Rather, “How (Not) to Run a Radio” is an opportunity for me to a) frame my learnings from the project, b) to further form my ideas about the limits of our radio curation and c) to understand the importance of the ‘independent internet radio’ as a format, in cultivating a listenership especially in the current Indian context of sound and music publication, consumption and engagement.

By now, most of you who are music producers, DJs, promoters, fans or even remotely enthusiastic/aware of the global club cultures or the nightlife industry must be familiar with the trend of ‘community radios’. These need little to no introduction. <Insert City Name> followed by the term “Community Radio” and you’ve got yourself a spanking new way to repurpose the economy of the nightlife industry and “create a community”. The infrastructural setup is easy too. The internet based format helps bypass the bureaucracies and logistical challenges which come attached with tapping into the state run FM airwaves. All one needs then is a camera and a laptop to record the sets and some sort of electronic hardware instruments/DJ decks/playback equipment through which one can showcase the emerging talent of one’s city.

In many ways, these community radios have come to be perceived as the successors of pirate radios which promise an alternative to commercial broadcasting, algorithmic streaming platforms and state-controlled media by offering editorial freedom, niche programming and community-led participation. Sounds like a dream, right?

Well, after spending the last few years “recording broadcasts” with community web radios in different cities across Asia and eventually launching the KISSA In-Store Radio out of Delhi NCR, I found myself increasingly unsettled by a contradiction. I noticed that while most stations often speak the language of openness and experimentation, a language familiar to the format of a radio, many “community radios” have quietly inherited the value systems of the club.

Here, I’ll rest my argument on the derivations of anthropologist Louise Meintjes, who in her essay The Recording Studio as Fetish, argues that the recording studio is frequently imagined as a site possessing an almost magical creative power, obscuring the social relationships and labour through which music is actually produced.

I believe community web radios have become similarly fetishized. Their apparent openness often conceals the social, technological and cultural relationships that structure participation within them. What appears to be an open platform frequently reproduces hierarchies of expertise, aesthetics and access.

In this essay, I will make these relationships visible by detailing a set of four observations. The observations that follow are not intended as universal truths about community radio though. They are propositions that emerged through our own curatorial practice – especially through the contradictions of trying to build an internet radio that we thought could resist becoming just another extension of club culture.

Background

First, some context is necessary. In January 2025, Antariksh Records was invited to curate the KISSA Evenings at the VegNonVeg (VNV) store in Gurgaon. Conceived as a series of weekend listening sessions inspired by the Japanese Jazz Kissa tradition, the programme centred on a well-designed high-fidelity analogue listening environment, with vinyl records positioned as the primary medium of playback. Our initial curatorial response seemed obvious: invite vinyl DJs to play the space.

It did not take long, however, for the limitations of this approach to become apparent. These limitations exposed deeper questions about listening, curation and the infrastructures through which music is presented. Three, in particular, shaped our thinking.

1) The first limitation was technological. There is a dearth of vinyl DJs, collectors and sonic storytellers in our country. What little we can claim as our contemporary vinyl culture comes with a selective focus on playing records as an esoteric format aimed at creating value in an otherwise saturated market of DJs – for the F&B venues and the artists alike. Understandably so – a lot of DJs who work with the format create value and position themselves in the market with “vinyl-only” and “strictly-vinyl” DJ sets – a marketing tactic most F&B venues and promoters welcome with open arms.

This selective (and limiting) focus on the “vinyl-only” format acted less as an invitation and more as a filter for us. Many artists working with sound, field recordings, oral histories, archives, poetry and other forms of listening simply had no place within this framework.

2) The second limitation came as a form of social filtering. VegNonVeg as a brand sells sneakers and apparel, so any regular patron encountering a club grade audio setup inside the store is in for a surprise on any given day. A larger question to ask here is – how do we build a culture of listening when our patrons are not intentful or curious about our practice?

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Moreover, the VNV Gurgaon store operates out of the Ireo Grand View mall, which itself advocates for a vociferous social filtering, policing and surveillance of the body on their property. One has to go through a security check while entering the premises. Pets aren’t allowed. Sitting with your legs up on the bench is not allowed. Eating in common areas or outside of restaurant premises is not allowed. Videography and photography are strictly prohibited.

For us, the question of “which section of the society gets to listen” largely got dictated by the context of “where they are listening” and “what they are listening to.” Here amplified sound, much like architecture and urban space itself, runs a risk of becoming a mechanism of social filtering.

3) The third one pertains to geographies which lie outside the usual club circuits. Even among those interested in attending, Gurgaon remained a difficult destination. Much of the independent music community is concentrated in Delhi, and convincing listeners to travel across the city for a listening session proved remarkably difficult.

This pointed to the absence of cultural infrastructures capable of sustaining communities of listening beyond prevalent nightlife circuits. Gurgaon possesses uncountable commercial infrastructures. Although, comparatively few public spaces exist where curiosity, conversation and cultural participation can nurture without first being mediated by purchasing power.

We eventually realized that our curation played up to these limitations rather than overcoming them – dictating the need to reconsider our own curation logic. Consequently, we launched the ‘KISSA In-Store Radio’ operating out of the VegNonVeg Gurgaon store on 18th April ‘26.

Two Ideas of Community Radio

Before turning to the observations, it is worth distinguishing between two very different ideas of what a community radio can be.

In India, the term community radio carries a specific legal meaning. Under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s Community Radio Station (CRS) policy, community radios were conceived in 2002 as a non-profit, hyperlocal broadcasting service intended to support education, culture and community development. These stations are expected to be participatory, locally accountable and embedded within the communities they serve.

At the same time, they operate within a tightly regulated framework. Editorial autonomy is limited, independent news and political broadcasting are prohibited, and the technological reach of each station is intentionally restricted through licensing, transmission power and coverage limits. The result is a form of broadcasting that democratizes access to radio while remaining firmly situated within a state-controlled sphere of public media.

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Internet based community radios, on the other hand, emerge under very different conditions. Rather than broadcasting over licensed FM frequencies, these stations operate through the internet, bypassing many of the technological and editorial constraints that define terrestrial radio. Without the need for spectrum licenses or transmission infrastructure, the barrier to entry is significantly lower. Programming is no longer confined to local civic information or state-approved content. Instead, web radios have become spaces for freeform music programming, and editorial practices which value artistic experimentation.

This alternative model is well documented in Hyper-local, Hyper-global: Exploring Sustainability Models in European Community Web Radio – a handbook developed in collaboration between Refuge Worldwide (Berlin), Kiosk Radio (Brussels) and Radio Dopo (Palermo) — see below.

Hyper-local, Hyper-global: Exploring Sustainability Models in European Community Web Radio (English)

4.35MB ∙ PDF file

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Rather than offering a fixed definition, the handbook identifies a set of shared characteristics: internet-based broadcasting, relatively small organisational structures, community ownership, freeform programming and an absence of commercial advertising. Editorial independence is treated not simply as an operational feature here, but as the defining political condition of the format. Many of the stations interviewed in the handbook describe themselves as platforms where community members become broadcasters rather than merely audiences.

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Perhaps the most compelling feature of community web radio is its ability to exist simultaneously as a local gathering place and a globally accessible broadcasting platform. Unlike FM radio, whose territory is determined by transmission power, internet radio produces a more fluid relationship between place and audience. A broadcast may emerge from a neighbourhood café, a record store or an artist-run space while remaining instantly accessible to listeners across the world.

At first glance, this appears to represent a profound expansion of broadcasting freedom. Editorial control is decentralized, technological barriers are lower and participation seems more accessible than ever before. It would be tempting to conclude that these freedoms have also transformed the politics of radio itself. My experience suggests otherwise.

Over the last few years, while recording broadcasts with several community web radios across Asia and eventually building KISSA In-Store Radio in Gurgaon, I began noticing a different set of patterns. These stations were undoubtedly freer than their state-regulated counterparts, yet many seemed to reproduce the same hierarchies of expertise, sonic aesthetics and cultural value that organise contemporary club culture.

Here I follow with four observations which helped me in understanding how these new forms of exclusion are produced – through the technologies, formats and value systems that increasingly define community web radio itself.

Observations

1: The Technological Erasure of Speech

The first thing I began noticing while participating at community web radios across Asia was not the music being played, but the absence of the use of the microphone.

The microphone was there in its physicality, mounted on a boom arm beside the mixer, yet it often remained untouched – by me, and often by fellow DJs too. Entire broadcasts unfolded without a single spoken word. At most, a brief introduction marked the beginning of a DJ set before the voice disappeared again, giving way to uninterrupted music.

At first this seemed like an aesthetic preference. Over time, as we started our own radio, it became difficult to treat it as such. We realized that the disappearance of the microphone fundamentally altered what the radio as a format meant.

Technically speaking, the microphone is one of the simplest devices in a radio studio. It is a transducer, converting acoustic energy into electrical signals. Politically, however, it performs a much more significant function. It amplifies speech – the most accessible mode of making sound and noise available to an individual. The microphone transforms private utterance into public address.

Historically, radio did not become a mass medium because it could play recorded music. It became one because it could amplify voices of the commons and create publics through sound.

Contemporary community web radios have increasingly decentred or completely erased the microphone. Instead of amplifying speech, the community radio privileges uninterrupted musical flow. As a consequence, conversation becomes secondary to selection. This erasure/decentring of the microphone and the amplified voice is not a neutral choice but a political act.

By decentring the microphone, community web radio also decentres the skills associated with speaking, interviewing, storytelling, emceeing and holding conversations.

In their place emerges another form of expertise: music selection, beat matching and sonic continuity. The ideal broadcaster becomes someone who can curate records rather than someone who can sustain a conversation.

As the gap left by the erased/decentred microphone fills with music selection and mixing skills, the broadcaster slowly gives way to the DJ. This moulds a DJ into an archetype of an artist – one which is created on the idea of music mixing skills and selection. The archetype DJ doesn’t need the microphone. This is an act of social and political filtering taking place by platforming select sonic aesthetics – aesthetics which are made possible technologically.

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I’m not arguing against DJing here. I am arguing against confusing DJing with broadcasting. The two require distinct forms of knowledge which in turn produce distinct relationships between broadcaster and the listener. A DJ set invites immersion; a conversation invites participation. When the microphone disappears, so too do the social worlds and publics that can only be created through speech.

Interestingly, some stations continue to recognise this distinction. Refuge Worldwide’s submission guidelines explicitly encourage broadcasters, and even DJs to use the microphone, treating speech not as an interruption but as an essential part of the radio form. Such decisions remind us that the marginalisation of voice is not technologically inevitable, but an editorial choice.

2: The Economy of Community Web Radios

The decentring of the microphone has altered the value of a radio. Many community web radios now operate according to the logics of club culture, where the emphasis is placed on showcasing music mixing skills rather than sharing knowledge. For DJs, a radio appearance often functions as evidence of competence – a recording that can later be circulated to promoters and venues in order to score more bookings.

In this way, the community radio becomes less a site of broadcasting and more a site of content production, creating digital nightlife centric portfolios and driving economies of social media. This transformation reshapes programming itself. Aspirational sonic aesthetics which are valuable to the club, the F&B venue and the promoter end up increasingly shaping radio programming.

Conversation appears less valuable than seamless mixing. Imperfection becomes something to edit rather than something to inhabit. Programming gradually aligns itself with the aspirational aesthetics already rewarded by clubs, festivals and online platforms.

Paradoxically, institutions founded to escape commercial music economies – such as the radio – begin reproducing many of their value systems. Even though community radios remain non-commercial in their organisational form, they increasingly participate in the symbolic social economy of artistic branding and value creation.

Technology plays a crucial role in this process. DJ decks have become the default infrastructure of many web radios, central in shaping not only how stories are told but also who gets to tell them. Turntables, CDJs and mixers occupy the physical and symbolic centre of the broadcasting studio. The microphone, when present, often occupies the margins. Such arrangements appear practical. In reality, they quietly (re)organise participation.

Technologies of amplification and playback do not merely facilitate cultural practices; they actively produce them. Every technology demands particular forms of competence. Learning to operate professional DJ equipment requires time, money, access and mentorship. These requirements are socially unevenly distributed. Expertise itself becomes technologically mediated.

Who gets to tell their stories and how they tell them are not separate questions, especially since acquiring skill and building expertise is a question of access to technology.

This became increasingly apparent while curating KISSA Evenings at VegNonVeg. Our reliance on vinyl did not simply determine the format of our listening sessions; it determined the pool of people who could participate. Artists working with oral histories, archival recordings, field recording, poetry or regional music traditions found themselves excluded not because their practices lacked value, but because our infrastructure had already decided what counted as legitimate broadcasting.

The politics of technology are therefore never confined to equipment. They shape social relations and in turn are shaped by them. They determine which skills become visible, which practices become professionalised and which forms of knowledge remain peripheral.

3: Fractured Spaces, Fractured Listening

Community web radios occupy an unusual position within contemporary media because they exist in multiple places simultaneously. Every broadcast emerges from a physical location – a cafe, a record store, an artist-run space or a cultural institution – while also circulating through the placeless architecture of the internet.

These two publics rarely overlap. As Raymond Williams observed, radio has always separated the site of transmission from the site of reception. Yet community web radio intensifies this separation because its physical site is often integral to its identity.

Listeners present at the point of broadcast encounter sound alongside architecture, ambient noise, social interaction and the behavioural expectations of the space itself. Online listeners, on the other hand, receive a comparatively sanitised transmission within their own listening environments. Although they hear the same broadcast, they participate in fundamentally different sonic and social experiences. These fractured listening contexts inevitably produce fractured aesthetics of sound.

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Our own broadcasts from the VegNonVeg store repeatedly revealed this tension. The store’s identity is carefully constructed around sneaker culture, analogue hi-fi listening and vinyl DJing and listening cultures. Sound is already part of its brand language.

Yet once the microphone returned to the centre of our radio programming, the broadcasts began accommodating conversations about regional music traditions, personal archives, speculative futures and sonic memory.

These programmes exceeded the cultural vocabulary of the store and VNV’s brand language itself. The radio was no longer simply reflecting the identity of VegNonVeg; it was producing a different public with different expectations of what the space could become.

This points towards a broader transformation in the role of a community web radio. Historically, the legitimacy of a broadcast was derived from the institution that produced it – a recognised radio station with its own editorial identity. Today, the relationship increasingly works in reverse.

Cafes, galleries, record stores, brands and cultural venues establish radio stations not simply to broadcast, but to cultivate a public around themselves. The radio becomes a form of cultural infrastructure through which a physical site acquires social and cultural legitimacy and values of various kinds.

Community web radio, then, should not be understood merely as a broadcasting technology. It is a technology for producing publics that, in turn, reshape the cultural identities of the spaces from which they emerge. The significance of the medium lies in its capacity to continually renegotiate the relationship between place, listening and cultural legitimacy.

4. On the Question of Time

As mentioned before, the community radio has become less a site of broadcasting and more a site of content production. This has affected the “liveness” of the radio.

Traditionally, a live broadcast collapses the moment of capture and amplification into a single event. A broadcast unfolds in the present. The broadcaster and the listener share a moment that cannot be perfectly repeated. Unlike recorded sets, live radio remains ephemeral.

Pre-recorded sets premiered on a community web radio increasingly resist this temporality, especially since pre-recorded broadcasts are easier to edit, archive, circulate and monetise. They can be refined, corrected and repackaged indefinitely. Most importantly, they continue generating value long after their initial transmission. Their usefulness extends beyond listening and into promotion. Recorded time can be stretched in a way liveness doesn’t allow for.

Liveness refuses this logic. A live broadcast privileges presence over perfection. It foregrounds encounters rather than documentation. Mistakes cannot be edited away. Conversations unfold unpredictably. Silence remains possible. Time passes without the possibility of revision.

This ephemerality has always been one of radio’s greatest strengths. It produces forms of attention that recording (both as a product and as a process) and playback cannot. The listener participates in an event by paying attention rather than consuming an ever available object passively.

This in turn affects the aesthetics of sound propagated and platformed by community web radios. Music begins representing professional competence rather than facilitating shared presence. Broadcasts become archives of expertise rather than occasions for collective listening.

The question is therefore not whether community radio should archive its broadcasts. Archives remain invaluable. The question is what happens when the archive becomes more important than the broadcast itself.

It is here that community web radio most clearly begins to resemble the attention economies it originally sought to escape. Its political challenge is no longer simply remaining independent of the state or the market. It is recovering the forms of listening that only broadcasting, rather than content production, can make possible.

Listening is an Act of Curiosity, Curiosity is an Act of Resistance

सबसे ख़तरनाक होता है

मुर्दा शांति से भर जाना

न होना तड़प का सब सहन कर जाना

घर से निकलना काम पर

और काम से लौटकर घर जाना

सबसे ख़तरनाक होता है

हमारे सपनों का मर जाना

— पाश

While the store’s physical and technological limitations pushed us towards adopting the radio format, the above stated observations ultimately shaped the nature of the radio we wanted to launch.

The biggest challenge we faced was the fact that the boundaries between listening and production have changed. The listener is now treated like a consumer. The act of listening has been replaced by the act of consuming music and sound. How do we revive and rethink these boundaries between listenership and production – together taken as an engagement with sound, music and sonic storytelling?

Central to this approach was bringing the microphone back into focus. Rather than centring DJing as the preferred mode of storytelling or reproducing the value systems of promoter and club-driven booking models, the radio for us became a platform for artists, researchers, storytellers, and other voices whose practices do not necessarily fit within conventional nightlife infrastructures.

This also required distinguishing the logic of curating a radio station from that of curating a club programme, allowing broadcasts to develop their own editorial and cultural priorities. The result was a radio that could accommodate a wider range of narratives and sonic experiences: stories about regional music traditions, stories about sounds which subvert, broadcasts that disrupt the sonic environment of the VNV store, and conversations that move fluidly between memory, history, speculation, and futurity.

Launching the radio was a crucial lesson in ownership as well – not only towards our own music, stories and people producing them, but also towards our own social infrastructures. All of our radio staff are broadcasters and radio residents, with a stake in the radio which goes beyond their logistical support. This was a valuable lesson we learnt from the handbook, which helped us further dissolve the boundary between producer and participant.

