Whether collaborating with traditional Indian musicians or flipping Bollywood cuts, Shantanu Gursal aka kSaya's musical home is the frantic rhythm of the breakbeat – as he works as an Asian Underground revivalist over the past 2 years. It is no surprise then that the Mumbai act's Wild City mix comes replete with a near-constant underpinning of the iconic beat and its variations. The selections remain far from the heavy onslaught of breakbeats' pacier sub-genres, instead embracing the pristine at...
Jan 06, 2023•53 min
At the outset, Mohit Tyagi aka Mocid is firmly rooted in the conventions of hard-hitting techno. That even includes the genre's association with retrofuturism and obsession with the extraterrestrial, as he attaches the moniker's artistic vision to that of a "space traveller exploring the Universe, searching for intelligent beings and establishing the first contact with them through rhythmic sound vibrations." A closer listen to his latest release 'Bioterror' unpacks layers more unique to the New...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 11 min
What connects experimental composer John Cage, Michael Jackson, the pop-punk group Paramore, blues legend Buddy Guy and an electronic producer like Floating Points? They all figure into the plethora of influences and listening palette of Parekh & Singh, which they highlight with our latest Wild City mix. The Kolkata duo of Nischay Parekh and Jivraj Singh, who stand as modern royalties in India's indie music at this point, recently released their third album 'The Night is Clear' – bringing to...
Nov 18, 2022•52 min
In a recent interview with Mixmag Asia about her debut EP 'Young Hate' and its just-released lead single 'Stonefruit', Sijya laid down the following as her artistic agenda: "It’s a bit rebellious I’d say. I think it fights the notion that there are certain ‘correct’ paths to reaching a certain level of knowledge or making." Carrying out that rebellion against the run-of-the-mill on the back of an intuition-led meticulousness, the New Delhi composer, producer and visual artist has begun to unveil...
Nov 04, 2022•55 min
Ever since Bangalore's Eashwar Subramanian started supplementing his white-collar professional life by putting out music nearly 5 years ago, he has done so relentlessly. A regular fixture in the country's ambient music landscape, Eashwar's work sets itself apart from the rest in the genre by creating placating dissipative soundscapes primarily through minimal melodies than abstract textures – naturally borrowing from the cinematic and new age. Initially putting out the work at a staggering pace ...
Oct 17, 2022•1 hr 5 min
For almost a year now, M.A.P // A.M.P has explored the intersection of activism and music in South Asia with a variety of platforms, from performance and pirate radio to documentary films and podcasts. One of the biggest efforts from the Goethe-Institut-led multi-pronged project has been its crowdsourced library which presents a repository of socio-political from around the world, spanning several hours' worth of music. M.A.P // A.M.P gives a glimpse of the library's far-reaching span with our l...
Sep 30, 2022•55 min
Aashish Gupta aka AAGUU, better known for his work as one-half of the duo TechNomads while erstwhile remixing Indian cinema undercuts, curates a love letter to the formative days of house and techno on his Wild City mix. Assembling deep cuts and familiar sounds from primarily the early 90s, the Bangalore artist taps into the nostalgia for the joyous glossy strands of the two adjacent genres – hovering closer to their Italo-disco roots. High synthetic string lines, plastic-y melodic percussion, s...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Earlier this year, the Twitter electronic music world chortled around a "Two Guy Theory", which is centred around the observation: "From Bicep to Overmono to Two Shell, the trend of two fellas coming up with elaborate excuses to hang out a lot has been picking up recently. Guys can't just be mates anymore, there has to be a catchy and fresh take on underground dance music involved." Towards the Indian sub-continent, two of the latest purveyors of that theory are Ishaan Gandhi aka Okedo and Rohan...
Aug 09, 2022•54 min
Few sets invite one into a trance as quickly as Deep Brown's Wild City mix, which instantly whirrs you in with the arpeggios of Nathan Melja's 'Back And Forth'. A long-standing DJ originally from Kolkata, Ankur Kedia aka Deep Brown gradually lets the arpeggios dissipate into textures focused on percussive numbers and bass melodies tailored for the dancefloor with the techno and house set. Within the incessant thump of the genre that never overbears and never lets down the energy, the selection t...
May 09, 2022•1 hr 10 min
Few in the country have embraced the canon built upon the quick energetic hits of the breakbeat as closely as Smokey, whose hold on the sub-culture has seen her connect the underground deep cuts with popular tastes on stages of increasing magnitude. The Mumbai-based DJ brings a specific modern pop sentimentality-soaked colour of the genre to her Wild City mix. With soft-centred lyrical tunes, Smokey sets apart her selections from the majority of our Mixes before recontextualising it back for the...
