SOUND SYNTHESIS: The party crowd is tuning in to the new strains of club music

Even as Norah Jones was the only Indian (well okay, half Indian) making her way up the pop charts these past few months, there has been an equally hummable success story in alternative music. Midival Punditz, the Delhi-based raga-electronica band of Gaurav Raina and Tapan Raj, released its first full-length album in the US recently and became the first Indian electronic band to make it to the Billboard World Charts.

The Punditz's schedule could well belong to an international rock star: when not touring New York and San Francisco with Bill Laswell (producer for Santana and Sting) as part of the various artistes that form Tabla Beat Science, the pair have done the DJ set with Talvin Singh in gigs in Mumbai and Goa; in Delhi they have made crowds surrender to multi-layered music manipulation at Cyber Mehfils, their floating nightclub where the venue changes but the guest list-hardcore followers of the band-follows them. Punditz' music infuses Indian elements into electronic dance music, taking forward the "Asian Underground" movement synonymous with Talvin Singh.

When juxtaposed against the international din surrounding club music, however, the Indian sensibility is still only a faint drum and bass beat. The big beat invasion came into its own in the mid-1990s. Now radio stations give the genre dedicated airplay worldwide and hoardes throng sports arenas for "massives". What to the uninitiated sounds like repetitive beats at high decibels sometimes interrupted by semi-human noises or snatches of words that step in for lyrics, is for the globalised generation that has embraced it a masterful synthesis of sound. Under the leadership of the DJ, it has the power to tap into a variety of "moods" in one single track.

Musicians who grew up on the club culture realised they had to be true to their roots. Gaurav Raina and Tapan Raj, Midival Punditz

Political boundaries are broken down when the beats take on a subtext. The UK's embracing of Asian Underground in the late 1990s came to be symbolic of multicultural New Britain. Though Talvin Singh has been seen as the principal proponent of Asian Underground so far, to say he created the genre would be incorrect. He was, as Raina points out, the face of "a simultaneous uprising in different cities by a generation of musicians who grew up on the club culture but realised that we're Indian and that our music needed to be true to us". Now it's a whole global network. If the goateed Karsh Kale is at the forefront of the Asian Underground movement in New York (his album Realize was seen by critics to bring "soul" to electronica), Punditz-who have played with Ustad Zakir Hussain and Ustad Sultan Khan all over the world-has emerged as a strong force in India.

"Their efforts are sincere, but to make a mark internationally Punditz will have to be supported by a financial and cultural movement for electronic dance music as a complete genre in India itself," says Whosane?, the DJ who began playing electronic dance in India 15 years ago. But while the club culture is not as big in India as in Europe, the US and Japan, even the cautious say the genre has become fashionable.

SPACED OUT: There are no clubs to cater to followers of electronica

Till even three years ago, Goa was the raver's heaven, the Ibiza-like space in a country that otherwise balle balle-ed to bhangra and Bollywood remixes. Now, in cities like Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, the suit-clad MNC executive and the literature student in college step out at night to tune in to the strains of electronic dance-the fat, loud beats of speed garage, the soulful rhythm of drums and bass, the built-up frenzy of jungle and the pure energy of psychedelic trance. "I've seen a democratisation of electronic dance music," says dj Rummy who began hosting his first "nights" in Delhi three years ago. Whosane?, who began playing under the cover of "terraces of homes away from the city", says in recent months he was "surprised to find dance music followers in places like Hyderabad, Chennai and Ahmedabad." Perhaps the most telling example is the Ganeshotsav in Mumbai this year: Whosane? and DJ Asad, in what can only be described as a techno trance Ganesh resurgence, played atop a truck and led devotees to the immersion.

Earlier hosted at farmhouses for fear of being termed "seedy" and seen as merely a background score to "the sex and drug culture", the music now has corporate respectability. Pepsi, Coke, Smirnoff and Bacardi are regular sponsors. "A couple of years ago, you couldn't walk into a store and ask for trance music," says Hardy, a trance music lover/promoter in Delhi who was among the first to "out" his parties and take them to public venues-one night at the Dome, Ambassador Hotel, he got cross-dressers to work the doors for the first time in India. "Today, they have whole sections." DJs with unpronounceable names are jet-setting to and fro. The Internet becomes the musical highway and there's a rush of traffic there-DJs use MP3 to send samples of their music to clubs and radios worldwide.

Besides this electronica exchange, there has been a growth in local talent. Following the unwritten rules of the DJ culture of this genre, the laptop wielding music-makers keep to the background, restricting their movements to shuffling in the console, never allowing personality to take over the beat as it does in pop music. Yet, DJ Light, the club name for Delhi-based Amit Seth, a psychedelic-trance deejay, DJ Pearl, currently MTV veejay Nikhil Chinnappa's girlfriend, and Whosane? are established names known even to the Page Three reader. And even as DJs Excite, Joy, Jayant, Mickey are touted as new talents, others spring from the music mixer with increasing regularity, filling the gap separating niche from mass.

I was surprised to find dance music followers in places like Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. Whosane?, DJ

But as the followers grow, there remains a dearth of space. While the music and its specific genres have pushed for and found a permanent home in clubs worldwide-Heaven in London is known for house, Matso in Amsterdam for techno and progressive and London's Ministry of Sound, for garage-club music lovers in India, except for weekly flirtations at five-star hotels, and Fire and Ice, Mumbai, which plays techno on Tuesdays, draw a blank. With radio being in the state it is in-though private stations have for the last four months been giving the music considerable weekend airtime-it is left mainly to floating clubs like Cyber Mehfils to ensure the genre flourishes.

So will the genre's push for space and its growing followers put India on the electronica map? Channel V VJ Gaurav Kapur says any sound that will make its mark has to be Indian: "Internationally, there is so much electronic music being made that what will be noticed is what you bring to the table." Fans believe the groundwork was done in the UK, with mainstream support coming from Madonna and Talvin Singh's tracks in The Cell. Raina says Indian classical was an inevitability in any music where beat reigns, bringing to it the depth critics of electronica accuse it of lacking.

That Asian Underground-or "Indian Electronica" as Tapan Raj would rather it be known-is the masala of the moment on the electronica scene is obvious from in the way international deejays use Indian sounds without having learnt Indian classical music. Buddha Bar, the bestselling Ambience Lounge music, too uses rich Indian overtones. Punditz likens its work to jazz, considered underground till it became a movement. "The use of Indian elements with electronica is a genre that like all new genres fails typecasts till it forms a space of its own, as is happening now," says Raina. Is Delhi the New Orleans of the New Age?