These approaches fundamentally made us realize the power of cultivating curiosity through the act of listening. For us, the radio is a powerful format which can cultivate a culture of listening to stories, songs, sounds, poems, noise, music, recipes, personal and regional histories, speculative futures and a plethora of other sounds which do not fit the singular narratives currently being propagated throughout the world.

For the poet Paash, the most dangerous thing for us is for our dreams to die – सबसे ख़तरनाक होता है हमारे सपनों का मर जाना. It is no wonder that the importance of dreaming is highlighted by a poet, for a poem is meant to be listened to and to be dreamt along with.

The act of listening, dreaming and being curious are inherently linked. By extension, listening becomes an act of courage and resistance, for cultivating curiosity and dreaming is an act of resistance. But how do we cultivate a culture of listening in order to cultivate dreamers? This, for us, is one of the most crucial questions we are yet to answer through our radio curations.

Thanks for the read and don’t forget to tune into our radio every Saturday and Sunday, 6-9PM IST. In the meantime, follow us on @antarikshrecords and @antarikshradio.

Stay Tuned. Stay Curious!

Anandit for After EOD and Antariksh Records

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About the Author:

Anandit Sachdev is a practitioner and researcher of sound based in Gurgaon, India. Anandit is also the founder and curator of Antariksh Records, an independent record label promoting underground electronic music and sound cultures in the Indian subcontinent since 2018. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Sociology from Shiv Nadar University, India where he is looking at the question of technologies and aesthetics of amplified sound and electronic music in India and how it creates a sense of the social. Contact Anandit here: contact@ananditsachdev.com

However, both audiences and organisers began to show signs of stress. Audiences were delighted with several options in the aftermath of Coldplay’s India shows. Yet as the year went on, there were just too many shows to choose from— meaning fans had to prioritise and be more intentional with their choices. For organisers competing for the same audience this increased intentionality demands better lineups, but also infrastructure, production and pricing.

Another outcome of this quickly maturing industry is the emergence of informal ticket resale groups. These are decentralised communities, usually on WhatsApp, that connect gig-goers interested in selling or buying tickets. These groups operate outside of the law and without any central governing structure, making them fully trust-based and informal. Yet, these communities provide a clear insight into how audiences value concerts.

Ticketing platforms like BookMyShow and District are opaque and clearly operate for profit maximisation. While ticket resale groups are largely ungoverned, they are made by and for concert-goers. The only central principle is that no scalping is permitted. Admins enforce a strict no-profit rule: tickets cannot be sold above face value. The result is a free market outside the opacity and rigidity of pricing tiers set by profit-chasing behemoths.

If we look beyond the boastful press releases and slick video editing from event organisers, we see an industry still finding its feet. The secondary ticket market never lies (though it may sometimes be inaccurate): every oversupply, scheduling conflict, and genuine frenzy is recorded in real rupees gained or lost.

Methodology

Our sample set included chat logs from four ticket resale WhatsApp groups which focus primarily on Mumbai events, with around 4000 members in total. We converted these unstructured chat logs into structured data — identifying event name, buy/sell intent, listed price, original price and timestamp. After cleaning and deduplicating, we analysed 17000 listings from November 2023 to January 2026, covering over 1000 events. Each entry was tagged by genre and event date. Events with fewer than 50 data points were excluded.

The following chart maps three variables:

• X-axis: demand (number of buy requests).

• Y-axis: average seller loss (%).

• Bubble size: average ticket price.

Rightward movement indicates stronger demand for tickets; upward movement indicates sellers absorbing greater losses.

Average loss measures how far below face value sellers list tickets. Higher percentages indicate sellers absorb higher losses.

Larger bubbles reflect higher average ticket prices, typically driven by premium tiers such as VIP or Fanpit.

This methodology has limitations. Our sample set is only a small section of Mumbai’s gig-going audience. We also do not know the actual final price of the transaction, which would be a better indicator of utility. Fan behaviour is a composite of many factors and cannot be reduced to a few variables. Still, we are confident that this dataset and analysis captures the post-Coldplay correction we observed firsthand.

For a fully interactive view of our findings, visit our website!

After EOD website

Findings

Multi-genre resilience

Across four editions, Lollapalooza has built rare brand trust in India. As the country’s only multi-genre festival at scale, it encourages early buying — audiences purchase before lineups drop, confident at least one global headliner will justify the spend. That confidence also creates volatility: when a headline act feels unappealing, resale listings rise. Ambivalent buyers then step in late, securing discounted tickets. The festival’s breadth enables both conviction and ambivalence, making it the only IP elastic enough to sustain this cycle.

Too big to fail

Coldplay sat at the peak of pure demand, but only a handful of artists approach that stability: Ed Sheeran and Bryan Adams through decades of repeat touring, and Diljit Dosanjh and Arijit Singh through cross-demographic and Bollywood-adjacent mass appeal. These acts convert familiarity into resale resilience. Their audiences are less speculative, more committed. Only a handful of acts can compare (eg. Taylor Swift), but for promoters, booking them reduces volatility as demand will surely follow.

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Band for band

In late 2025, BookMyShow and District sparred for the hip-hop calendar between Travis Scott and Rolling Loud. Initial frenzy around Travis’ Delhi announcement led to added shows, fragmenting demand — especially for out-of-city buyers. Mumbai dates then overlapped with Rolling Loud, cannibalising attention and liquidity across both. The result was steep resale losses. Timing the market would have allowed audiences to breathe, and perhaps improved outcomes for both.

Loyalty at scale

Cigarettes After Sex occupy a precise middle tier: no longer niche, not yet stadium. Since their Nh7 Weekender appearance in 2017, their audience has deepened rather than broadened chaotically. They are neither small enough to be cult nor big enough to command a co-headlining slot at Lollapalooza. This in-between position works in their favour. By drawing loyal crossover fans to large but proportionate venues, they avoid the hype volatility attached to mega-pop tours, signalling a durable mid-market category.

Stable Subcultures

This quadrant reflects tight, self-selecting fandoms. In these niches, buyers and sellers are typically genuine fans, not speculators. For example, Steven Wilson’s cult metal following and PCRC’s reign as indie darlings ensure much lower levels of speculation and hype These communities move tickets quietly and predictably. With limited hype and little overreach, resale trends show healthy alignment between scale and audience depth.

If you would like access to our base data, please write in to after.eod@gmail.com, or DM us on Instagram.

“I don’t care about the sponsors and their activations, it’s their job …. Mag Fields is disappointing now, but it’s not like it used to be 5–6 years ago before COVID. Remember Red Bull? They always did cool stuff.” — overheard at Magnetic Fields Festival, Rajasthan, 2024

Uttered in the shared quiet of a fireplace as the sun comes up after Tom Midland’s 5am closing set— partly confession, partly complaint, partly flex. What sounds like simple nostalgia — “Remember Red Bull?” — is in fact a cultural paradox: a longing for authenticity expressed through the memory of a corporate sponsor.

Music subcultures canonically have an antagonistic relationship with capitalism. The old thinking is that culture is incompatible with commerce, i.e. everything the business school grads touch turns to shit. But in a country with negligible public support for alternative music culture, brand sponsors have always been a necessary evil. The result is a fragile hypocrisy that continues to be enacted today.

In this cultural war of attrition, the question isn’t whether they’re present, but how they show up — from big-budget ownership fantasies to smaller, direct-to-culture alliances that treat scenes as partners rather than assets.

Authenticity as grammar

Authenticity in music culture has never been a fixed essence — it’s always been relational. It only appears in contrast, when one scene defines itself against another that’s seen as diluted, commercial, or inauthentic.

“The scene is dead”— such statements let people signal their status and position in the subculture. The more you can talk about ‘back then’, the more credible and experienced you appear, the more you can flex your insider status. Nostalgia is a performance of credibility— of cultural capital.

In that sense, authenticity is less a value than a language, a grammar to signal what belongs and what doesn’t, distinguishing insiders from imitators. Like any language, its meanings shift. What looks performative to one generation might feel authentic to the next. Take Boiler Room, for example— in its early days, critics asked a simple question: how can such a hyper-mediated event be true to dance music’s original tenets of freedom through anonymity? The reality is that with time, this problem has been bypassed altogether. For the Boiler Room generation, mediation is not a betrayal of authenticity: it’s part of how authenticity is constructed.1

The accusation often levelled at the new scene is that it has forgotten the anti-capitalist and revolutionary power, and responsibility, of alternative music culture. But the opening quote reveals an irony: any memory of an ‘authentic’ 90’s or early 00s countercultural moment in India inevitably implicates global consumer youth culture. The same old-heads who lament the loss of that purity today rely on brands to make their case.

Think of the MTV—Vh1—Channel V era, or Pepsi’s Yeh Dil Maange More moment, or owning Levi’s jeans as rites of passage. What we call ‘authentic’ adolescence was always-already mediated by multinationals. Brands that were once part of that historical moment got absorbed into its mythology, and they are now recalled as shorthand for an era of perceived purity.

Similarly, to recall Red Bull (the Red Bull Tour Bus being one of the most memorable) is not to recall ‘adventure’ or ‘thrill’ as their brand managers may have hoped then, but to invoke a lost feeling of community and discovery. The brand becomes a relic of authenticity itself.2

Thus, brand Red Bull becomes part of a lexicon of nostalgia used to flex insider and veteran status. In the opening quote, the festival-goer in one breath claims himself above the dirty and inauthentic business of brands— and yet in the next exonerates Red Bull as a signifier of the better days ‘back then’.

The old binaries no longer hold. ‘Selling out’ is not as black-and-white as the rubber stamp of corporate investment. Maybe brands aren’t the enemy by default? Maybe subcultures are adapting to coexist with commercial involvement?

Saviour complex

On the other side, brands and businesses have always wanted to get into cool youth culture. Their mandate has always been clear— if brands face resistance to entry, then they can only build trust by supporting behind-the-scenes— through artist funds, sustainable venue and events partnerships.3 At a global level, Jagermeister’s Save The Night fund was a lifeline for many grassroots operators during the pandemic. Red Bull Music Academy’s nineteen years of events, artist platforms, and gig circuits built the brand’s current mythical status even among fans.

On domestic soil, this more romantic view is parroted at higher levels— BookMyShow in recent conversation with Music Plus points out the collective benefit of growing the industry— that “the biggest return on investment lies in [...] the sense of civic pride, community participation and emergence of local talent [that] all add to a city’s cultural identity.”

But in India, brands focus less on building artist ecosystems (more on that later) and instead on trawling an elusive Total Addressable Market of fans/consumers (in the alcobev industry, the golden goose today is a widely-circulated mythical number— 20 million LDA (Legal Drinking Age) consumers entering the market per annum).

In pursuit of that rainbow, businesses with big budgets have historically footed the bill for some of the most foundational event series, festivals, artist platforms and college gig circuits— Bacardi (NH7 Weekender), Levi’s (Levi’s Lounge, Mumbai and Levi’s 501 Day events), Harley Davidson (Harley Rock Riders) and Converse (Road to Rubber Tracks).

A more recent history of brand sponsors is laid out by an article by Amit Gurbaxani— well worth the read. Through conversation with Uday Benegal (Indus Creed), Gurbaxani points out a role reversal: even back in early 2018, brands were already conspiring to move beyond backing culture— into owning it.

Delusions of ownership

Today, the game is the same, but the stakes are higher. The market for live music events is booming, and the 2024 season was a turning point.

A recent article by Peony Hirwani points out how brands are responding aggressively, and organisers are getting squeezed. Brands want more control and have higher expectations from partnerships, all while the live circuit is more dependent than ever amid rising costs.

Brands are even reconsidering if they need at all to win the trust of artists and promoters to get access to fans. Already, ABinBev is now trying to replace promoters altogether, to own IP’s and curate experiences themselves.

They are also reconsidering the traditional route of supporting the ecosystem first. In India, shifting the spotlight from homegrown artistry to generic fandom is simply good business. Fans still idolise mostly foreign artists.

A case in point: Budweiser’s original Yours To Take campaign in 2022 partnered with hip-hop culture directly through artists like Anderson .Paak, who could genuinely connect with fans through a story of being “young, black, gifted, and dangerous” (lyrics from Anderson .paak’s track with the campaign name).

But when ABInBev brought Budweiser’s Yours To Take campaign to India, they dropped the artistry story entirely. The press release is as on-the-nose marketingspeak4 as they get:

“This digital film breaks away from the traditional brand storytelling, shifting the spotlight from iconic performers to the raw, unfiltered energy of fans [...] powered by a global anthem that captures the unbridled essence of Indian youth culture.”

Cut out the middleman, i.e. the artists, and go direct to the fans. The result is a cheap imitation of the original campaign, swapping out Anderson .Paak for the “global anthem” that captures the “essence of Indian youth culture”: Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life.

At events like Budx NBA House Mumbai in June 2025, despite massive spends, BudX’s cultural curation felt shallow. The likes of Nyshka Chandran and Provhat Raman visited for a panel on South Asian artistry, only to be drowned out by gaudy basketball activations. I was probably the only one in attendance who was not a paid press or entourage. The same pattern repeats: big budgets, little meaning.

The point of no returns

Marketers are scrambling to keep pace with the consumer boom— but does the fantasy actually translate to business advantage?

It’s easier for alcobev companies, for whom direct bottle sales through bar rights at events are a major channel for sales (and marketing) due to restrictions on direct advertising.

But the reality is that most businesses are not going to make their money back through sales. Instead, the only hope is in being discovered at that event by fans who they assume overlap with their own ideal audiences.

When it comes to measuring impact on brand relevance, sponsorships are a black box. Businesses rely on poor proxies for genuine engagement— footfall, content impressions, visibility in terms of social reach.

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Direct consumer research is also unimaginative. At Budx’s The Loft, Goa, I was surveyed by a team from Budweiser, with whom I had a very blunt conversation:

“Is this venue better than others in India?”

“Yes.”

“What do you usually drink at such events?”

“Usually what’s cheapest— Bacardi and ice?”

“Did attending this event make you want to buy more Budweiser beer?”

“Probably not.”

And money, like boardroom patience, dries up quickly. It took nineteen years for Red Bull Music Academy to earn its reputation around the world. Most brand managers switch jobs every two years.

This game is not for the faint-hearted or short-sighted— sponsorship consultancy Sponco CEO Subramanian Iyer, in recent conversation with Music Plus, points out that: “these are long-term investments. Some parts are measurable but a large part is about building cultural relevance [...] We do not have many brands willing to take that kind of long-term bet yet.”

There are no easy solutions, of course. There is no special-sauce metric that suddenly incentivises brands to ‘build authentic culture’. Long-term commitment also requires frequent, consistent, and varied touchpoints with consumers, not just at one-off major events. Bacardi’s exit after a decade with NH7 Weekender proves that the annual-slap-a-logo-on-the-flyer approach sponsorship model is not really effective.

Direct To Culture

To recap— big businesses are getting nowhere closer to building meaningful relationships with fans, especially if they bypass the grassroots scenes where such relationships are incubated. But simultaneously, brands are no longer the subcultural enemy, and authenticity is no longer defined by rebellion. In this strange scenario, maybe the question is not whether brands belong — but which ones should.

Direct-to-consumer brands have already broken distribution monopolies. The next frontier is cultural. Instead of chasing ‘youth’ in the abstract sense as big businesses have so far, smaller brands have a chance to pick a scene, a genre, a niche community, and genuinely show up there again and again until they become part of its folklore.

This is mostly theoretical, however. It is difficult to foresee many small brands committing years of partnerships, especially when small businesses face existential crises every year. But some brands do offer experiments with these kind of partnerships. Seeking examples, we spoke to Khyati and Shalina of Studio Kitsch Mish, a creative consultancy in Mumbai.

Some braver brands are fully committed to music culture. Lo-alc beverage brand Pursue is going both routes— fan-first and artist-led— recently through owning the Cosmic Disco Bar at Magnetic Fields and an artist residency in Alibaug.

Other brands, especially those a bit more distant from music, tend to be light-touch but more literal— Bombay Sweet Shop just gave away 100 tickets for Rolling Loud festival.

But more distant brands can still make forays into live events, if they can be more imaginative with surrogate advertising. Wellness and sports supplement brand Fast&Up did a pop-up at India Cocktail Week, moving to earn a niche in the alcohol/nightlife space. D’you, a skincare brand, did the water packaging at the recent Kevin Hart show in Mumbai— on the inventive premise that skincare is hydration for the skin.

Shalina and Khyati do caution, however, against blind faith in the hype: not every brand should be in music. Instead, visibility through value alignment is crucial — for example, Namiyaa, a sustainable personal care brand, was at Echoes of Earth festival, where sustainability and wellness are front and centre. Brands must accept that immediate sales aren’t the point; it’s being seen at the right event alongside the right fellow brands.

That is a bitter pill to swallow— especially for small businesses with tighter budgets. It’s tempting to imagine them as the ‘good guys’: nimble, but in reality, multinationals are the ones who can afford the long game. And yet, if small brands do play it, they might do it with more creativity and incisiveness.

What grassroots partnerships offer audiences

Elvt.live is a DIY collective expanding out of Mumbai. In a city where the only venues are monopolised, Elvt.live has broken through by taking over less plug-and-play spaces. They have to sort out everything from liquor licenses to A/V installations— and they rely on a community of like-minded young people to put it all together. As Nathan Menezes of Elvt.live tells me, these are passionate 23-27 year-olds with a point to prove — they “usually don’t get respect or acknowledgement from older people in the scene, who will call them oversmart.”

Elvt.live has built partnerships with brands willing (or constrained) to go grassroots first. Their Monsoon Gathering in August 2025 was a microfestival with pop-ups from small businesses (CBD wellness products, homemade brownies, lo-alc craft beer, etc.), a yoga class, a panel discussions on wellness, b2b duo Anshul & Malav, and of course, Sunju Hargun. This format gives attendees a full-day, cross-interest, multi-sensory cultural experience. At their Halloween event, Elvt.live brought on bigger partners in Simba beer and fashion brand Chapter 2.

Nathan points out that relationships with these brands are symbiotic. Big sponsors are unlikely to come to a grassroots, experimental concept. And if they do, they usually have a long list of expectations (although he reassures me that Simba is an accommodating partner). Micro-brands, by contrast, are often aligned with the tone of the event itself and can offer something useful, tactile or experiential for attendees, besides nominal rent for space, and freebies for artists, speakers and crew.