Apr 04, 2022•53 min
In the progressive, tech and deep house-dominated nightlife of Sri Lanka, Sunara Jay stands out by instead choosing to explore around the genres of glitch-hop, hip-hop, funk and nu-jazz. Consequently, the DJ and visual artist has been counted upon to represent the island's alternative underground culture with shows in Norway, UK, Germany, Pakistan and India. With a practice of spanning over a decade of spinning tracks to different types of audiences, Sunara knows well to use the console as an in...
Mar 14, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Based out of Delhi, Antariksh Records has quietly but strongly left footprints in the global landscape of underground dance music over the years – releasing left-of-centre techno, break, acid house and electro tracks that have found their way onto dancefloors around the world while championing homegrown talents like Marbman, Fr4ctal, Planet Meta and Sepoys. The leftfield approach to dance music gets underlined as the imprint stitches together its repertoire and inspirations with a label mix for ...
Feb 28, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Mumbai-based Udai Sharma aka Maddeof manages to pick up the genre of lo-fi house and dust its mess off to contextualize it perfectly for the COVID-19 lockdowns, using the time when the dancefloors were shut to redefine his sound and utilising the style to offer some of the most effective releases of the period which offered familiar rhythms but with more laidback moods befitting to the new and constrained listening habits. The producer, DJ and audio engineer however doesn't primarily stick to hi...
Dec 06, 2021•33 min
Electronic act KillZen construct their Wild City mix with only original and unreleased work to introduce their body of work in a free-flowing journey. The duo of Abhishek Chaturvedi and Anannya Gupta musically embody a musical duality in their work, even naming themselves after it. They signify the intense, raging, compulsive and club-friendly part of themselves as 'Kill', and on the other side of the coin put their immersive, placating and introspective work, referred by the 'Zen'. Their nearly...
Aug 09, 2021•39 min
Starting as a radio show and a continual chain of song edits by DJ-producer Stalvart John, Dynamite Disco Club has since evolved into event curators championing artists which, as their name suggests, specialise in a motley of disco styles with heavy inclusion of house. The growing collective has an unfailing ability to create a musical oasis at festivals and club nights with curation that focuses solely on providing pure dancefloor fun. A Dynamite Disco Club event sticks closely to the ethos of ...
Jul 27, 2021•1 hr 36 min
Whether at a late-night slot at a club in South Delhi or a sunny pool-side party, Vijayant Singh as GIRLS NIGHT OUT always cues his selections with a natural sense of the occasion and the energy of his audience, always rendering sweating it out on the dance floor an effortless and compulsive experience. While the ongoing pandemic has kept the local dancefloors empty for most parts, the half-lawyer half-DJ transports the listeners energetically to the clubs with his Wild City mix, adding an extra...
Jul 16, 2021•1 hr 2 min
boxout.fm-regular Jaskaran Rana aka Sleepy Insomniac is known to take to the internet radio every month for his show ‘Lucid Dreams’, inviting the listeners into a psychedelic trip through guises of dance music. The New Delhi-based selector attempts the same on his Wild City mix, kicking things off with the abstract textures of Australian and Canadian electronica forces Roza Terenzi and D. Tiffany with their recent track ‘Melting Ladies’. The mix latches on to the intensifying assault of percussi...
Apr 26, 2021•1 hr 2 min
As we try to differentiate our mix curation with the inclusion of our first mix from a label instead of it being representative of a single individual, none felt as unique in that sub-category as Amarrass Records. Started by Ankur Malhotra and Ashutosh Sharma in 2009, the label, management, booking and vinyl pressing agency stood apart from most of the music industry, which was looking at the West-imported strands of music modern Indian culture, by turning its focus towards the 21st-century face...
Mar 04, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Aalhad Joshi aka Marbman makes a case for taking dance music to the energy of its early roots when the genre wasn’t replete with as much explicit seriousness, but he does so with modern selections on his Wild City mix. Holding onto a penchant of fun-filled vocal refrains – as he does on his productions, the most recent of which ‘Class’ released on the Portuguese label No, She Doesn’t – the Mumbai-based producer ties together works of the likes of Four Tet, Cignol, Ilana Byrne, L Major and Admo, ...
Jan 08, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Among the many styles of DJs, some selectors rely on the quality of their selections to create the mood while others make the case of how mixing equates with performances by “traditional” instrumentalists – where entire sets come together cohesively akin to a single song, constructed with a zoomed-out vision by meticulously combining isolated, sometimes morphed, phrases and sections like individual musical notes. Anhad Khanna makes a similar case with his Wild City mix as his new moniker Sublime...
