Electronic City

Artistes attribute the exponential growth of electronic music in India to globalisation and technology.

The history of electronic music in India is believed to go back to the '80s. Charanjit Singh, a musician from Mumbai, released an album called Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat and, though it caught the fancy of a few people, it was never a commercial success. A few years ago, a UK-based record label discovered and re-released the album. Ever since, Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat has been a part of the discourse surrounding the first acid house record, a genre characterised by a repetitive, hypnotic style .

Around the end of the decade and the beginning of the '90s, another genre of electronic music emerged in Goa and was eventually called Goa trance. A number of DJs from around the world picked up the genre but the audience for electronic music in India continued to be restricted to a few pockets. In the late '90s and the early 2000s, a handful of electronica acts began emerging in different parts of the country and the scene is becoming bigger every year. Today, some of the best-known musicians from the country belong to electronica, and some of the biggest electronica acts from around the world have played here.

Gaurav Raina, one half of the band Midival Punditz, which began playing in 1997 and is one of the pioneers of electronic music in India, says, "Initially, electronic music was perceived as alien because it comes out of a computer. Now, it's being perceived as a genre of music." He attributes this to the acceptance of the computer as a vital part of life.

Sahej Bakshi, better known as Dualist Inquiry, believes globalisation has been one of the factors for the popularity of electronica. "It's the choices of this generation that is contributing to the growth of the scene," he says, "Everything is more globalised today, including the music scene."

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