At best, this model shows that a subculture can create value for brands and fans simultaneously. At worst, it’s a fragile balance, and one that will be tested when scaled.

Authenticity after Apocalypse

We mourn ‘authentic’ eras by invoking a multinational energy drink. But what we miss isn’t a brand-free paradise. We miss a time when at least some brands took risks with us, stuck around, and felt woven in instead of parachuted in for a season.

In a landscape where everything circulates on monetised platforms, there is no clean outside to capitalism to retreat to. Brands are in the room whether we like it or not. The work now is to decide what kind of role they’re allowed to play.

In the end, authenticity won’t be decided by whether a logo is present in the room, but by who the room is organised around. What keeps a scene alive isn’t who funds it, but who it’s for.

The photographs in this essay don’t elevate performers or chase peak moments. Instead, this essay stays with the overlooked: the labour we expect but rarely notice, the rituals that start hours before the first track plays, and the remnants left behind. What happens around, before and after the gig tells us more about the scene than its centre.

In these places, nightlife isn’t just a vibe, it’s a system. A quiet order holds everything together from the edges, showing itself in how things are arranged, repaired, and reset. It mirrors the same questions we face everyday: Who gets to belong? Who stays invisible? Who holds things together when no one’s watching?

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prelude

A bouncer stands firm, rain-soaked folks line up behind soft ropes guarding the DJ’s pulsing setup. The bartender shines glasses, readying his spot. A raver, pumped, prepares for the dance floor. A train, empty of commuters, slips through dusk. Staff arrives, gear in tow. Workers sort crates in the stockroom. How is the night built before we arrive?

stewards of the night

Door staff snap wristbands. The checker props his feet up and tracks entries with a glance. The crew eyes the camera and stays sharp. Police scan the alley with steady gazes in the fading light. Their quiet watch holds firm against the night’s wild hum. Can their vigilance earn our respect?

behind the lights

Staff haul trash out back. Workers grab quick bites on break. Engineers dial in pulsing lights in sync with the beat. Bouncers watch the crowd with sharp eyes. Who powers the night’s momentum?

fade to residue

Dancers linger, whispering about afters. Some wait for Ubers, phones glowing, while others walk home through hushed streets. Staff sweep trash from the dancefloor. Cooks pack up pots and wipe counters. The beach, strewn with cans, meets dawn’s glow. These weary, quiet acts, clinging, waiting, walking, cleaning, and fading. Does the night’s rhythm end?

All photographs were taken with consent.

Jhanvi Shah and After EOD retain full rights to the images, which may not be reproduced or used without prior permission.

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Of these many musical imports, American punk band Green Day captured the essence of this cohort who were ready to stake their claim over the world around them. 25 years after the turn of the millennium and five years after India's ’Superpower 2020’ deadline, Green Day has finally validated that millennial worldview. Lollapalooza 2025 was a celebration of a generation and a band that stands for something in an increasingly meaningless world.

The millennial dream has had a tumultuous journey to fruition, with its many cracks and shortcomings revealing themselves along the way. That is, until Green Day proved a long-awaited milestone in a decades-long search for closure. With Linkin Park headlining Lollapalooza 2026, it is clear that this will be a protracted millennial celebration.

Green Day on stage at Lollapalooza 2025, at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in Mumbai

One step closer: millennials’ gradual route to finding themselves

In the 2000s, urban India (unequally) grew in opportunity. Business schools were built to teach corporate-speak for the MNCs opening offices in India. Marketing and advertising firms emerged to sell to a rapidly growing consumer class. Tech-parks cropped up to build and service the back-end of overseas clients. This generation of unprecedented affluence differed from previous generations, not just in its earning potential but also in its Westernised consumption. Dial-up internet, multiplexes and cable TV provided a window into lives half a world away, foreign lives that were aspirational but now easier than ever to recreate thanks to consumption. This consumption was material — visiting Cafe Coffee Day and Barista, or buying a Premier League football jersey — and cultural, through media.

While Western media was more accessible than before, it was still scarce: dial-up internet was unimaginably slow and expensive (compared to our post-Jio world), imported CDs were tightly regulated and costly. This scarcity forced intentionality: every download, every rip, and every CD burn was sacrosanct —precious collections built layer by layer.

The disparate but intentional process of acquiring and sharing music made communities necessary. These communities— precursors to subcultures— created a communal process to build these collections. Music was co-owned, shared through decentralised, informal networks of friends, classmates and bandmates.

Much like their music collections, millennials' identities were built gradually, with intentionality, enabled by access. None of them were born into a fully Westernised India — they watched it unfold in front of their eyes— piece by piece, with tangible, momentous shifts parallel to their lives. The first McDonald's in Mumbai opened while they were in school, the first mall opened while they were in college, and by the time they had finished their MBA, Porcupine Tree and Metallica were playing in India. It was all happening — and they could make it happen.

Unlike the buffet-style route to identity formation of the generation that followed them, or the heavily restricted, survival mindset of the time before theirs, the millennials’ identity formation was flexible and deep. It kept up with a rapidly changing world, and different ‘levels’ of identity were unlocked as technology shifted and means of access improved.

This desire to stake their claim on an evolving world, seemingly for the better, was visible in the music scene. It offered a microcosm of millennial optimism, a DIY ethos and a misplaced feeling of ‘suburban rebellion’. In an earlier article, I wrote:

“The scene was driven by a spirit of subversion— a sort of siege mentality coupled with an optimism that collective action leads to some change…The enemies were clear—Bollywood and its cousins’ chokehold on the entertainment industry, rent-seeking cops, a paucity of venues and audiences who only wanted covers of their favourite American/British bands.” – Arnav Sheth, Abandoning Authenticity, After EOD, January 2025

This was a generation that believed their music culture could change something. But soon, the dream would need a bigger stage.

In Bombay, music shops like Rhythm House and Planet M were core memories for millennials, offering a genuine ‘third place’ where young people could just hang around and listen to CD’s. These were places music subcultures were incubated through intentionality and care.

Rhythm House, Mumbai, ©DNA India

Somewhere I belong: NH7 Weekender, the Happiest Music Festival

Born out of the band scene in Mumbai, NH7 Weekender best exemplified the urban Indian elite's desire to consume as the rest of the world does. Weekender was created as India's “Happiest Music Festival”, modelled around Glastonbury. Weekender was unprecedented as a format — multiple stages, multi-genre, with global artists. An outdoor festival, drenched in fairy lights and related kitsch, helped reinforce its ‘global music festival’ aesthetic.

For much of the 2010s, this ambition was realised. Weekender retained the edginess and punk-ness of the band scene, creating something of a cult following in its early days. Its platform benefited both artists and audiences. Bands breaking through around the country got a chance to play on a massive stage, and audiences were exposed to new genres and artists— thus kicking off the Weekender flywheel of discovery and adventure.

Ox7gen live at Weekender Pune 2014, with the stage decorated in phrases advocating discovery, adventure and hope

Discovering an artist at Weekender was not just plausible— it was an expectation, or even an inevitability. It stood apart from other EDM-focused festivals such as Sunburn and Supersonic. At Weekender, each stage felt like a considered, intentional extension of different parts of the millennial identity— from college-hostel icons (Karnivool, Steven Wilson, Periphery) to early-adulthood emoting (Prateek Kuhad, Parekh and Singh, When Chai Met Toast) to Indian dance music for when you were drunk enough (Nucleya, Ritviz).

While its stronghold of college students and music-scene-adjacent professionals remained loyal patrons, Weekender was reliant on its novelty as an experience, not on its lineup, to attract new audiences. This was not uncommon for music festivals — especially in the 2010s, when the ‘market size’ for multi-genre music festivals was uncertain and risky. Booking a headliner with mass appeal was a tall ask.

Working with this constraint, Weekender's programming was strategic and effective. Aware of the strength of the metal community and their depth, a not-so-famous yet still cult band like the Dillinger Escape Plan would be enough for their captive audience of metalheads to buy a ticket. A Hindi-pop act like Amit Trivedi made Weekender more palatable for first-timers. Between these were a host of fantastic ‘festival’ acts’ — not the ones you make the trip for but those you discover and take home with you. In 2014-17, The F16s exemplified the ‘festival act’— they played an early evening slot for a scattered audience— some lying on the grass, some moshing, some just walking in. It is unlikely that they pushed significant ticket sales alone, but they were an act that audiences enjoyed, many for the first time.

Weekender recognised the importance of the college student market, incentivising them to attend through their Under-21 discount, advertised by their army of campus ambassadors. This meant that Weekender, in a lot of cases, was your first ‘college trip’ — drunk off Smirnoff and a lack of supervision. Weekender’s cult-like following is evidenced by the ubiquity of those iconic steel mugs which have now been repurposed into vases, ashtrays and other showpieces across apartments in Khar, Indiranagar and Gurgaon. ‘#iwasthere’ was a core phrase that held Weekender together, visible across the festival’s stages, merchandise, and social media. It captured the essence of Weekender’s position within the zeitgeist of the mid-2010s. By being at the festival, you were not just in the audience; you were part of a larger cultural moment. You were there.

Our walk to Weekender in 2017 from our “hotel” 800 meters away, with Bisleri bottles filled with vanilla vodka

Semi-charmed life: Weekender’s plateau-ing

The millennial desire for exploration was fulfilled at Weekender. As the generation who apparently had the world at their feet, they took full advantage of the adventure that Weekender offered. But Weekender peaked in its hipster moment. It was limited by scale, and their international programming was never strong enough to put ‘India on the map’ and allow a mass-scale realisation of the millennial Indian dream.

Towards the late 2010s, Weekender’s sheen had eroded, with other multi-genre festivals to compete with (most notably Vh1 Supersonic, who leaned into their staple of large-name EDM headliners, but also added big-ticket non EDM acts like alt-j, Incubus and Bonobo). Weekender had also set expectations too high. Their loyal audience of metalheads had grown accustomed to Steven Wilson or Megadeth, and demanded stronger follow-ups as the years went by. The original #iwasthere community were making their voices heard, frustrated by the (lack of) big headliners within the larger rock/metal ambit, and the repetitiveness of the rest of the lineup. Their frustration was immortalised by the hilarious #atleasttool hashtag, which was rabidly commented on Weekender’s social media— from fans expecting an appearance from ‘at least’ Tool, the legendary American prog-metal band. Anurag Tagat wrote in Rolling Stone in 2022 –

“...we’re hoping it builds up to a bigger international metal act who can lead the way. Even if it doesn’t, Bacardi NH7 Weekender’s lineup still walks a tightrope between legacy and dependable names. It’s a letdown in some ways but certainly not in all ways, as the Internet may have you believe.”

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Arriving somewhere but not here: millennials’ half-kept promises and half-baked legacy

Disappointing lineups set aside, Weekender’s proposition of a ‘Weekender State of Mind' is quintessentially millennial and unimpressive to a newer generation of festival-goers. The shared ethos of the millennial band scene— filled with discovery, community and pride in being homegrown—is rejected.

While exciting and fervent, the millennial band scene was ultimately defined by a kind of ‘suburban rebellion’ — an upper-middle-class venting with little to no political impact. This rebellion was less about transformation and more about carving out a space for ‘their’ music — detached from any intent to shift the class, caste, or gender hierarchies of the scene. Ultimately, a scene born out of a siege mentality against the powers that be replicated the same exploitative structures that they claimed to fight.

Companies like OML and Homegrown, positioning themselves as bastions of the millennial-yuppie creative industry, promised inclusivity and impact to the young professionals entering their ranks. In reality, they continued to be apolitical, vapid and exploitative. Their liberal posturing masked the truth: their prominence was built on the exploitation of women in deeply unsafe work environments, not only by individuals but also a larger system that enabled them. This broader system of creative work — then and perhaps still today — disproportionately rewarded powerful men at the helm and came at the cost of women’s careers and safety. While the financial impact of OML and Homegrown’s crooked workplaces is hard to quantify, the fallout revealed a deeper moral failure of the millennial thesis: an inability to drive meaningful change, either within their organisations or among their audiences.

From November 2018 — the headline of the Caravan’s piece on OML’s deeply unsafe and exploitative workplace. Full article can be found here.

Otherside: Finally, validation from the West

By the late 2010s, the millennial dream had faltered and the pandemic was a reset. With a break from live music and a new generation entering the workforce, a different format of music festival sprang up to cater to post-pandemic revenge partying. Music festivals were not nearly as much about adventure or exploration as Weekender’s State of Mind— instead, they now prioritise hedonism and nostalgia.

DGTL and countless dance music IPs and festivals provide avenues for hedonism, but it is only with Lollapalooza that the multi-genre festival has found its feet. Finally, ‘India is on the map’, as the biggest global music festival franchise (Lollapalooza) has recognised what the millennials have been trying to make happen for years — India as a global music market.

Through its first two editions, Lollapalooza inched closer towards the full realisation of the millennial dream. The Strokes (who played at Lollapalooza in 2023) are a millennial band, but like the Weekender trope, were a few notches off mass appeal: Manhattan-bred private school boys somehow never spoke to upwardly mobile urban India. Imagine Dragons (also at Lollapalooza 2023) had mass appeal, but given their more recent rise to prominence, their audience skew was younger than the millennial cohort. The second edition (in 2024) came closer to this delicate balance between mass appeal and being companions to the millennials’ journey, perhaps closest through OneRepublic and Keane

Was this it? The Strokes brought closure to a section of millennials, but not at scale

What’s my age again: post-dated closure in 100 minutes

If others before had come close, Green Day — who played a 100-minute set on Day Two of Lollapalooza India's third edition— was the realisation of the millennial dream. Finally, a band that they saw themselves in, one that soundtracked each formative phase in their lives Green Day was the first English band they had seen on Vh1, American Idiot was the first album they had torrented, and Time of Your Life was the song they had heard on loop after failed college romances.

Green Day’s shift from DIY punk outsiders to so-called ‘sellouts’ offers a neat parallel with the millennials’ story— who are themselves a once hungry, rabid generation that settled into quieter, domesticated lives. Yet to dismiss Green Day as mere sellouts is reductive: even today, we still see slivers of their politics. At Lollapalooza, their lyric switch in American Idiot—“I’m not part of a MAGA agenda”—alongside references to Palestine, was far more overtly political than anything attempted by Indian acts. Even if these gestures felt detached from any real world, they were still leaps ahead of their Lollapalooza peers, and certainly ahead of their stadium-concert contemporaries like Coldplay and Maroon 5. This brief politicisation may only amount to a small achievement—the kind of self-congratulation for which millennials are mocked. Yet, when set against the vacuousness of adjacent generations, it makes their attempts laudable.

The outpouring of Green Day-focused love during Lollapalooza may have appeared like nostalgia, reminiscing for simpler times in college or young adulthood, but it was not. It was closure. It was the closing of a chapter that had begun decades earlier on Limewire and at Planet M, forced onto you by an older sibling or through shared earphones in a college stairwell. Finally, ‘their’ band was live, in the flesh, in their backyard. Old black t-shirts were dusted off, hidden tattoos and scars were made visible again, and mascara (inevitably soaked in tears) was worn for the first time. For the millennials, who had the arrogance and gumption to both have dreams and try and make them come true, Green Day was an ideological and emotional companion. Decades after the black t-shirts and bootlegs have been traded for spreadsheets and speakeasies, this was a long overdue welcome to paradise.

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In the first part of this series, we explored how Indian fusion music emerged out of global circuits of exoticism and diaspora. Indian fusion music in the West was composed of a fundamental distinction between ‘modern’ sounds of beats and basslines with ‘traditional’ sounds of Indian music. Also related to this opposition are loaded terms like ‘futuristic’ and ‘heritage’, ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’, and so on. But these are not neat oppositions and sometimes they complicate each other.

After the 90s, the continuum of Indian electronic fusion music returned home, repatriated and rebranded by a new class of Indian elites. The subcontinental musicians inherit the same tensions and dangers of self-exoticisation that the Asian Underground were familiar with. But even though its aesthetics remain similar, the continuum has been wrenched out of a specific social and political contexts and into another. The diaspora felt assimilation to be a threat to their idea of heritage, shared contexts and Indian 'essences'. But now after its import into India by and for elite urban youth culture, those politics have been lost— or transformed— in translation.

Cyber mehfils and the nouveau maharajas

Back in the homeland, Talvin Singh's mentee and the biggest proponent of Indian fusion electronic music was MIDIval Punditz. MIDIval Punditz is inseparable from its context of the post-liberalisation era. The 90's and early 2000's was marked by the fantasy of an Incredible India coming into its own, brushing off the shackles of Nehruvian socialism, and taking its place on the world stage. The first generation of liberalisation's children were those that disproportionately benefited from this idea of an emergent India, and composed mostly of a privileged section of urban, Savarna millennials.

In an analysis of the 'cyber mehfils' organised by MIDIval Punditz in Delhi in the 2000's, Dhiraj Murthy (2010) reveals this genre to be at least possibly political. Even though many in the audience described the cyber mehfils as nothing more than ludic parties for Delhi's bored elites, the artists he interviewed in Delhi unanimously believed that the music they were creating was political. They presented their music as:

• responding to a loss or disconnection of the modern metropolitan Indian from national tradition and a sense of Indian-ness, and

• a celebration of domestic culture being empowered and recognised on the global stage.

For these urban elites that Murthy describes as 'nouveau maharajas', fusion music like Indian electronic music is emblematic of an emergent, modern India that still keeps in touch with its heritage and roots. There is pride in being represented abroad through 'our' music. Of course, disguised in the empowerment is still the need for the West's approval and patronage. One of Murthy's informants revealingly said that they “feel proud that West is buying music from the East".

This, of course, completely erases what Part 1 of this series established— that this music was diasporic in origin, and its politics were completely different. As Murthy points out, those in the subcontinent see their diasporic counterparts as 'not quite' Indian. This is only until there is something to claim as a national product — not unlike when NASA astronauts or American rappers are claimed to have been Indian all along.

