A soundtrack for a foreign existence

A light scent of sandalwood lingered in the lounge. The soft, colourful lights filtered through hovering smoke as music resonated throughout the room – a mix of booming club beats and tabla, topped with melting sitar riffs. Then the voice of Ustad Sultan Khan joined the ensemble, reminding this writer of the old Indian classical songs that his mother used to listen to every morning. The sound of the sitar seemed to grow by the second, blossoming into something magnanimous, the sinuous bass lines reverberating along with the tabla's da da dhin na and the club beats, as the Ustad's haunting vocals diffused over it all.

This grand unification was thanks to a band called Midival Punditz, one of the first Indian 'electronica' bands to make it big on the international scene. The group's founders, Tapan Raj and Gaurav Raina, are known for their cross-cultural vision, which they describe as marrying "the soulful elegance of Southasia's extraordinarily rich traditional and classical music heritage with the exuberance and limitless potential of modern Western electronic music". The group is also an integral part of the musical collective known as the Asian Massive, an offshoot of the Asian Underground movement, the UK-based collective that mixes contemporary metropolitan culture with traditional Southasian music. According to Raj, "It is about trying to stretch Western audiences towards Indian sounds, and to stretch Indian audiences towards modern, electronic, Western music."