Dec 11, 2020•1 hr 14 min
As we reached the milestone of hosting our 200th mix, few artists felt as befitting as Discostan. The outfit started as a personal endeavour of Hyderabad-born and Los Angeles-based Arshia Haq, who was inspired by her own decentralised idea of a “homeland” as a modern-day immigrant in a globalised world, to carve a unique space on the dancefloor for a consolidated decolonised musical identity of South Asian, West Asia and North Africa uniting it with all its shared sense of heritage, trauma, stru...
Nov 20, 2020•52 min
Few individuals can be ascribed the descriptor “musical polymath” as justifiably as Natasha Noorani. A singer-songwriter, playback singer, producer, voiceover artist and ethnomusicologist, the Lahore-born artist felt perfect for our 199th mix when we found ourselves enjoying her collaborative NTS Mix with Discostaan where she displayed her musicality as ‘Peshkash’, her project through which she is highlighting and archiving sound art and oral narratives of 20th century Pakistan. However, it is t...
Nov 06, 2020•50 min
Over his 5 years in Bath, primarily as a student, Saumya Masrani, who chose his last name as his moniker, involved himself in his immediate British electronic music scene, becoming the resident DJ for local promoters Origin Sounds. Subsequently, the Mumbai-born UK-based talent found the opportunity to open for the likes of Scuba, Or:la and DJ Stingray as JUKEBOXX, and later followed the trail to his hometown with support slots for Cinnaman and Lilly Palmer. All the nights of partying seeped into...
Oct 19, 2020•54 min
Punjab and Manipur-origin North Londoner Nayana IZ’s (pronounced “eyes”, after her first name which means in eyes in Hindi) trajectory as a solo artist has been nothing short of meteoric. Releasing her debut single ‘how we do’ just at the turn of the year, the rapper, model and multi-instrumentalist dropped a steady drip of singles running up to her EP ‘Smoke & Fly’ and has already found her verses resounded within campaigns for Adidas and soundtrack for FIFA 2021. The driving force behind i...
Oct 02, 2020•1 hr 3 min
There’s a lot of emotive ground and dynamic range one can cover behind the four-on-the-floor beat of techno. From the more spatial inward journeys of minimal techno born out of YMCAs and church halls of Detroit, to its more hedonistic raw takes morphed within the gigantic confines of warehouses and derelict industrial buildings in Europe – these are merely two distinct points in a multi-dimensional genre. Shaun Moses finds his footing in the latter, gripping on to the visceral nature of it even ...
Aug 31, 2020•1 hr 2 min
There is no shortage of producers flipping Bollywood-samples, though a good few of them treat the practice as a gimmick or novelty. Anthony Daniel aka November Rose on the other hand does it out of pure and sincere love for the fun and unique flavour in classic Bollywood soundtracks. It is that fun-factor which the Atlanta-based DJ and producer captures on his Wild City mix. Born in Pontiac, Michigan and raised in metro-Detroit, Daniel grew up around the region’s vibrant dance culture, social mo...
Aug 14, 2020•55 min
Not a lot of mixes can leave a lump in your throat – less so, within a minute of them. Enter Derain’s mix for Wild City, which picks at fresh wounds of our collective consciousness with the opening echoes of Aamir Aziz’s poem ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega’. The quintessential verses gained their importance through the poignancy with which they encapsulate all the emotions and tragedies surrounding protests against the discriminatory Citizen Amendment Act and the unjust retaliation they received which s...
Jun 26, 2020•55 min
With his formative experience as a session bass player, Mumbai-based Nathan Thomas has shown a great understanding of the pocket of a beat even in his electronic productions as NATE08 – offering the leisurely draw of Dilla beats in his lo-fi hip-hop and RnB-rooted works. On his Wild City mix however, the young talent donns an entirely different oomph altogether, laying down the soundtrack for a beer-garden summer weekend with disco-rooted modern retro, jazz and afro house numbers. NATE08’s pench...
Jun 12, 2020•1 hr
Anyone who has caught the enigmatic Babloo Babylon live has beared witness to the anonymous producer and DJ’s knack for interspersing film dialogues between climatic oomph of Bollywood edits in his DJ sets to bring the spirit of 70s and 80s’ noirs to the dancefloor. Behind the decks, Babloo is a storyteller with a unique voice, which compensates for his hidden identity. Recognising and utilising the difference in context between mixing for a live event and curating a mix for an online platform l...
May 21, 2020•48 min
After years of collaborative output with Vir RC as part of the burgeoning electronic duo Vridian, Siddhant Jain ventured out last year into his solo project ELM – naming the act after the gigantic elm trees that once served to offer respite to the travellers. Taking a cue from the tree’s property to provide comforting shade against light, the New Delhi-based producer and DJ related it to the properties of his own music. There is darkness to ELM’s sound, but instead of being jarring or brooding, ...
Apr 20, 2020•55 min