By this logic, 'authenticity' is found not in who made it and in what context, but merely because of the music's usage of traditional sounds and instruments. In Murthy's paper, a quote from an unnamed interviewed journalist in Delhi stands out:

“A lot of my friends like the whole idea of beats with the sitar and the tabla. It’s kind of an India which is saying that we are important . . . [it represents] the idea that we have arrived, this is the global music. It’s not just us listening, it’s the whole world listening, and it’s got the sitar, the tabla—our instruments.”

This is a singular, monolithic ‘we’, as if all Indians could be represented by ‘our’ instruments. All other sounds are erased in favour of a singular style and tradition. As are all other identities that do not conform to a particular conception of what it means to be Indian. MIDIval Punditz' music assumes an inherent essence of Indian-ness that is shared by all Indians. Gaurav Raina of MIDIval Punditz said in a personal interview with Murthy that:

“Being Indian is the basic thing which ties it all together. . . . everywhere in India you go, the basic feeling or the basic sense of belonging everybody has is similar.”

In part one of this series, we saw how World Music allowed white liberal culture, alienated in globalised modernity, to appropriate the authenticity of the exotic. This authenticity is captured by reducing the local culture to exotic tokens of a supposedly universal, basic ‘essence’— not unlike the ‘basic feeling’ of Indianness that Gaurav Raina describes.

Murthy also quotes Gaurav Raina in an interview with the magazine Krich in 2005, clearly showing that their music is envisioned as a response to globalisation: “For people frustrated with corporate, globalized reality, Indian music is one of the places to turn”. MIDIval Punditz’ opposition of the authentic tradition with 'corporate, globalized reality' is itself derived from the same fears and alienation behind Western exoticization of India.

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The hauntology of Indo-futurism

Another dimension of the continuum is its relationship with visual and sonic futurism. Ordinarily, ‘Indian’ elements are associated with traditional heritage from a bygone, ancient civilisation of the past, while the ‘Western’ are conflated with modernity, efficiency, technology and the future.

But these categories are slippery and artists deliberately play with them to create whole new imaginary worlds. The past becomes inspiration for the future, and modernity becomes located in tradition.

Afrofuturist thinker Kodwo Eshun's notion of an Advanced Rhythmic Technology (ART) includes classical Hindustani and Carnatic music, and shows how complex technology and knowledge can be recovered from bygone eras and traditions. These ‘technologies’ reveal sophisticated advancements by cultures that have now been marginalised by global (white) culture, and confined to ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’.

Indo-futurism uses speculative fiction and fantasy to look back at shared culture and heritage. In doing so, it can unearth radical imaginations and possibilities of Indian-ness in a future world (to illustrate this movement beyond the musical, you can -take - your - pick from Indofuturistic aesthetics in art today). Like Afrofuturism, Indo-futurism is an aesthetic movement which displaces the present with haunting memories of imagined futures, i.e. memories of what-could-have-been.

But these haunting possibilities are not only the obvious postcolonial question of what-could-have-been (if colonisation did not happen). To imagine a radically different future means to reckon with the present status quo— of social inequalities in class, caste, gender, sexuality. In a Master’s dissertation, one Kyle Schirmann of Columbia University identifies a queer futurism in MIDIval Punditz’ track Khayaal, which is in a contemporary ghazal form. The ghazal form is well-known for 'ambiguity of gender and consequent homoerotic undertones'. Queerness essentially rejects the here-and-now status quo and insists on the possibility for another world that defies binaries and boundaries. Thus,

“The ghazal in “Khayaal” may thus be read as a requiem which traces an ultimately unrealized homoeroticism of the past. [...] The pleasure of listening to “Khayaal” comes from its trajectory of shared, collective struggle, an arc which connects the past and the present before mobilizing a politics of hope as it launches toward the future. It forgives the frustration of a future which never came to pass by suggesting that its possibility lies beyond some eventual horizon”

Schirmann even suggests that this "electronica perhaps fills a cultural void left by the exasperation [with] the left in Indian politics.” This is similar to how Kodwo Eshun described a fatigue with futurity and political imagination among African intellectuals in the late nineteenth century, and Mark Fisher described Alt-J and Britpop music as pastiche and nostalgia to cover up the failure of British working class politics.

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‘Underground’ is a contentious term when used to describe dance music scenes in India. One could argue that these electronic scenes are ‘underground’ in the sense they are alternatives to mainstream culture industries like Bollywood. They are also short-lived due to the lack of support infrastructure and favourable conditions— nightlife IPs that are not monopolistic or a race to the bottom in a service sense are a rarity. And social dissent does sometimes find its way into electronica, even if tangentially. Schirmann also offers an example of Imaginary Parrots Cheebay (2012) which is a song by Karachi’s Dynoman, of the band Forever South, which begins with snippets of conversation about parents and secret weddings. Forever South joined homegrown electronic collectives like Karachi Detour Rampage in a then-promising underground music scene that was soon to come of age, but quickly dissipated.

What makes scenes plausibly ‘underground’ here is also their moral persecution by the dominant, conservative social order. Club culture is closely associated with drugs, with many events organised without permits and risking police confrontation. In this cat-and-mouse chase, promoters are often complicit, tipping off competitors to police who needed to meet monthly quotas.

Still, even if nouveau maharajas are ‘exasperated’ with politics and governance, the jury is still out on if this music actually critiques any status quo. At the end of the day, this is music culture consumed by a privileged elite who are fairly alienated from the realities of the country.

Global citizens and the burden of inheritance

All this context shows us the diverse and complicated tapestry we are descendants of. There is now a rich recent history of homgerown artists working between Indian and Western electronic music. Samrat Bharadwaj's now outdated book HUB: Indian Electronica 2010 is a good overview of a scene we take for granted.

While building AltSpaces, Shivhari acknowledges our indebtedness often with an Isaac Newton quote— "I only see further because I stand on the shoulders of giants." But we inherit not just the sonic textures of the continuum, but its fundamental tensions and identity politics.

Alt.Spaces is one of many in Indian electronic music, and is haunted by the same internal tensions that blighted World Music. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan had to watch as they diluted eloquent Sufi mythology into pop hits— he wanted to intervene but was forced to 'compromise'. Shivhari is also wary of this pitfall, of merely mixing loops and chopped-up vocals. In his words, this is not "cheesy" "bastardisation" to be "sold as Indian". He is deliberate and intentional in his crate-digging, and he gives his classical selections the space and time in a mix they deserve to be appreciated.

And what of the nouveau-maharajas, how have they evolved since the times of cyber mehfils? As Shivhari agrees, MIDIval Punditz broke through at a time when emergent India was staking its claim on the world stage. But now we are already global(ised) citizens, who have more in common with hipsters in Berlin than with the country’s masses.

For us global citizens, who 'just happen to be in India', being modern is a given and we have internalised the white man's gaze. We see in the mirror the pale mask of homogeneity, and want to go native (again). Shivhari is reticent to admit, but his music does convey "a sense of home" to people, and they may feel comfort in a fantasy of Indian-ness. But we are not ‘re’- connecting with heritage, as I suggested, because as Shivhari pointed out we were never connected with it in the first place.

But Shivhari wants to build a community without identity politics— which he sees as divisive. Identity performance can empower people, but sometimes it is better to be inclusive, to welcome everyone— "Music should not be the place where we fight wars over identity".

Shivhari, who stands on MIDIval Punditz' shoulders, rejects their claim that there is some 'basic' essence of Indian-ness that the music appeals to. That optimistic idea of India and Indianness on the global stage has changed. Superpower-by-20xx projects have failed spectacularly, Internet culture has turned on India and revealed the country's shortcomings, and any feel-good sense of patriotism has turned sour. Internally, we are more aware of social divisions than ever. There cannot be any misconceptions that we are culturally or spiritually unified. As Shivhari says, "India is a useful political construct and an abstraction but it has a limit ... there is no single reality here".

If not a sense of home or national heritage, Shivhari believes in his music’s universal spiritual appeal, cutting across identities and boundaries, purely based on its experiential sonic quality. As he puts it, white foreigners in the Pushkar desert having a spiritual experience to Rajasthani folk classical music enjoy it just the same as us despite having less context. Beyond culture and identity, this is 'ancient', 'tribal' music that appeals to some deep rooted universal humanity.

His ethos is of love and compassion, of no hierarchy between the DJ and the dancefloor. Shivhari knows intimately the importance of these experiences to people's lives— and so he treats someone's feedback and attention with utmost seriousness and responsibility. He aspires to recreate the togetherness and spirituality of Goa psytrance scenes, which taught him how through music:

"You can alleviate suffering, you can be in the here and now, you can feel part of a larger community… Dancing has been in our genes for 100,000 years... Dancing activates something fundamental and primitive, a sense of feeling as part of a tribe… The dancefloor provides you what you need."

(above) Vridian's recent release Days of Paradiso which ripped up the dancefloor at AltSpaces was made as a homage to Goa trance that he never got to experience (imagined memories that could-have-been) (source). Shivhari similarly also said the Goa scene is a big inspiration for his vision of community ethos. The irony should not be forgotten that Goa trance was a hybrid product made in an enclave of white culture in India. Despite efforts to gatekeep it from Indian tourists, that enclave declined and has now disappeared after the pandemic.

Shivhari's vision and ideology— of authenticity through ‘primitive’ spirituality— clearly echoes those in the continuum before him. He may hope to transcend cultural identity politics, but his music cannot escape its inherited context.

The same internal conflict follows us to the present. By celebrating our own heritage as ‘spiritual’, ‘authentic’, ‘tribal’, are we perpetuating the same self-exoticisation? Are we denying our music their critical and revolutionary potential? World Music was marketed as universally spiritual and authentic, consumed by white people as an alternative and response to the authenticity of Black music. Is it possible that fusion music in India plays a similar function for urban Savarna culture today, which is similarly threatened by the rise of Desi Hip Hop and the threat of mass access to dance music?

In any case, Shivhari knows his “movement” is “not there yet”. But it is growing, one disciple at a time. Uncles and aunties at weddings, coffee and burger shop ravers, tech bros, are all waiting to be onboarded, and positive responses from unexpected sources gives him courage.

No Home to Return to?

Today, the desi electronic continuum is going strong and spans genres. Cutting-edge contemporary dance from Baalti shares the limelight with retro-pastiche from Glass Beams or Khruangbin. What these examples all share is some contact of Western technology with vernacular languages, aesthetics or cultures, usually mediated by diaspora. These points of contact are made in the cause of 'hybridity', on the delicate fault lines between neo-colonialism and self-exoticisation.

If Asian Dub Foundation was a politicised voice of international diaspora, then experimental, fusion club music like that nurtured at Alt Spaces is the sound of the intra-national, inter-state diaspora. For the global diaspora, the fantasy of India was stuck in time, protected. For the elite internal diaspora, the fantasy of emerging, superpower India has long collapsed in front of our eyes. Unlike for the global diaspora, for us there is no 'back home' to nostalgise about, and with global recession impending there is no ‘outside’ to escape into. It may be too generous to think that what haunts the ‘nouveau-maharajas’ at Alt.Spaces is the unrealised possibilities of a modern, liberal India. In truth, what haunts us is probably our personal futures that could-have-been— our lives as foreign expats in the West, finally being cultural minorities who can feign angst without question.

Today’s Indian electronic music is no longer about representing India to the world. It’s about finding fragments of self in a culture whose past is increasingly volatile and weaponised. There is no spiritual unity left to reclaim, only pre-digested nostalgia and broken, haunting inheritances. Our future and past need to be synthesised out of the flotsam of failed nation-building projects. The scene may not escape the structures it inherits—but on the dancefloor, something else becomes possible: not a return to home, but a moment of shared estrangement.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Shivhari Shankar for his time and patience with my questions. Thanks also to reviewers: Pranav Manie, Apoorv Somanchi, Sanjana Sheth and others.

No copyright infringement intended. All material credits to the original authors.

References

Banerjea, Koushik (2000), “Sounds of Whose Underground? The Fine Tuning of Diaspora in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Theory, culture & society, 17(3), 64–79.

Gopinath, Gayatri (2005), Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Duke University Press,

Hasan, Rafeeq (2001), “The Dialectic of the Dance: On Talvin Singh’s ‘Anokha,’” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 32(4).

Murthy, Dhiraj (2010), “Nationalism Remixed? The Politics of Cultural Flows between the South Asian Diaspora and ‘Homeland,’” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(8), 1412–30.

Schirmann, Kyle (2015), “Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat: Futurism and Pirate Modernity in South Asian Electronica,” Master’s Thesis, New York: Columbia University.

Sharma, Ashwini (1997), “Sounds Oriental: The (Im)Possibility of Theorizing Asian Musical Cultures,” in Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music, ed. Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk, and Ashwini Sharma, London; New Jersey: Zed Books

Part one traces the global and diasporic roots of the genre, examining how the South Asian identity was curated and sold in the West. Part two turns to its repatriation to elite youth cultures in the subcontinent, and considers how artists today inherit this complex legacy.

It is a given that Bangalore is a melting pot for young, ambitious migrants. Despite political and social backlash, regional diasporas have reshaped the identity of the city. This shift is visible in its music scenes too. On a Sunday night in February when the weather recalls Mumbai's, Hindi is spoken conspicuously on Ulsoor’s main roads. Inside Aqua at The Park, Alt.Spaces' gig is as eclectic and inspiring as ever, but the crowd is not indigenous. In the niches of the city, Shivhari Shankar is building a diasporic community around music that crosses geographical and historical boundaries.

AltSpaces hosts a highly educated crowd that knows when to stroke their chins (for Mahaalaxmi's ambient dub) and when to go airborne (for Vridian's too-techno-to-be-house). A cover of Charanjit Singh's now-anthemic Raga Bhairav (1985) elicited a manic response that contrasted sharply with the listless crowd at Magnetic Fields in December, where the track was played by at least four foreign DJs. Alt.Spaces is premised on Shivhari Shankar's vision and taste. He is clear that he is "building a movement", but he is careful to avoid the ego and clout-chasing that can come with being at the vanguard. His music is difficult to name, and after much deliberation he has arrived awkwardly at a functional label: "Indian classical electronic fusion music". It’s no wonder that his community WhatsApp group is ambivalently named “Asian Underground / Indian Fusion Revival.”

Alt.Spaces is one of many present day enclaves of a rich tradition these names refer to. This article explores the complex politics, histories, and geographies of this slippery genre—or rather, this continuum of genres and scenes.

Exotic origins in the Third World (Music)

The continuum of genres about to be described is essentially a history of hybrids— between Indian (or South Asian) music with Western electronic music. When I say 'continuum', it is with direct reference to Simon Reynolds' term 'hardcore continuum', which describes a fairly distinct and linear cultural evolution in British electronic scenes beginning with rave and ending(?) with dubstep. Our continuum is anything but clear-cut.

Today, from food to fashion and back, marketingspeak words like 'fusion' and 'glocal' have become ubiquitous, alongside related epithets like ‘ethnic’, ‘tropical’, ‘folk’ and ‘tribal’. Despite being cliched through overuse, 'hybridity' is still celebrated as if it is inherently progressive and ground-breaking.

But hybridity is fraught with ideological tension. No example captures this quite like so-called World Music. Invented as a genre to sell firstly to the Western, white, affluent music consumer in the late 80's and 90's, World Music celebrated the authenticity of exotic non-Western cultures.

Exoticisation had always accompanied the coloniser’s fascination with the savage’s culture. With modernity came homogeneity and loss of sense of tradition and heritage, driving desires for a fantasy of ‘authentic’ Oriental culture. The result is an extractivist imperialism that stretches from pre-colonial trade for exotic goods and into modernity with the appropriation of spiritual practices like yoga.

But World Music specifically is motivated by a deeper social insecurity in white Western society that emerges after 1960’s counterculture and the American civil rights movement. The series of watershed moments in the West such as the 1968 student riots in Paris or the global hippie movement promised a moral and cultural revolution which never came. The failures of collective utopia led to individual alienation, a turning inward, trying to leave the world behind.

Ashwani Sharma's (1998) introductory chapter to (Dis)Orienting Rhythms explains how World Music was made to cater to white North American culture. In the late 80’s and 90’s, World Music had emerged as a product for 'vacant white liberal culture' to search for some universal 'authentic', 'human' and 'real' essence. After the political failures of rock and punk music, white music culture needed a new source of ‘realness’ as a response to the urban, technologized, articulate and sometimes militant Black dance music and hip-hop.

To be clear, before World Music there was already a long history of Western-produced music inspired by Oriental culture— that began well before The Beatles, and extends well into the present. But rather than mere exoticisation, World Music claimed to represent a collaboration of equals. Towards the end of the Cold War when global capitalism congratulated itself on its victory over any alternative, World Music offered a utopia of cosmopolitanism and a breaking down of the duality of the West and Third World (or coloniser and colonised).

Multiculturalism and hybridity were celebrated even in the colonised society, but only by those elites that benefited from this contact with the West. Even today, the era of World music is fondly looked back at as a time of 'Incredible India' being re-discovered by the West. Recently, Homegrown uncritically went through the archives to nostalgize about this era when "Western musicians looked to the East for inspiration, and Eastern musicians looked to the West for innovation".

But really, only a certain type of Third World was made visible, and only in a certain way. World music reduced whole national cultures to singular categories, while ignoring the real power differences. Exoticisation works by essentialising a culture, i.e. by identifying some basic, inherent ‘essence’ of a society as representative of the whole society. This tendency follows well before, during and after the colonial project— and is necessary to create a discourse of ‘us vs. them’. Essentializing is a basic social function which allows other cultures to be classified, administered, and appropriated. Examples of this process range from the scale of entire societies being labelled ‘criminal tribes’ to the creation of stereotypes—like the portrayal of ‘spiritual’, ‘authentic’ but ‘dirty’ India.

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Of course, any idea of a basic ‘essence’ that is universal to all members of the society is a fantasy that ignores complexity. In reality, there is no ‘innocent’ savage untouched by the corruption of the West— this is a fantasy produced to maintain the apparent opposition and exotic quality of the Orient. The hybrid artist is presented as the miraculous child that finally reconciles the two.

