Chhatarpur, 2011

It was maybe 2am at a farmhouse party on Radhey Mohan Drive in Chhatarpur. New Delhi, 2011. The kind of farmhouse that has a lawn the size of a cricket outfield and lights strung between trees that someone put up three hours before and will take down three days later. Maybe two hundred people. Open bar. The kind of crowd that arrives already decided about what they want to hear.

I was not giving them that.

I had been sitting with genres that most people at that party had never heard. Deep minimal techno. Psytrance edits stripped back to just the pulse. Afro house before anyone in Delhi was calling it that. Dark progressive builds that went nowhere for four minutes and then went exactly somewhere. I was fusing these into Bollywood samples. Not the obvious ones. Not the wedding floor fillers. Older stuff. Slower stuff. A vocal lifted from a 70s Hindi film score sitting on top of a 128 BPM minimal loop, phased out and reintroduced until it stopped sounding like a sample and started sounding like it had always belonged there.

The mixes were hypnotic by design. Not hypnotic like background music. Hypnotic like something is pulling you forward and you cannot identify what it is or when it started. I wanted people to lose track of time. I wanted the mix to feel like one continuous thought rather than a playlist. That took work. That took hours at home building transitions that had no business working on paper but worked completely in a room.

Around 2am someone stood next to the setup and just said, what is this. Not in a bad way. In the way people ask when they cannot place something and they want to. I did not have a clean answer. It was not a genre. It was just where my head was going.

That is the thing about exploring music that has no name yet. You cannot explain it in advance. You can only play it and see what happens. The room at Chhatarpur that night took about forty minutes to settle into it. Then it did. And then it really did.

I think about that period a lot. 2011, 2012. Before streaming algorithms decided what sounds like what. Before every genre had a Spotify playlist and a Reddit thread. There was genuine discovery involved in finding music then. You had to want it. And when you fused things that had no obvious reason to go together, you were making a small argument that they should.

Design does the same thing when it is working. You put two references in a room that have no obvious relationship and you find the logic that connects them. That logic is the work. Everything else is just execution.

I still have some of those mixes on a hard drive somewhere. I should probably listen back. I probably will not. Some things are better as memory than as audio files.