebi, Anish Sood and 8-Bit Culprit - are going back in time with their music while simultaneously moving towards newer spaces. “They are recalibrating their sounds,” Khanna says, adding that many genres that have their roots in the 1970s and ’80s, such as Detroit or Chicago house, are starting to resurface in clubs these days.

That’s a good thing, he adds, because if you don’t know the history of something - even if it’s politics - you are missing out on a big part of the story. “You wouldn’t know how to connect the dots, and I started noticing that a lot of this music was coming back in smaller sets, but no one was ready to be that person in the past two years or so who went for it fully. We felt that we could, and this record made us realise there’s a larger audience for it.”    They brought collaborators like Isheeta Chakrvarty on board to pepper the tracks with Indian classical strains. The result is a multifarious album that is suited to a nightclub atmosphere as much as it is to a long drive, and which harks back to an era when the world started waking up to the fact that Asia, too, could be a fertile field for electronic music to flower in. 

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