An excellent example of such a reductive process is again provided by Ashwani Sharma is Bally Sagoo's signing on Sony Records. Bally Sagoo is most known for his role in the British Bhangra scene (interestingly a genre that fluidly co-evolved with Black British music like dub and reggae, which is a problem for marketing which tries to keep the exotic separate from the Black). But Sagoo's 1995 album Bollywood Flashback was a strategic move by Sony Records to sell Bombay film music repackaged for white Western consumers (and, in the future, upper middle class and Westernised consumers in the Indian subcontinent). Bollywood remix was aesthetically hybrid, but what was really being sold was the artist's identity as a paratext to the product. Sagoo, Sharma argues, was marketed as a migrant subject who draws both from his 'ethnic traditions' and western knowledge of technology.

In World Music, artists’ identities are portrayed as hybrids of exotic authenticity with Western modernity. They are ambitiously modern despite their traditional background. Artists must perform their nationality and ethnicity. They are put in a box, preventing them from transcending their own cultural position or being considered anything else except their assigned ethnicity. Artists who play 'traditional' i.e non-electric instruments and sing in indigenous languages are preferred by labels and record companies. Specific artists, musical forms and styles are seen as authentic representatives, ignoring the others who have not had the privileging encounter with the West or who don't have photogenic poverty to sell. Thus, those artists who can serve as one-dimensional caricatures of the ‘essence’ of some local culture are given world stage.

World Music reflects a broader fascination with the ‘authenticity’ of the exotic while foregrounding the technological modernity of the West. Artists are forced to self-exoticise in order to be palatable to the Orientalist gaze. Balancing this duality of modernity and tradition forms the basis of the continuum, represented sonically as well as visually.

Authentic traditions x Western modernity

At an aesthetic level, desi electronic music is composed of a duality based on the cultural origins of their sounds. This is an immediately recognisable distinction between 'Indian' (traditional sounds, ragas, etc. and 'Western' (beats, bass lines, etc.).

The duality of Indian and Western play distinct functions, with the 'Indian' sound being the source of authenticity, spirituality and heritage and the 'Western' representing the progressive, modern and contemporary. But this is not a meeting of equals. The 'Western' part, which represents modernity, shifts to the background and is taken as a natural, basic requirement to be dance-able. What comes into focus through a fetishistic gaze is the exotic, authentic traditional culture. Even today, Shivhari similarly presents his music as "highlighting the beauty of Indian classical” without “sacrificing” the “groove”, “danciness”, “structure and familiarity” of modern electronic music.

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When cultures are reduced to one-dimensional tokens of a supposed basic essence, they are de-politicised and detached from any historical context. This makes them more palatable for appropriation— emptied of meaning and used for fashion.

In World Music, a good example of this tendency is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's Qawwali music which became a bonafide superstar figure in the genre through remixes and collaborations with electronic producers like Massive Attack. Even today, Qawwali is celebrated as 'enchanting' and 'mystical', but this erases the crucial socio-critical, religious-devotional, and revolutionary elements of the music, reducing it to aesthetic form. The album sleeve of Mustt Mustt (1990) by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & producer Michael Brook reveals how the music is stripped of its meaning and used only for its sonic quality:

"These are the only two songs with actual lyrics; the rest are classical vocal exercises in which the words have no meaning but are used for the quality of their sound. These notations are selected to fit particular ragas.

‘We made some edits that were not acceptable to Nusrat, because we’d cut a phrase in half —sometimes there were actual lyrics that we made nonsense of.’ A compromise was achieved —important lyrics phrases were restored without losing the musical structure Michael had developed." — Album sleeve of Mustt Mustt (1990), Real World Records (source)

There is a clear power hierarchy here— the authentic local culture of the postcolony is extracted by globalisation and Westernisation. This is a familiar story— of the technological and rationalistic modernity of the West and the authentic traditions and heritage of the Orient.

But it is not a simple story of the old master appropriating the fashions of the savage. Different artists and scenes in the West, in the Third World and in the diaspora mobilize hybrid music towards different ideological ends.

The diasporic Underground and self-exoticisation

Another starting point for tracing the continuum of desi electronic music culture is with the South Asian diaspora (in the West) as its pioneering producers. While World Music offered Western audiences a consumable fantasy of the exotic Other, diasporic South Asian artists in the UK turned this gaze inward, creating hybrid genres that questioned identity, modernity, and cultural authenticity.

Dhiraj Murthy defines 'British Asian electronic music' as a:

“a mix of some of the following: electronic digital manipulation; one or more traditional Hindustani instruments such as the tabla, sitar, sarangi or veena (or samples of them); Asian vocalists; lyrics and samples broadly relating to South Asia; samples of Bollywood tracks, but generally a rhythm line similar to drum and bass; downtempo; jungle; and other electronic musics.”

In the UK, what came to be contentiously called the 'Asian Underground' movement was exemplified by its namesake- Talvin Singh's 1997 historic compilation Anokha— Soundz of the Asian Underground. The Asian 'Underground' was named so for its supposed social and political subversiveness. Since the 80's, South Asian diaspora in the UK had been pushing bold, experimental fusions often with Black British music scenes, ranging from bhangra to dub and jungle and back. These genres aestheticised a feeling of angst amongst minorities in the first world who faced marginalisation and a perceived loss of heritage in the face of cultural assimilation. These scenes connect to a global constellation of culture produced by first and second-generation postcolonial diaspora who struggle for self-expression.

Gayatri Gopinath (2005) initially writes in praise of Asian Dub Foundation, a legendary fusion electronic act known for their political lyricism. ADF mobilized nostalgia for an idea of 'India' that was not based in some ‘essence’ of cultural identity but a shared memory of struggle and defiance against the coloniser. But importantly, Gopinath also points out how tracks like ADF's Rafi's Revenge (1998) problematically reproduce the 'militant masculinity' of icons like Bhagat Singh and Udham Singh and the tendencies of those movements to subordinate others.

For all its claims for subversiveness, the Asian Underground faced the same existential dilemma as other forms of hybridisation— how to represent some shared context of culture and struggle, while avoiding reducing ethnicity to homogenised, empty aesthetics?

So-called ‘underground’ dance music is often called political, even revolutionary, but valid doubts remain. Rafeeq Hasan (2001) describes an all-too-familiar picture of a crowd at a Talvin Singh performance at Fabric, London, as mass of alienated, narcissistic, Black British and Asian hipsters:

"These are not dancers dancing in any sort of modernized scene of tribal collective catharsis, each individual indistinguishable from the next [...] These are atomized individuals, occupying a completely desexualized space, each using unique hand movements to self-stylize themselves, to present themselves [...] as an aesthetic object to be appreciated, though not approached." (205)

Like with any music subculture, there is no guarantee of subversive or socially productive action. Koushik Banerjea (2000) argues that the stale trope of the underground is actually just a place for social visibility, and has nothing to do with any broader political consciousness. Underground diasporic scenes are merely a hipster fashion beginning with the elite, globalised classes of society:

"People for instance who can only appreciate their ghazals or qawwali dipped in junglist wax are no more likely than their peers to accept the growing demands for recognition by Asian working-class folk in the housing, employment and education markets. Rather like those early batch-cooked menus in the original curry houses, it appears to be a case of dilute to taste"

This existential tension between commercialisation and authenticity is obvious and has long been discussed in academia. In the 1920’s, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, founded critical cultural studies based in Marxian theory. One of the leading figures of what is now referred to as the Frankfurt School, Theordo Adorno looked at big band and swing jazz to point out the commodification of culture, where art and culture are transformed into products for mass consumption, losing their authenticity and critical potential.

But Rafeeq Hasan makes an interesting point that there is a “subtle subversiveness” on Talvin Singh’s anonymised, self-absorbed, alienated dancefloor at Fabric. Women are, for once, not the object of male gaze. Aesthetically, there is no enforced 'correct way' of dancing regulated by cultural gatekeepers. There is no foreign exotic tribal culture being fetishised and mimicked.

Instead, here is a sense of togetherness built around a 'self-determined style of self-exoticization'. This is an introspective journey which finds authenticity in the self rather than some Other exotic culture. Can this self-exoticisation really be subversive?

These questions are explored in the next part of this series. Until now, we have examined the roots of Indian electronic fusion. This is a history of asymmetry—between the West’s desire for spiritual authenticity and the East’s ambition to be at-par with modernity. From the packaging of ‘exotic’ Indianness for World Music markets to the diasporic search for identity in the Asian Underground, fusion music was shaped by a deep sonic duality: Indian sounds as markers of heritage and mysticism; Western instruments as symbols of progress and futurism. Even when artists reclaimed this hybridity, they often found themselves complicit in the very gaze they sought to subvert. The continuum was born not just of collaboration but of contradiction—a sonic world haunted by the politics of self-exoticisation. In Part 2, we ask what becomes of this lineage once it returns home to India—who inherits it, what it means now, and if and what new futures can still be imagined through it.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Shivhari Shankar for his time and patience with my questions. Thanks also to reviewers: Pranav Manie, Apoorv Somanchi, Sanjana Sheth and others.

No copyright infringement intended. All material credits to the original authors.

References

Banerjea, Koushik (2000), “Sounds of Whose Underground? The Fine Tuning of Diaspora in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Theory, culture & society, 17(3), 64–79.

Gopinath, Gayatri (2005), Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Duke University Press,

Hasan, Rafeeq (2001), “The Dialectic of the Dance: On Talvin Singh’s ‘Anokha,’” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 32(4).

Murthy, Dhiraj (2010), “Nationalism Remixed? The Politics of Cultural Flows between the South Asian Diaspora and ‘Homeland,’” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(8), 1412–30.

Schirmann, Kyle (2015), “Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat: Futurism and Pirate Modernity in South Asian Electronica,” Master’s Thesis, New York: Columbia University.

Sharma, Ashwini (1997), “Sounds Oriental: The (Im)Possibility of Theorizing Asian Musical Cultures,” in Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music, ed. Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk, and Ashwini Sharma, London; New Jersey: Zed Books,

2025 Kochi is unrecognisable to what was once a pub-less small town. Don’t get me wrong. We’ve always had bars. But ‘pubs’ were different. ‘Pubs’ were what people in Bangalore went to. It served a younger, co-ed crowd instead of uncles who had perfected the art of hastily downing a drink before returning to their families. Pubs had live music. Bars played 9XM. Clutching a handful of 24x7 cafes and big-city dreams, the 2012 Kochi we were once teenagers in didn’t have the weekend plans that big-sibling metros Bombay and Bangalore had. While a Dunkin’ Donuts or a Krispy Kreme was just another corner café for them, we wore our Sunday bests to the first McDonald’s that graced our state in 2013.

But, unbeknownst to our innocent, unexposed selves, our own big brothers and some lucky sisters had their spots; subterranean scenes that were so underground that we only knew of their existence in whispers. However, as we marched into 2010, those whispers quickly turned into melodic shouts and heart racing roars, loud enough to reverberate across Kerala and beyond, as Kerala folk rock, fusion rock and folk metal announced the arrival of an original sound. Desperate pleas to older cousins were answered with mp3 tracks of The Down Troddence while Motherjane and Avial gave crash courses on their genres in their canonical Rosebowl appearances. As more bands came out of the woodwork and audiences openly began to proclaim their allegiance to them, the new cultural phenomenon culminated at the iconic Mojo Rising 2015 — Kappa TV’s 14-hour non-stop music fest.

We’ll never forget that first edition of Mojo Rising. Kochi’s Bolgatty Palace grounds where we previously used to have family picnics was now littered with metalheads and rock fans, brandishing their horned fists in the air, proudly celebrating their subculture as it waded into the mainstream for all of us to see. And man, the sights we saw…Black Letters hitting each note as hard as the afternoon sun. Ameeth Thomas stuffing his lit cigarette between his guitar’s nut before rocking out with the rest of Junkyard Groove. And peak Thaikkudam Bridge who played unreleased tracks from their then upcoming debut album, Navarasam. It was then that we truly understood the pride with which our dads and uncles remembered the Kochi of their time that witnessed 13AD and Osibisa live. We realised that this concert was one of those moments in our city’s history that would be embedded in its cultural consciousness. The clandestine culture of our time had finally come to the light and the city had embraced it.

My generation was lucky to grow up with this Kochi. We were adolescents when Kochi was a small town and young adults when that small town grew into a young city. And right now, this young city that we’ve always called ‘home’ is at another fascinating cultural crossroads.

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Since that fateful day in 2015 when Mojo Rising popularised the Kerala sound, Kochi’s music scene has taken the form of a metric to measure how quickly the city is adopting national and global culture. Around the world, electronic music and its army of subgenres have been playing on loop since the ‘90s, but techno’s meteoric rise to popularity has been fairly recent, climbing steadfastly without a drop in sight. Kochi’s picked up this change in frequency and it did so at exactly the right time — as tourism booms across the state.

With the State Government loosening many restrictions to adopt new tourism initiatives, Kerala has emerged as a popular destination for travellers around the country and beyond; especially artists for whom it is now a pilgrimage site thanks to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The Biennale is arguably one of the most significant players responsible for granting the state a permanent residence on the international cultural map. With entry tickets at ₹50 during the first edition in 2012, the festival recorded an average of thousand visitors a day, reaching ten thousand on weekends. Everyone from your next-door neighbour to a Moscow-based art curator could be found wandering the streets of Fort Kochi, where business went up by 80% as per the record of the manager at Kochi’s iconic Hotel Seagull. By its second edition, the Kochi Biennale foundation had received a total of ₹12 crores through private donations, crowd-funding campaigns and State allocations, which became the highest sum a state government in India has ever given to an art event.

While art and culture tourism significantly picked up during these years, post-pandemic travel took things to a whole new level. In the world’s desperation to start travelling again, Kerala had become a first-choice destination among global tourists. With a 21% increase from pre-pandemic levels, the state’s tourism industry exploded at a record 2.22 crore visitors in 2024. While an increasing number of domestic travellers hopped, skipped and jumped on over, the growth rate for international tourists visiting the state had become higher than the national average. To host our gracious economy-boosting guests, the State government worked the tourism department overtime, introducing heli-tourism and seaplane services, e-visa facilities and immersive local stays while optimising inter-city travel with the Kochi Water Metro network.

Within districts, cafes and event spaces are multiplying, aggressively hosting open mics, workshops and live gigs. Kochi’s flourishing food scene has emerged as the perfect hype man to lift up the city’s music scene. This is owed partly to the State limiting bar licenses to three-star hotels and above. While this seemed to jeopardise tourism, the move has instead prompted the city’s hospitality industry to embrace resto bars. As more eateries leave their stoves on into the night and more pubs leave their lights on for a little longer, opportunities increase for music to occupy these spaces. Bustling crowds regularly flock to Fort Kochi’s Francis to attend musician Ayesha John’s cover sets, while enjoying a late-night beer in the tavern-like pub. Nikhil Velayudan is a regular act at Rocks and Brews whose new outlet at Hotel Benhur has taken the city by storm.

Curfews proposed by the government to dodge a rising drug menace have even been met with vehement public backlash, especially from the city’s youth and local businesses to whom nightlife provides a promise of good times and prosperity. Unable to deny the successes of a thriving nightlife, the State has liberalised its excise policy, leading to a titanic 2,662% increase in pubs and bars over the last eight years. Plans are also underway to use public premises as venues for buskers and bands to perform for free. As weekend scenes increasingly get sorted, the battle for nightlife in Kochi is witnessing fewer casualties and more victors.

Unsurprisingly, Kochi’s city status is a byproduct of this rapid globalisation fuelled by a tourism boom. But added to that mixture is the state’s staggering 98.1% student digital literacy rate — the highest in the country. With the window to the world in their hands, Kerala’s youth consumes globalised cultural forms and templates before their morning breakfast. Everyone’s online and we’re all busy studying algorithms to trend and thrive in a free market of cultural capital. As more streamers, vloggers and content creators emerge, many adopt tried-and-tested templates that increase their chance to achieve internet virality.

At this juncture, a familiar name emerges once again, albeit in a new guise. Kappa, now evolved from a TV channel to a full-fledged production house and music label, is once again at the forefront of guiding the city towards the dominant electronic and hip-hop music culture of the time. Aptly named, their CULTR festival has caught the attention of ravers around the country and the world, with acts like Miss Monique headlining the first edition in 2024 and an exclusively electronic line-up taking over the two stages in the second edition earlier this year.

There’s no doubt that CULTR is solidifying Kochi’s spot on the map with its high-end festival infrastructure, equal-parts professional and equal-parts chill management and dazzling line-up. It follows a template of any other contemporary music fest, so its success is a natural consequence.

But therein lies the very cause for concern.

Standing at the very same Bolgatty Palace grounds, only this time for CULTR 2025, I realised I could very well have been standing in festival grounds somewhere in Bangalore, Bombay or any other city that had the potential to host an event of such a scale. Like any commercial behemoth, it administered the right dopamine doses through cool sponsors, reputed food stalls and a glamorous crowd. Every ingredient was laced with quality and style that drove sales and publicity, establishing Kochi as a new venue in the world of music festivals. So, celebrities and state government representatives understandably extended their support for it.

But in the rush to become a fest of international standards, there was nothing Kochi or Kerala about it. And was it a space for “everyone” like how the fest and its patrons claimed? That question would better be answered by the horde of Kochi’s youth who stood outside the festival gates, asking attendees if they could borrow their high-priced wristbands to catch a glimpse of what was happening in their city. With the lack of homegrown talent in the line-up despite Kerala’s rising electronic music scene, the bigger questions arise — What kind of culture is truly being celebrated here and who is allowed to be a part of it? While CULTR was like every other enjoyable fest fine-tuned to fit a certain standard of exclusivity and globally accepted quality, it seemed to lack an authentic form of what its name promised.

As Kochi becomes more globalised and experiments with more festivals, gigs and live events, the possibility exists for the city, in its haste to reach Tier 1 status, to clumsily fall into a void of indiscernible cultural homogeneity. But there also exists another possibility for this young city and its inhabitants — the exciting chance to redefine their cultural identity for the new era they enter, so that while Kochi and Kerala meet the rest of the world, the rest of the world knows exactly who they are rubbing shoulders with.

In the growing electronic music landscape, the Kerala sound has once again reincarnated through the music of electronic/techno artists like 6091 and Shanka Tribe. Rooted to his own experiences and influences, Trivandrum-hailing 6091’s music holds “story, character, emotion, and culture” — ingredients that form a personality from which emerges an original style. Shanka Tribe on the other hand, experiments with tribal and indigenous instruments from around the world, consciously using their sounds to translate it into homegrown, organic trance music. While both artists maintain distinct musical identities within their genre, their sounds carry the same nostalgia that connects them and their listeners to a shared cultural history that is re-introduced through globally recognised formats.

This balance between global influence and cultural individuality can also be found in certain pockets of Kochi, where the global cultural exchange of music has led to the creation of distinct city spaces.

Last December, I found myself walking towards a psy-trance rave tucked away between lanes near Vytilla Mobility Hub — Kochi’s major intercity bus terminal; the last place you’d expect to witness anything remotely psychedelic or trancelike. We alighted from our auto and like the beginning of most scenes, followed the low, thumping rhythm to Space. — a venue we’d never been to before and one unlike anything we’ve ever seen. We turn a corner to an open-ground parking lot lit up with just enough yellow lights. The gates are open and people are freely walking in and out while a DJ plays his set in a corner, on an unintentionally brutalist stage made out of corrugated metal sheets, wooden planks and cable reels. Opposite to that was their cafe — a beautiful hut made entirely out of window frames that served momos, nuggets, Boost and other comforting post-party foods. Here, attendees lounged on cane chairs made by a local artisan who had used the venue to conduct a workshop on traditional carpentry. From aunties and uncles rocking everyday churidars and mundu to dapo-star obsessed psy-trance ravers, Space. was open to all. With no entry fee that night and an infrastructure that not only wowed but welcomed, the venue is one among Kochi’s finest platforms where a culture of artistic expression and cultural exchange between artists and audience is encouraged.

JD’s Jukebox in Kaloor is another example. The record store set up at the owner’s childhood home is Kochi’s sonic Shangri-La where people come together, put on their favourite record and simply vibe to the music and eventual conversations that unfold through it. Within walls painted by friends and visitors rests more than 6,000 records which have travelled across countries and generations to reach the humble Kaloor abode. With corners dedicated to patrons who have donated music books, record collections and cassettes, JD’s is a tapestry of all who have entered the space and made it their own. Sujit, the owner, embodies the philosophy upon which the space is built — to “live and let live with music”, inviting everyone to occupy the space as their own hangout spot with no pressure to make any purchase.

Such spaces, artists and individuals embody a DIY spirit that is motivated by creativity and curiosity over commercial glamour. With an open invitation to all, these stalwarts are creating something that is unique to their history and hometown; just intimate, inviting and interesting enough without trying too hard to be. Through the things they create, we know their story starts here, rooted and ready to explore the world beyond their own. They follow no template, resemble no references and desire for nothing more than to create a scene of their own in their city.

One could say that Kochi is currently going through its contemporary-era young adult phase — ultra-exposed and vulnerable to all kinds of influences. The city walks the path of discovering its own identity while growing alongside a rapidly changing and intermingling global environment. As it comes of age, it is poised to enter its new cultural era, with a full realisation of who it is and what it has to offer to the rest of the world.

In its nascency, the scene was driven by a spirit of subversion— a sort of siege mentality coupled with an optimism that collective action leads to some change. This ethos was necessary and powerful, forming a clear in- and out- group. The enemies were clear and required direct and violent opposition— Bollywood and its cousins’ chokehold on the entertainment industry, rent-seeking cops, a paucity of venues and audiences who only wanted covers of their favourite American/British bands. While the purpose of this larger movement is hard to crystallise, it was authentic. There was little financial or social capital to be gained from playing in a band, putting up shows or documenting them. It was born out of a burning passion and a literal rage against the powers that surrounded them. It is no surprise that Bulls on Parade has endured as one of the few permissible cover songs within the scene.

The scene’s style of music took the intangible authenticity and made it very literal. Rock and punk and metal are violent, aggressive and overpowering. The intention is to subsume, to be loud enough to drown out the hegemony of the world around. Distortion and double-bass were the sound of suburban rebellion. This heavy music held the scene together, providing an avenue for latent rebellion to manifest at long last, both for bands and audiences.

Being in this scene formed an intrinsic part of your identity. It meant far more than buying a ticket to a show or downloading an album. Halfway through a Kunj Gutka mosh-pit in Sitara Studios, you, for even a brief moment, felt like you were part of something real. That you were contributing to something larger (but not that much larger) than yourself, and that this was a worthy, noble fight that you were proud of partaking in. Finally, there was a community and with this community of black t-shirts and Old Monk, anything was possible. "I feel patriotic when I go to a festival. This is India. This makes me feel like I'm happy to be here", says Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy (frontman of Scribe) in Arjun S Ravi’s seminal documentary series "Standing By".

This promise of adventure and conceivable change had deep resonance, most visibly in colleges, specifically engineering colleges. The disaffection of the male engineering student, caused by continuous societal imposition through their childhood and early adulthood, found a medium and a purpose that was able to capture the confusion of hostel life. Through joints shared while listening to Tool (ask any engineer and they will know that Lateralus follows the Fibonacci sequence), torrented Slayer albums and trying to make sense of System of a Down’s lyrics, metal and rock spoke to the latent testosterone of an otherwise regimented, banal life. This group would go on to organise college festivals and competitions, creating an infrastructure for new generations of bands and audiences to find their feet.

The circuit of college festivals was the breeding ground for bands to ‘put the hard yards in’ and truly come of age— ironing out their sets after each competition, being prepared for inevitable technical issues, traversing the country with the hope of finally winning one competition— all as part of a rite of passage for a new band. The ugliness of this process further reinforced the authentic ethos of the "scene". The do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic, of independence and self-reliance, was intrinsic to bands, organisers, and their allies. This communal ethic helped realise unimaginable dreams for its participants, such as sharing the stage with international bands that had immeasurable influence on them. Take Mood Indigo, IIT Bombay's college festival, where the headliners from a similar period (2009 - 2012) were Porcupine Tree, Katatonia, Karnivool and Simple Plan— all legendary bands. Bands manifested an inner rage and belief that anything is possible. There were no blueprints or metrics to define success, let alone achieve it— there was simply a bias for action to make something from nothing.

"Without the wider community’s acceptance, creative pursuits lack the potential for commodification. There’s no point in preening yourself for success because it’s just not real. It’s a fairytale, so you may as well just do it in whatever way you like, good or bad, in your room or on the top of the Telstra building" – Pretty Flowers Grow in Shit by Nicholas Allbrook

The internet was also pivotal in allowing audiences to participate meaningfully in the scene, with platforms like GigPad acting as havens for gig reviews, often piercing but always honest. This underlying honesty and a capacity for dissent were tenets of a real scene, a self-regulating community, capable of disagreement and discourse, yet largely united. Metalwikileaks exemplified this best, as a blog about the metal community that gave back to it through satire, a reminder that no matter how bold the mission or how loud the music, to not take itself too seriously. They strengthened the collective fervour around the scene by poking fun at its participants.

7 years on from this post, in 2025, bands have now been relegated (with some exceptions) to havens outside mainstream relevance. A quick look at the Lollapalooza lineup in its three editions is telling of bands' fading relevance –

Equally concerning is the question of how a band is to play at Lollapalooza or an equivalent festival. Previous bands have followed the same logic as their college festival days, by playing smaller-scale gigs regularly, and eventually being booked for a larger festival. Yet the smaller scale gig (such as a headlining gig at antiSocial) is also near impossible to come by—

While multi-genre festivals like Lollapalooza and Echoes of Earth recognised that (Indian) bands have a low return on investment from a programming point of view, festivals like Outrage, (Mahindra) Independence Rock and Bangalore Open Air do offer some promises of scale to smaller bands, yet act in isolation, ‘othered’ into safe spaces for themselves.

This collective forgetting of bands is explained by a fundamental disconnect on which the scene is premised— authenticity. The real-ness in music and action of the Razz(berry Rhinoceros) and B69 scene was its cornerstone. This was a scene filled with intention and meaning, ascene you wore proudly on your sleeve in college or at the office. Finally, you belonged—it was you and your ramshackle troupe of black t-shirts against the world, and nothing else mattered.

Gen Z rejects the millennial logic of meaning-making through effort, instead opting for superficiality and cynicism. Their scepticism by-default of sub-cultures that require commitment is a result of a fluid identity formation process. Identity is now tied to the visual aesthetic, divorced from the ethos of that sub-culture, be it punk or rave or metal. The millennial promise of possibility through DIY is rejected. Everything that was to be done has been done, everything that was to be seen has already been seen, live-streamed and edited into 30-second clips. Participation is no longer about forging something new but about consuming and remixing aesthetics—a looping spectacle of nostalgia, where sub-cultures are fleeting, stripped of ethos, and reduced to a carousel of curated identities. Now that everything has been both seen and done, Gen Z is afforded the freedom to be whoever they want to be without the pressure of it meaning something, as it once did. And they choose all of the above, sometimes punk, sometimes emo, sometimes tradwife, sometimes tech-bro. This rabid construction of identity is a nihilistic coping mechanism in a world increasingly devoid of meaning.

At Degenerate Disco’s third edition, held at antiSocial in October 2024, young Pune-based band Ren played their first gig in Bombay, showcasing their latest EP from front-to-back. The EP itself was an atmospheric yet heavy, syncopated yet sparse, loud but clean release that made stellar use of the large room and solid sound system that night. By their own admission, their music draws both from the current state of metalcore music, as well as hyperpop, an outrageous combination indicative of a schizophrenic, everything-all-at-once generation, both as producers and consumers of music. Between the six tracks from their EP, however, Ren played two covers by the ‘niche band’ The 1975. Devoting a quarter of your debut set in a new city to covers is not criminal in isolation, but when contrasted with the generations before that fought endlessly to create space for original music, can be considered egregious. The band did not seem to recognise or value their privileged opportunity to play original music, a result of a culture war fought further south and north on Mumbai’s Western line, at Rang Bhavan and Razz, or just across the street at Sitara Studios. This violation of a fundamental tenet of the Millennial scene is further telling of the dissonance in values between two adjacent generations.

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Cracks in institutions and power structures and the looming threat of AI-driven obsolescence have grown in Gen-Z a feeling of being “cheated” by previous generations. They gravitate towards a chaotic, buffet-style path to identity formation— largely aesthetic, and therefore meaningful enough to experience a sub-culture, even if fleeting. The myth of consistency and longevity, peddled by past generations, is simply untrue at a time where the world appears to be moving so quickly. The language of the Millennial scene too has been expunged from our minds and bastardised into marketing-speak. These words were symbols of purpose– ‘DIY'’ and ‘independent’ used to vocalise a stance against corporatism, ‘underground’ used to distinguish from a very real Bollywood-led mainstream. These words are now irrelevant and forgotten. Even ‘hipster’ or ‘scenester’, used sometimes pejoratively to describe participants the DIY scene have been reduced to their aesthetic value (with fashion trends like indie sleaze) and removed from their ideological origins.

Bhenchod-madarchod is also the title of a zine that pays tribute to the scene and culture that spawned it. One of the last few remnants of a scene that has passed, the BC/MC zine is perhaps more relevant than ever:

“So if you wanna put on a show, but don’t know how to build that into a business plan that a brand sponsor would sign onto, fuck them….if you’re an artist whose music is too out there to get on the bill at a major club, fuck them….If you wanna write about the music micro-scene you love, and no editor will commission you, fuck them…Because, regardless of size and scale, what matters is that you do or create something that reaches out and touches another person”

“We hope it inspires at least one of you to get off your ass, stop waiting for some corporate brand manager in Only Much Something or Book My Shit to book the act you love or create the gig lineup you want to see. Just get up and go do-it-yourself, dude”

—Bhanuj Kappal, BC/MC 2024

The flavour of disaffection and rage may have shifted, yet, as the everything-all-at-once generation inevitably fragments into abject confusion, a new spirit of negation/subversion will ignite, with its own set of enemies and uniforms, with their elbows out and horns up.

Nine years ago, September’s Ganpati celebrations in Bombay were a watershed moment for dance music in India with Nucleya’s album launch for Bass Rani (2015). Nucleya demonstrated the scale of demand for homegrown EDM which maintains its independence from Bollywood. Although the Nucleya moment has long passed, EDM and the broader dance music circuit in India has had time to expand its roots in the popular imagination. The scene has stratified into tiers of ‘mainstream’ dance music fan culture whose tastes range from Bolly-tech to ‘EDM’ (a loaded, specific genre rather than a broad label for electronic dance music) that have been much scorned by an equally dubiously named ‘underground’. As elsewhere, the self-declared ‘underground’ fashions itself as cooler-than, signalling through its musical taste, fashion and socially-exclusive access. This distinction has always been at the core of rave culture, ratified in cultural studies nearly thirty years ago through Sara Thornton’s seminal work Club Cultures (1995)— 

“Discursive distance from [the mainstream masses] is a measure of a clubber’s cultural worth. Youthful clubber and raver ideologies are almost as anti-mass culture as the discourses of the artworld.” (1995: 8)

In India, the underground is a performance played out by a haute couture elite, a mythical space that oldheads and hipsters seek out to distinguish themselves from the base cultural masses. Now, with the broader dance music circuit in India burgeoning along with the global wave of neo-rave culture, the borders separating the underground from the mainstream are becoming porous and subsequently increasingly militarised. The gatekeepers are intensifying their bullying of suspected infiltrators and are disinvesting from once-niche spaces overrun by mass culture. This condescension aimed at the new generation of dance music fans is not just embarrassingly hypocritical but reveals an insecurity at the heart of elite music cultures in India.

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Across the world, lockdown was the perfect incubator for neo-rave culture. Twitch streams and TikTok trends took the pent-up hedonism of a youth watching its best years pass by and aestheticised it into bum bags, retro sunglasses and a taste for hardstyle techno. Now that the ‘mainstream’ has come out to clubs and festivals again, it is already fluent in the styles that once distinguished the underground. This is a new generation of unproven connoisseurs who make up for their lack of years on the dancefloor (which are ravenously being reclaimed) with an unprecedented depth of how-to-rave knowledge. This same cohort, who once would have thronged for Nucleya and EDM, is today more avant-garde than ever before. Regardless of ancestry — from the college festivals of Nucleya to Ganpati mandals and from resto-bars to ticketed techno shows — those in attendance at Boiler Room Mumbai 2024 had flirted with dance music long before they knew what Boiler Room was. 

Authentic memories of dance music combined with independent knowledge of rave culture means that the crowd at the Nesco warehouse for Boiler Room Mumbai was self-secure and uninhibited in expressing its disappointment and boredom.  Unlike their counterparts in Bangalore, where the pressures of seeing and being seen at Boiler Room forced consistently over-the-top responses, the audience in Mumbai was at ease in its performance and remained unconvinced through the night. This Boiler Room audience expressed its boredom in its nonchalance on the dancefloor, the occasional Taambdi Chaamdi chant and in many cases, just leaving early. Each of these indicates a comfort with themselves — their sedated movement showed that there was no pressure to feign a vibe or dance a certain way, the Taambdi Chaamdi chants a half-ironic attempt to resuscitate the night and entertain themselves, and leaving early a prudent ‘cut-your-losses’ decision. Each rejection of the music at Boiler Room was an indication of a hyper-aware audience, increasingly intentional with their purchasing power and unbothered by narratives of how ‘raves should be’. 

Of course, the bypassing of the gatekeepers raised alarm bells. The authors of The Swaddle’s critique of Boiler Room 2024 took the boredom of the audience as a photo-op or a sign that Boiler Room had lost its ‘underground’ ethos in favour of becoming mainstream. For these “longtime scene kids” accustomed to Bonobo and antiSocial, this was unlike any party they had been to— 

“The kids and the punters showed up in their cyberpunk shades, cut-off tees, and coloured hair […] influencers started walking in around 7pm […] There were a lot of “Brooooo”s all around […] unhinged, like it was a college fest.”

The other-ing of the audience who are reduced to pejoratives indicates an insecurity in the authors’  position as vanguards of ‘the scene’. Construed as a sign of an uneducated mass encroaching on hallowed turf, the authors are quick to delink themselves from the ‘demo’ (shorthand for demographic in marketing-speak, common parlance for the Swaddle and friends). The end result is Boiler Room’s obituary— death by a mainstream that is simultaneously infantilised, groomed and profited off of.  Earlier this month, Resident Advisor feebly distanced themselves from the now ‘mainstream’ Fred Again in an attempt to remind their audience of their own ‘underground’ ethos. The Swaddle reproduces this same tactic. In both cases, they are flogging dead horses: aware that there is no (sub)cultural capital left to extract, they are more than happy to denigrate what was once cool and wait for the next muse to prop up. So the cycle continues. The Swaddle thus join a host of others trying to demarcate themselves or ‘educate’ the new crowd in the ‘proper’ (read: Western-led) etiquettes of the rave. The ‘proper’ raver is usually distinguished by avoiding certain telltale behaviours of mass culture; this discourse of (borderline internally racist) red flagging often points out sexual harassment as equally heinous as having conversations on the dancefloor or participating in the characteristically Indian crowd’s ouu-ouu’s. 

Democratisation of access has created immense pressure on the gatekeepers, who in fear of being overwhelmed by the cultural nouveau-riche, quickly jettison the properties that have been infiltrated. In turn, they defend the location of the authentic scene— but who, and where, is underground? As they may have you believe, the ‘underground’ is at antiSocial. The ‘underground’ here is a gentrified facade literally built on top of decades of repressed urban trauma in the chawls and factories of the textile industry. But the ‘underground’ is not brick and mortar, it is a performance that uses once-subcultural signifiers to demonstrate its authenticity. 

Krunk’s 12th edition of Basscamp Festival at antiSocial showed symptoms of the scene’s chronic Todi Mills complex—- not exclusive enough to be underground, not countercultural enough to be authentic. Being cool(er than the mainstream) means displaying niche and ‘authentic’ subcultural signifiers; this authenticity derives from the subversive or political discourses of the subcultures from which the music, fashions, and styles are appropriated. For instance —  Swadesi’s track Warli Revolt (2019) was once an incendiary rallying cry made with tribal activists in Aarey protesting the clearing of forest land for the Mumbai Metro construction (remember that your-favourite-celebrity-DJ played at the Ambanis’ wedding, the dynasty who still own majority stake in the Mumbai Metro One). Five years hence, Swadesi’s revolution was remixed into the opener for Kiss Nuka's set at Basscamp and took its place alongside other samples— from Reggae Rajahs to Kurupt FM— played over the two nights at antiSocial. Exemplified by Swadesi’s gully discourse, many subcultures are often exactly those that resisted the onslaught of urban modernity and the established cultural orders that absorb them. Thus while the so-called ‘underground’ necessarily isolates itself from the overground masses by performing as subculture, its sanitised appropriation of ‘real’ counterculture renders itself impotent. 

But if not countercultural, the elite underground is still vaguely subcultural. Like any scene, it has in its engine room a collaborative network of creatives and producers. This is that hallowed ‘community’ of the scene — graphic designers, musicians, visual artists, fashion designers, even promoters— which shows up early and regularly. Social access here is earned through commitment and actual creative work. At Basscamp on its second night in Bombay, the network began its IRL interfacing at the art exhibition by Optikal Asylum (formerly of Kranti Art Theory) which has been a platform connecting young artists with music subcultures. The night picked up with a treat of a live set by Drum ani Bass, an exceptionally musically astute homegrown act. Eventually, chin-stroking gave way to occasional footwork as the locals got on the decks, but soon enough the crowd had grown beyond its core creative community. Still, antiSocial never really reached capacity. Basscamp had snuck under the mainstream’s radar, and was a comfort zone (not a ‘safe space’) for the ‘longtime scene kids’ to signal in peace. The smoking room was the site for the usual the-scene-is-dead talk mourning the loss of some fabled authenticity, but also for communal self-congratulation: even if the scene sometimes feels cramped or nepotistic, at the very least there is comfort in seeing familiar faces around especially when the real threat of mainstream incursion is at the gates.

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However, the imminent danger to the cultural elite is not from the masses above, but from other parallel undergrounds below. Other properties are already demonstrating that you don’t have to be desperately OG to program great nights for your own community. For early indicators, one only need glance at the new names populating the weekly updates from Instagram pages like Bombay underground. A case in point—  a week after Krunk’s Basscamp, Elvt.live took over Waves Club Mumbai (a typically ‘mainstream’ destination) to put up new local names on B2B sets supporting an India debut from Alpha Tracks on an exceptionally ‘underground’ no-cameras night for Waves Club’s standards. As an afterparty destination, Waves attracts a multilingual crowd extending their night from across the city— including Pubjabi-speakers from Delhi, Marathi-speakers on ecstacy, Sobo-speaking brats talking about buying drinks for the ‘eye candy’, and suburban kids who pregame on their scooty and are regular patrons of Waves but have heard that antiSocial has a ‘good sound system’. Most at Waves didn’t know who Alpha Tracks was; but no matter, they threw steps and hands to his set that would have brought the Nesco roof down had it been played there two weeks ago. By today, Krunk has undoubtedly earned its place at the vanguard of the underground through its years of service to the scene. Still, Nucleya’s prophecy of anyone-can-do-it is coming true, embodied by a new-faced generation. But despite democratisation, the traditional underground represented by Krunk still maintains its death grip on the few legitimate live music spaces like antiSocial. With national venue shortages, their monopoly is their most important asset, and will ensure their survival for as long as their relationship with Social's empire stands.

It is a precarious time now while the scene devours itself— when everyone dresses the same, listens to the same music, and have all apparently been to Berlin, who can tell apart poseur from authentic, infiltrator from OG, tourist from creative community? Popularised access to rave mythology and programming means that the ‘underground’ syndicate which once had monopoly over subcultural capital has been forced into a tactical retreat into its strongholds where it may mount a valiant if misguided last stand. It remains to be seen how the old underground defends itself, but perhaps there is hope in riding out the mainstream wave. In any case, it is unlikely that ‘rave culture’ will stay so immensely popular for so long. Perhaps we may see the pendulum swing back as the mainstream fragments into subcultures again?

References

Thornton, Sara (2013), Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Wiley.

In this context, I find myself as the only brown-skinned person at an outdoors gig on a sweltering summer evening at S-Klub in Olomouc, Czechia. On stage in front of me, Slovakian grime and drill rapper Gleb towers over the crowd, delivering a fire-quick flow over a drum and bass track. His command is imperial– this is a choreographed crowd that knows every track, and that unerringly finishes his hooks for him when he prompts them with the mic. For the most part, my accompanying friend Radka had to translate for me. She explains to me how popular DnB, grime, drill and dubstep is in the Slovakian scene in which Gleb has emerged on top.

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Gleb raps in Slovakian, but most local hip hop around the world cannot avoid at least some global references and language, and so my attention was naturally drawn to the few words I could recognise. For example, from his track alibababigbass :

“money-moneymake, Abu Dhabi swag out / na ulici pripomínam arabského šejka / lietajúci koberec, dávam pull up na Shellkách / s nami Alibaba smokin’ oriental” (“money-moneymake, Abu Dhabi swag out / on the street I resemble Arabic sheik / flying carpet, Imma pull up on Shell / Alibaba with us smokin’ oriental”)

With the globalisation of hip-hop, local scenes across the world began with imitating American rap. But two decades hence, it is truism now to note the obvious importance of local languages in regional scenes. Vernacular rap flaunts a locally-embedded authenticity that champions the stories and identities of urban youths. Staying 'real' means staying true to your neighbourhood, dialect, lived experience and geographical context, in the face of cultural homogenisation imported from the West. This is why Peter Barrer has noted that rap in Slovakia is "staunchly" rooted in the Slovak language (2017: 150), instead of insincerely imitating terms and topics from outside the domestic scene: "While informed from abroad, Slovak rap is not an imitation of these trends but is rather an appropriation and adaptation of a dynamic musical idiom into the Slovak context." (2009: 72)

English rap is not simply imported and imitated, but nor is it simply rejected outright. There is instead a glocalisation of the imported language and style, in which the dialogue between local and global produces new cultural forms. Western rap is first imitated, followed by negative reaction that champions local linguistic authenticity, and then finally the dialectic movement is completed with multilingual experimentation and a hybridised 'translocality'.

Gleb is an example of Slovak-English language-mixing and code-switching. But re-discovering local and personal authenticity extends beyond the linguistic. As my friend explained to me, Gleb has won the hearts of his audience because he is a refreshingly new break from the Western-imitative styles and topics of his peers in the scene. He rejects the spectacular opulence of rap, its fetishisation of luxury, and the codes of 'flexing' through wealth to demonstrate success. His authenticity instead derives from how he represents and gives back to his community. For example, on a 2020 track Budeme Tam (“We’ll Be There”):

“buck buck, nerobím za chicka-change / ale ne kvôli bazénu a veľkému domu / no kvôli tomu aby som to vrátil späť” (“buck buck, I don’t work for chicka-change / but not for a pool and a big house / but to give it back”)

And on the 2021 track noc v opere (“night at the opera”):

“ak si rapper, tak musíš mínať, moju bandu vozí limuzína / ale necítim sa v nej dobre, cítim sa trápne, vráťte mi peniaze naspäť / prinútila ma rap game, Gleb je ovešaný v zlate / ale necítim sa v tom dobre, cítim sa trápne vráťte mi peniaze naspäť” (“if you’re a rapper, you gotta spend, my posse rides a limousine / but I don’t feel good in it, I feel awkward, refund my money back / I was forced by the rap game, Gleb is behung with gold / but I don’t feel good in it, I feel awkward, refund my money back”). (all translations from the Bachelor's thesis of Damir Daniel Demovič)

And yet, despite using Slovak in a dynamic way with English to navigate, express and negotiate regional and local identities, the scene in Slovakia is still dominated by 'white' Slovak-speaking middle class youths. In Slovakia and the Czech Republic, topics of social exclusion are minimal, and ethnic minorities are left underrepresented. The same flow that appropriates the American gangsta ghetto, in the same breath represses, silences or objectifies the social and ethnic underclass of Slovak ghettos: "While tackling issues of urban malaise, Slovak rap lyrics do not present the sídliska as a ghetto reality." (Barrer 2009: 72)

The ethnic minorities referred here are often those from the Roma community in Europe, which has faced systematic oppression, exclusion and racist marginalisation as 'gypsies' for centuries. In the hip hop scene, Romani dialects are appropriated into Slovak rap, while Roma rappers and issues are silenced. As Oravcová and Slačálek (2019) note, the Romani rapper struggles with a 'triple inauthenticity': the first inauthenticity sees rap as a foreign art form imported from America. The second level relates to the Romani subaltern as an ethnic minority in Europe, i.e., as inauthentically European. The third inauthenticity is caused by the "the fact that the Czech majority defines what it means to be Roma, which creates a burden of expectations placed on the community" (ibid.: 939). This means that the individual Romani rapper is forced into expressing themselves only through the pre-given stereotypes assigned to them in the hip hop scene and in the broader Czech society: stereotypes of Romani as either talented musicians or criminals and lazy freeloaders living on benefits. This simultaneous cultural straitjacketing and appropriation of Romani cultures as exotic and Oriental extends beyond hip hop, of course— there is much written about how despite the soothing fantasy of multicultural harmony in European dance scenes, 'gypsy' music is sampled and remixed while the Roma communities themselves are ignored, discredited and marginalised (see, for example, Silverman 2015).

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In this context, what is the fate of another brown-skinned ethnic minority in Eastern Europe? There is more than just (contested) linguistic and genetic ancestry shared between the Roma and the Indian subcontinent. The Indian community in Slovakia is small, mostly comprising students, restaurant staff, IT workers, and lower income factory staff. Cultural exchange with Eastern Europe across translocal music scenes is not uncommon, either. We may recall as a recent example Krunk's collaboration with Slovenia, exchanging artists between Bass Camp festival 2023 and Channel Zero, Ljubljana respectively.

Indians in Eastern Europe also remain the target of prevailing negative stereotypes— but we would be dangerously amiss to equate the struggles of the Romani subaltern with those of the Indian diaspora. Yes, my skin colour draws second looks, but they do not carry the same weight as the white gaze on the Roma. Is it worth speaking of transnational solidarity? Substantial scholarship has already drawn comparison between the social justice issues of the Roma and Adivasis, Dalits and other marginalised subalterns in India (see for eg. Dragomir 2022). But beyond the realms of social critique, can subcultural expertise be shared? Trans-national subaltern and youth cultural movements do not have to always draw precedent from the Western and English-speaking worlds. In a sense, gully rap and hip hop in India in general represents a rare breakthrough in subaltern participation in hip hop culture— that is yet to appear in many scenes in Eastern Europe.

References

Barrer, Peter.2017. "The underground is for beggars": Slovak rap at the center of national popular culture.

Barrer, Peter 2009. “My White, Blue, and Red Heart”: Constructing a Slovak Identity in Rap Music. Popular Music and Society. 32. 59-75.

Demovič, Damir Daniel 2022. White, Blue, Red Flow? Analyzing the Role of English in Slovak Hip Hop. Bachelor Thesis, Charles University, Prague.

Dragomir, Cristina-Ioana 2022. Power on the move: Adivasi and Roma accessing social justice. London New York Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.

Oravcová, A., & Slačálek, O. 2019. Roma youth in Czech rap music: stereotypes, objectification and ‘triple inauthenticity.’ Journal of Youth Studies, 23(7), 926–944.

Silverman, C. 2015. DJs and the Production of “Gypsy” Music: “Balkan Beats” as Contested Commodity. Western Folklore, 74(1), 5–29.

Being the poster child of a techno-optimist country, Bengaluru positions itself on the cutting edge of enterprise and imagination. A city that rewards and facilitates adventure and serendipity with little regard for precedent — a neo-liberal meritocratic haven, poised to redefine the future of a hopeful new India. The logic is simple - the faster you are, the better you are. This can be extrapolated to Bengaluru's entrepreneurial ecosystem as a whole — newer, better, faster technologies that replace what came before, in order to create material change. The facilitators of this techno-optimism are products of an impossibly competitive education system premised on outrunning those around you, to achieve mobility for yourself. They enter the city accustomed to its ruthlessness and competition.

Most "Days" in the city are spent furthering this techno-optimism in return for massive disposable income, previously unseen freedom and the rumour of infinite upward mobility. This is, admittedly, intoxicating. Most "Nights", this intoxication prohibits the examination of the systems supporting it. 

To achieve this mobility and the riches that come with it involves loneliness, burnout and desperation that remains unresolved. It exists deep under the covers, and when confronted, is aggressively dismissed, relegated to "collateral damage" in pursuit of greater riches. Boiler Room Bengaluru mirrored this city — the allure of the pot of gold at the end of a grey rainbow. 

The first three sets — Raka Ashok, Kandy Kuri and DJ ADHD were literal and fast, just as "Days" go. Raka Ashok and Kandy Kuri, both longtime residents of the city and ecosystem, were attuned to the hunger of this audience. Their sets were cycles of "I'll do you one better", with each track imbibing the aggression the audience was accustomed to. A city whose more recent residents' circuitry is wired to pugnacity and outwardness, took to the breaks and bass-laden sets without second thought or invitation. The selections respected this and were stripped of all pretence - the dpm (drops per minute, a metric someone in the crowd introduced me to) was through the roof. 

Assuming that these would be "warm-up sets" was rooted in a chronology of dance music culture of ole, where the BPM gradually rises through the night and eventually crescendos. In its enterprise and at the party, there was an intentional and effective rejection of this precedent. The desire for disruption, visible along every trafficked street in the city had made its way to the dancefloor. Raka Ashok's inclusion of the "What ra Sudeep" sample against a frantic breakbeat only 30 minutes into the party summed up these sets best: loud, in-your-face and unrelenting. 

The first two sets revealed the relationship between "Days" in Bengaluru and a need for speed, as well as a digitally constructed perception of the rave. Boiler Room, through their robust documentation and sprawling network of sponsors, promoters and venues, pioneered the digitilisation of the rave, heralding a digitally constructed global rave monoculture, intensely visible in Bengaluru. This was best evidenced by a group of 5 youths who were immovable from their spot behind the DJ. Acutely aware of the value of that real estate (immortalised by the Fred Again guy who pressed the cue button while dancing, @peopleofboilerroom and the countless reels of "crazy reaction at Boiler Room"), these lads had rehearsed gun fingers, chiselled stank faces and mime-like skits in the hope of achieving their fifteen minutes of second-hand internet fame. In fleeting moments, their act appeared genuine, in most others, they represented a trope on the far end of the rave spectrum, but one that is growing in strength: clout-chasing, self-involved and detached from the authentic self-expression that the culture was borne out of. There were a surprisingly high number of sober people clad in sunglasses, blissfully unaware of their more hedonistic connotation yet assuming that they accompany leather, rings and glitter as seen in a grwm (‘get ready with me’ video). Across genders, it was clear that attire was sourced purposefully and dedicatedly for the event through drop-shippers and Instagram thrift stores with refined marketing algorithms. 

*Aside on trying to deal with the sobriety: a tactical visit to the bathroom to find something that had accidentally made its way into my shoe threw up a rude surprise: all bathroom stall doors had been removed, and each bathroom had two attendants lurking at all times*

While technology dominates the "day" literally through knowledge work and time-zone hopping, even liminal spaces in a day - commutes, chai/sutta breaks, and exercise - are occupied by digital consumption, in this case, dictating both what the rave should look like and what you should look like at the rave.  

DJ ADHD, who succeeded Kandy Kuri, fell victim to this perception of the rave. He closed the "Day" segment of the party, half a year on from his India debut at the Magnetic Fields Festival. Track for track, his Boiler Room and his Mag Fields sets had massive overlap, but their performance was as disparate as could be. 

Playing a sought-after timeslot (1:30a - 3a) at the largest stage at Mag Fields meant that the mature-ish and un-sober-ish audience could make sense of his "European" house set - smoother and happier and more vocal. The audience's patience afforded him allowed a gradual assertion onto the set, building into the infinite night of the festival. But the digital construction of the sonic aspect of rave events, such as Boiler Room, happens through the same modality as for fashion and dance — short-form video. This reduces DJs to participants in the attention economy, requiring them to play with more drops, quirkier edits and less space. This required DJ ADHD to short-circuit the gradualness for brute force, providing a fitting end to the "Day" segment of the party. 

The transition to the second half of the rave, or the "Night", was unsubtle. Kohra established the tone for a cold, dark, lost evening in the city in the first few minutes of his set. The viscerality of the first half was quickly replaced by an inward metronome that only grew more anxious. Kohra's set was sparse and biting, with darker percussion, and pitch shifts providing a metallic quality to his hour-long set. Hardly conducive to the finger guns or two-stepping as the previous sets were, Kohra zombified the audience into a body that swayed and nodded silently. There was visible discomfort and confusion, especially when layers began getting unstripped, often with only a kick drum and a hi-hat playing as the mix continued. Kohra provoked an audience ravenous for being subsumed by their surroundings into examination and questioning of what it meant to be in the club, rave and moment. Sunburn Union's tiered architecture provided a unique vantage point - from 3 floors above, the packed dancefloor was more unified than at any other point in the night. Unified by their collective unease with of music that required effort to respond to, and not a limbic reaction as other sets did. 

This jagged segue is all too familiar - a comedown from the incessantness of a workday to a sober, empty home. Evenings in Bengaluru are similar - offering an environment away from the workplace to examine, yet being unable to do so. To begin questioning inordinate salaries, cultish founders, privatised loneliness et. al. is an overwhelming ask, especially when conditioned and ingrained into believing that Bengaluru is the pot of gold at the end of a youth of penance. At best, we rationalise structurally competitive systems and jobs as the India growth story, our knowledge work jobs as some LinkedIn buzzword, and a failing social fabric as personal incompetence. And after this piecemeal, superficial rationalisation, we forget. 

After Kohra's anaesthetising, AK Sports and Anetha attempted to resuscitate. The result was an enraptured audience that took to the density and speed of their sets with much ease. The "Night" was back to its raucous best - fuelled by frustration pent up during the forced introspection of Kohra's gnawing set. The overwhelming hardstyle meant an opportunity to forget once again— except it was a more forced variant of forgetting. It was an attempt at reclaiming agency over the unease of darker sounds, an overcrowded dancefloor and a realisation of the finitude of the night. An acceptance of this reality (and a wilful obliteration of introspection)  then led to an even more visceral reaction. Both AK Sports and Anetha's intense brand of techno led to bedlam, with swaying and nodding replaced by a more volatile, aggressive collective frenzy —shoving and vigorously throwing fists into the air. This exaggerated response showed itself at the rave through movement but shows itself every day through substances, doomscrolling and situationships. Most attempts at exerting meaningful change for oneself are met with a drastic overcompensation with the hope of quashing the thought. Any opposition to the techno-optimist eat or be eaten narrative is so jarring that it renders indigestion, and is expunged at any opportunity. 

As the night came to a close, the forgetting had done its job - it had successfully justified any discomfort and suppressed any inquiry. All cracks that were threatened were taped over, and on things went. Bengaluru's incessant days remain unchecked by insipid nights, and it continues to dance between forgetting and finding itself.

The first wears a bindi on her forehead and twirls her henna-painted hands in some vague Bollywood style. Behind her, clips from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) play silently on a projector. She is at Dialled.in x Vedic Soundsystem's takeover at Southbank Centre, London on the 8th of March. Her group of friends form a conspicuous mix of skins and accents- most brown, some white, one of whom is draped with the Indian national flag.  The crowd is mostly a mix of desi professionals and entrepreneurs from London's South Asian community. They have gathered to celebrate shared nationalities, and they are here having secured the necessary generational mobility and disposable income. Kiss Nuka, live artist from the homeland, is playing her debut set in London for them. But perhaps the mere 'hints' of her Indian roots in her music (Resident Advisor) isn't 'Indian' enough for them? The night doesn't climax until London’s own DJ Anu closes the night with the anthem of Jai Paul's Str8 Outta Mumbai (2013).

The other dancer wears jeans, a snapback and reflector sunglasses, in a huddle with his friends amidst packed crowd at Control Alt Delete 2024, Mumbai. Practically free entry and a diverse lineup across multiple stages has done much to heterogenise the crowd, bringing together Mumbai's tribes from across metal, hip hop, indie and electronic scenes. Here is an inclusive safe space dissolving identity and championing its DIY ethos. And yet at the end of the night, late into Kiss Nuka's set, deep in the crowd, the mantra of Jai Shri Ram is heard chanted under the beat. His friends and him whisper it quietly, hesitantly, like a conspiracy snuck in through the gates. 

Both are distinct performances of nationalism — one cultural, liberal and secular, the other Hindu—  both with Kiss Nuka as a focal point. But if they converge in colonial ancestry and music, our two dancers are defined by their opposition. The thought of them interacting, of transgressing boundaries of class, caste and geography, invites disgust. Through the sweat and artificial fog of the night, they should repel at the other's lingering scent of social difference, which grease the layers of the waking world outside the dancefloor. Thankfully for our caste-ist sensibilities, our two dancers will never meet.

Still, their scenes are linked beyond just some vague idea of ancestry. They reproduce each other, and their embodied ideologies of nationalism morph and mutate in contact with each other. Dhiraj Murthy (2010)1 is instructive here in revealing the dialogic relationship of exchange and production which forms the basis of 'Asian electronic music', a transnational genre of electronic music that fuses contemporary electronic beats with elements from Indian (mostly classical or Bollywood) music. It is disproportionately represented by diasporic artists, with Indian-descent artists like Kiss Nuka being a minority. In London and elsewhere, British Asian diaspora are what Graham St John (2009)2 would call a tribe in 'exile',  in search of a utopian world where they may celebrate their identity which is perceived to be subordinated by an oppressive dominant culture. Their new hybridised culture is a 'mode of responsibility and identification', realised in music, style, and atmospheric 'vibes' of communal events. But as Dhiraj Murthy points out, these communities also yearn to feel closer to their lost homeland. Desiring recognition of their authentic Indian-ness, they remit their culture to India, i.e. send music back and perform in India alongside native DJ's . 

Back home, Indian producers, DJs and promoters implicitly appropriate the innovations of the diasporic Asian electronic scene. Simultaneously however, the scene disregards the music’s diasporic origin because “the subcontinental musicians ‘see’ diasporic musicians as ‘not quite’ Indian” (Murthy 2010: 1417). And so diasporic Asian electronic music's success is repositioned as a 'return to roots'.  This repositioning is possible because the ‘Indian essence’ of Asian Electronic music is preserved when it is imported into India— not as ‘foreign’ but already authentically ‘Indian’ due to its use of sounds associated with the subcontinent. If for the diaspora Asian Electronic music served to articulate a desire for cultural authenticity, then after import in India its ‘Indianness’ is similarly used to balm the alienation of elite urban youths who feel disconnected from an idea of an anterior, primordial ‘Indianness’. The music is so leveraged towards a progressive postcolonial identity — for example, by musicians or DJ’s branding themselves as ambassadors of a 'modern' yet 'traditional' India which needs to reaffirm its ‘heritage’ in the face of the threat of globalization. This latter ideology, is of course, redolent of Indian nationalism.  In this way,—

"Both the ‘homeland’ and diaspora converge in that their shared constructions of an anterior Indian essence(s) are based on an imagined pre-modernity or pre-capitalist India where the populace was in touch with their ‘heritage’. [... Thus, Asian electronic music functions as …] a mode of perceived symbolic resistance in the diaspora (due to migration experience) and the ‘homeland’ (due to a globalized cultural threat). [...] Also, unwittingly (but very importantly), a boundary between ‘homeland’ and diaspora becomes broken" (Murthy 2010: 1421). 

As Murthy points out with the case of MIDIVal Punditz' remix of Vande Mataram, it is exactly at this point of contact where boundaries are broken, that we can imagine 'secular' cultural nationalism with its 'cool gloss' mutating into the 'Hindutva' nationalism of the other. These two blurred categories problematically enable and reproduce each other, as with the two scenes that put them into practice through cultural exchange. 

As an actor in this exchange, Kiss Nuka’s brand is a floating signifier — morphing between the two scenes. Immersed in two separate symbolic atmospheres, Kiss Nuka is positioned slightly differently3. But Asian electronic music remains a common and confounding site for nationalist political, religious, social and cultural identities. Traces are carried across borders, and ideologies infect each other. Their co-evolution is so revealed when, with no fault or design, the same music that celebrates a cultural diasporic ancestry in London mutates, and ignites into a clandestine conjuring of Hindutva nationalism in the otherwise secular, inclusive, countercultural space of Control Alt Delete.

Contextualising the release as all of the following is necessary to do it justice - a release rooted in the alienation of the pandemic and the awkward return to normalcy, a "reverb-music" release in all its introspective glory, and a sign-of-the-times release in a polarized, dysfunctional and mechanistic world fail to do justice. 

As the Revenge of Kalicharan (released by the Lightyears Explode in 2013, when I was 15) chronicled the exuberance of being a teenager in Bombay in the mid-2010s, How the Mighty Will Fall is a companion to the confusion and wistfulness that my mid-20s have seen, with the pandemic punctuating these eras. The gradual transition into the professional world was both short-circuited and protracted by the pandemic, with no easing taking place, just a frenetic back and forth between excitement and panic. The pre-pandemic and pre-9-5 carefreeness is now rigour, the bellicose is now restraint and the general disregard for consequence is now tired anxiety. No release has come close to depicting the starkness of "#adulting" as this, firmly slating Long Distances as the confidante to the "post-pandemic adults", who are negotiating a confused entrance to responsibility. 

The band's [insert synonym for shimmering, lush, ethereal] arrangements, and lyricism, showcase their navigation of the pandemic and the time that followed. Unusual for a shoegaze band, vocals are clear and decipherable, allowing for far more coherent storytelling. While following their stories is supported by the vocal mix, their internalisation is per choice: “Our songwriting aims at balancing being specific and open or interpretive”, says Zubin (guitars and writing), during our hour-long conversation. Skin to Sea and Lovesong for an Apocalypse stand out in this regard: depicting two emotions intrinsic to the pandemic, grief and a tentative hopefulness. The depictions of these emotions, with the literal ("Can we make it through, I hear you say") and the interpretive ("all your words and memories, memories that I can't reach") balance provocation and reflection for the listener.

These narrations are delivered with a distinct variation with whispers, drones, and runs all playing their part, much as they do in the confines of office smoking areas, Hinge chats, and our minds. Then layered on massive arrangements resplendent in familiarity and richness, the finished article - How the Mighty Will Fall - has a veneer on top of its jangliness and unease - an exemplification of this hauntological, fleeting generation forced to grow up.

How the Mighty Will Fall is ambitious as a shoegaze release as, at least partially, it is overtly political in its writing. The band does seem to lean into the shoegaze label - an Instagram story depicting their "wall of sound" and a repost by a shoegaze release account indicating comfort with a genre that has skirted politicization. 

Shoegaze was underpinned by a rejection of the mechanistic nature of contemporary "mainstream" culture and a personalization of capitalist realism. Its very modalities - unending layers of guitars, hushed vocals, and non-descript imagery - were a response to popular music and its entrenchment in the industry at the end of the Thatcher era in the UK. Pioneers of the genre (MBV, Slowdive) wrote escapist, emotive songs that navigated the tumult of romance. 20 years on from Souvlaki and Loveless, the shoegaze revival saw bands like DIIV and Nothing expand into darker reactions to an accelerated, digital capitalist realism, yet as purely personal reactions to it. No EP that any of these bands have released is as charged in its anti-establishment as How the Mighty Will Fall, which adds to its ambition. Shoegaze was political in its aesthetic rejection of mainstream culture, and shoegaze band members are overtly political - Cole from DIIV spoke openly about his support for Palestine in New York last October - yet that the message is so intrinsic to Long Distances' music make them anomalies.

Related genres such as post-rock or blackgaze follow the shoegaze principle of escapism rather than confrontation. They hinge on transporting audiences rather than engaging them, a unilateral interaction. For instance, Sigur Ros spoke a sum-total of 2 words during a 150-minute set - "Takk, Riga" (thank you Riga), which did add to their larger-than-life theatrics, but felt oblivious and detached from its surroundings. Long Distances ground you - they ensure that you engage and reflect but in more subtle ways. DIIV and Sigur Ros live were awkward, and Deafheaven was cringe (lots of DJ-style “are you with me?”). Long Distances is neither. As a band, their “walls of noise” trap and confront, rather than free, and their engagement with the audience is endearing, rather than boring.

On first listen, lyrically both Empire and Bridge can come off as naive in their simplistic writing. This, however, is a subversion of the banal performativity that the liberal agenda espouses. Lines like "Will we ever learn to bridge these differences" are intended as indictments of a fractured society, but the larger objective is a forced self-examination of how we got here in the first place and our complicity in the status quo. This tongue-in-cheekness is between the lines and easy to miss, yet that there exists such depth in a debut EP exemplifies its ambition.

Commercially, they are at the right place at the right time: the shoegaze revival is running its course overseas, and it was inevitable that it would hit Indian shores. Younger listeners are accustomed to the sonic aesthetic - Cigarettes After Sex has primed them on the power of reverb pedals, Olivia Rodrigo on heartache, and Clairo on the same set of chords played repeatedly. "Zoomgaze" fits a lot of GRWM and Thalassa sunset reels too. Their placement within the zeitgeist is well-carved out, and their Lollapalooza set will likely have fewer plaid shirts, black T-shirts or Converse, and more Shein and Instagram thrift store vintage. 

The band, however, remains ambivalent towards both sections of the audience: "There is a tendency to be oblique, but with Long Distances we've been very intentional in making songs that are somewhat timeless, that don't exist in a particular era. Although they tap into the context of that era, our inner barometer is to make a song that we want to listen to, and that people can connect with".

As a shoegaze (or even rock) band comprising urban elite from Bombay in 2024, Long Distances is a marriage of celebration and helplessness that marks our time. A time of dissonance where art thrives in Kalaghoda galleries and oligarch temples, where serotonin is crushed up and licked off palms, and coastlines are easier seen in Goa rather than on Worli Seaface.  

I hypothesize that this awkward marriage exists within the band as well: a Lolla slot within their first year as a band, a stunning record that has received critical and audience acclaim, and the hope (and difficulty) of building a livelihood through music. These stand juxtaposed against gnawing questions of the role of art within our current capitalist machinery, exacerbated minority insecurity and the fabric of institutions being erased (or drawn, depending on how you look at it). 

Equipped with founded opinions and the scars of being musicians, significant others, and minorities, the band is well-placed to reconcile this context: far from the romance of being teenagers packed in a room 24/7 writing music, Zubin discussed their meticulous rehearsal and writing schedules, being a father, and the band's "no bitterness" policy in the fallout of Lollapalooza's mismanagement of their set. There is a palpable sense of pragmatism the band exudes, with a quiet ambition grounded in their lived experience (in the music scene and otherwise) rather than fantasy. This self-awareness and intentionality make their music both accessible and meaningful, sidestepping the pointedness of the hip-hop and punk scenes and the formulaicness of certain contemporaries. 

The ambition this EP is rooted in will be challenged: dealing with premature but deserved success, preserving their shoegaze but not really sound, and the general opposition to any political commentary. How the band chooses to grapple with these powers is somewhat immaterial - How the Mighty Will Fall and Long Distances have established themselves as guides to the dissonance and confusion of real life, quietly and then very loudly.

Credits for the cover photo - Abhishek Gupta

One origin of this cold, hostile sci-fi landscape and its praxis as a mode for social solidarity is in the techno of post-industrial Afro-futurism in Detroit. In the spirit of rebellion following the racialised social collapse, urban disintegration and economic recessions of the Regan-Thatcher eras, the Detroit techno movement was represented by collectives such as Underground Resistance. UR, formed in 1989, was militantly anti-establishment, anti-corporate and rejected the commercialization of techno and consumer hedonism in dance music. They also actively resisted celebrity culture, favouring liberation through anonymity behind balaclavas over the entrepreneurial self-narrativising that is ubiquitous today.  On its website, UR offers a polemic: “We urge you to join the resistance and help us combat the mediocre audio and visual programming that is being fed to the inhabitants of Earth. This programming is stagnating the minds of the people, building a wall between races and preventing world peace. It is this wall we are going to smash.”

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The above call to arms reads more like an obituary today. More than thirty years on, Jeff Mills, co-founder of UR, has visited India for the first time for Far Out Left Festival on a brisk evening in Bombay (and Goa, the day after). If minimal Detroit techno can be called a critical reflection of a dystopian world-to-come, then at Far Out Left it has proved to be its realisation. 

Cold, bored, detached - these are words to describe an audience that swayed indifferently to music that was once potentially revolutionary. It is difficult to point fingers, but not impossible.  Poor planning of the outdoor dancefloor meant an uncomfortable fight for personal space. Muddy sound meant that the boom of Mills' 909 was suffocating for all except those right below the stage. The glare from alcohol branding and security staff lining the sides of the floor served as reminders that one could never really escape the coercive gaze of industry. Perhaps it was that Mills' ironic celebrity status had been milked too much to maximise footfall, meaning a set better suited for a 2am closer was played at 8pm. Or perhaps it was simply that this particular brand of minimal Detroit techno just does not resonate with the Indian palette, which was better elevated by Marcel Dettmann's slick, contemporary and energetic set the previous night, or by local B2b duo Heemay and Soo Bombay's warm, fuzzy crowd-pleasers an hour later. 

In the media promo leading up to the event, Amaan Khan for The Wild City2 spoke to Mills about his artistic approach, with the article's opening line quoting his opinion on his legacy as something he cannot "really direct or participate in". And yet, it was his legacy and repute that packed the outdoor stage at the Todi Mills alley. But even his sanitized legacy did not run deep. If anyone hung their hopes on the popular reception of Mills' track 'The Bells' , they must havebeen disappointed. Instead of being a grand fulcrum for the night, the track would elicit little response except from those already familiar few who could only raise their phones to capture the moment as an accolade for the #iwasthere economy. 

Mills' tacit surrender of his legacy is doubly convenient- it disconnects minimal Detroit from its once political content, while allowing for its re-territorialisation from urban African-American ghettos and into clubs in Mumbai. Mills wrote to TWC that "having strong visions about the future isn’t privy to any particular country or city so, it was just a matter of coincidence. In this respect, no place on Earth is distant or remote." Could it be that Mills is forced to rationalise the dilution of local histories and futures in order to mint an exchangeable currency of counterculture? After all, it is only when "no place on Earth is distant or remote" from the forces of cultural globalisation, that we can conceive of a situation where elite Bombay youths enjoy music from a group that was once associated with the Black Panthers, a movement which inspired the Dalit Panthers, whose erstwhile crosshairs were set firmly on the caste and class hegemonies atop which we still sit.

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Even beyond the (de)political, the atmosphere at Todi was not transcendental- in fact it never got off the ground. As quoted in TWC's article, Mills considers some DJ sets as a "non-verbal story about ‘The Fantastic’, ‘The Amazing’ or [...] ‘The Unbelievable’". This story is "made in a manner with seriousness"; his 'seriousness' might mean he is inward-looking, far away, and isolated from the audience. This was visibly confirmed at the outside stage at Far Out Left- if Mills was away approaching fantastical, unbelievable alien worlds, then he did not bring us along on the journey. Instead, our minds were elsewhere, too - on when our drug dealer would arrive, on exorbitant bar prices, on whether we should go back to Toit for a bit.

Mills' set at Far Out Left makes one appreciate the sombre irony of the journey of (Afro-)techno-futurism from radical counterculture into the commercial marketplace of authenticity. The coldness of Detroit techno was once critical, piercing and eerie; now the cold is in the zombified flesh of bodies moving to it without purpose, without adventure, without empathy.  The radical futures imagined in Detroit have been long abandoned, today preserved as vestigial ghosts, kept on ice and brought out with branded vodka and cocaine. In an experimental piece titled 'Dead Detroit Lies Dreaming', Benjamin Noys3 writes that "Detroit is now confined to the past, but as an image of the future, as a threat, to the failure to embrace the ‘progress’ and ‘development’ that remains the capitalist promise, no matter how tattered and frayed."  Noys suspects that Detroit techno as an ageing form is now obsolete, frozen in form , having reached its limits:  "the futures sketched by Detroit techno never arrived. They remain as encoded ‘alien’ messages from a future that did not take place." Instead today this dystopian Detroit has been cryogenised like Lenin in Moscow for our nostalgia fetish: "Detroit may not be dead, but the corpse has already been consumed."

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