Wild City

Bombie can move a club floor. She has done so for stages shared with the likes of dance music giants like Jane Fitz and Special Request. However, the Bangalore-based DJ sets a different goal for her Wild City mix, focusing instead on creating a cerebral journey. The mix kicks from an ambient starting point before jumping between leftfield, dub and downtempo without shying away from radical choices...

With just over a year of existence, the party-throwers Future Funk have begun to dominate the nightlife of New Delhi – hosting parties that go beyond the usual fare of house and techno to dedicate nights to footwork, breaks and hip-hop. Even their next, on June 19, sees Taru Dalmia aka Delhi Sultanate jump in with Sanil Sudan aka Tyrell Dub Corp, and joined by the likes of Akashi and DARN, to cele...

Ahead of the sophomore edition in her party series Culture Club, OG SHEZ sets the tone with her Wild City mix. It moves from rising Shillong rapper Reble's just-released track 'Praying Mantis' and an edit of Travis Scott to the Punjabi dance number 'Jersey Jhoomer' and a Cardi B edit – all within the first 4 minutes. Evidently, the Mumbai DJ moves fast, quick-cutting through disparate genres but w...

For Aadhi aka Mo'Homo, "community" isn't just a buzzword as his fledgling work so far testifies. If you've attended any event dedicated to centring queer voices in North Goa over the last year (or even the last New Year's Eve Party at Prana, a calendar highlight for the state's nightlife now), chances are you have moved to Mo'Homo's selections. The DJ, curator and multi-disciplinary artist very mu...

As the person behind the gender diversity-centring club night QRAVE and the informative gatherings Flower Tools, Avril Stormy Unger knows more than a thing or two about making the dancefloor shake. But when it comes to creating a Wild City Mix, the Goa-based drag, stand-up and multi-disciplinary performer who DJs as Chutney Mary keeps in mind how the mix might be consumed (likely private home-list...

Though Vishal Unni's Wild City mix lands in the techno territory, it is hardly about slamming drums the genre usually signifies. Instead the hour and 12-minute journey focuses on the atmosphere that lies beyond it.  Surrounded by deep expanses of dubby sounds, the constant thump becomes meditative. The ebb and flow instead comes from whether Vishal rattles your body, like with the shaking low-ends...

Our latest Wild City mix from the dancefloors of ParaDisco, the party series founded by Mumbai's Nida Merchant, who was already one of the country's busiest DJs before she turned her focus to building the event series and other efforts like New Delhi Community Radio from the ground up. Dedicated to the joyous nature of disco and house, the parties are not the run-of-the-mill affair of handpicked a...

After closing for the likes of Joy Orbison on nights like The Warehouse Project and going B2B with Baalti in 2025, Yash Mundhra aka EBITDA has made a place for himself in heavyweight lineups gracing Indian dancefloors. Providing a snapshot of his sound at this milestone, the Kolkata-rooted DJ offers a Wild City Mix that doesn't conform to a single groove pattern but draws upon a relentless leftfie...

With the Wild City Mix, Femme Music's Sanoli Chowdhury organises the women-only selections to start with the electrifying energy of veterans like Heart and St. Vincent before mellowing the journey. Unreleased tracks from Indian musicians Ro Maiti and Tiana Tara, from Femme Music's upcoming debut release and compilation 'Nyima Vol. 1', lean more towards intimate and heartfelt alongside the acoustic...

One of the steadily rising electro and house selectors of the country, New Delhi's Jaidev Kaushik aka Jay Drive found himself entrusted to warm the dancefloor up for the prominent modern-day techno act Helena Hauff at her New Delhi show – the mix from which he shares exclusively via Wild City. With a nod to Hauf's prowess as a vinyl DJ and balancing dark textures with a sustained fun factor, Jay t...

New Delhi's UKato distills his usual fare of breakbeats (which has got him to some of the genre's coveted labels like RAM Records) into the laidback groove of dubstep and the underlying pulse shared with techno before finding his way back using the deep low-end as the connecting thread. Starting from Mala, remixes of Aphex Twin and Pearson Sound edits, the mix goes deep into deep cuts in the secon...

As a tag team digging through their combined vinyl collection, Unnayanaa and Hamza Rahimtula have been bringing the house down. Anyone who has danced captivated to one of their back-to-back sets this year, in any of the go-to local haunts that the pair is making its way through, knows that that metophorical statement isn't a hollow praise. After connecting at AQI (the multi-day event hosted by Ham...

The influence of Bombay sometimes comes through gently included but obviously present samples likely from film soundtracks, and other times through the subtle rhythmic inclusion of the bustling city streets into the percussive assembly. It creates a Bombay-meets-Brooklyn sound that Rajah Betta dubs as "Bombay Club".  The Bombay-born and NYC-honed DJ, producer and radio host Sagar aka Rajah Betta i...

All around the world in dance music, the South Asian diaspora is carving a space for the culture they have carried from their roots to their adopted new homes. One of the leading forces among them: Stick No Bills. The Dubai-rooted collective started as a party spearheaded by Jeftin James aka DJ Jeff and GT, and immediately became a home for people who wanted to celebrate their desi sound and aesth...

In its first quarter itself, Paloma's Wild City mix connects the low-end rattling bass of Joy Orbison's 'Flight.fm' to the tribal house of Nick Léon's 'Xtasis' before proceeding to the melodic runs of Charanjit Singh. This itself clues you in on the quick genre-hopping that the DJ, surfer, model and TV host does on the mix, which reels dancers in with the popular, more accessible numbers before go...

New Delhi DJ Sheral doesn't wait for a build-up on our latest Wild City mix, entering above 140 BPM from the get-go and keeping it relentless for the first quarter of the mix. When eventually we arrive at the special sustained blend of the vocal hook from Vin Sol's 'Wts' against the percussion breaks of Burland's 'Untitled 140', the first quarter emerges as a high-octane warm-up leading up to a dy...

Roan Sable's Wild City mix is the kind that makes listeners reach for Shazam time and time again. Peppered with deep cuts that the Pune-rooted DJ elevates to the efficiency of classics, the mix traverses through house music, reaching for the genre's upbeat vocal hooks and syncopated basslines. The journey, which Roan played out in Hyderabad for Sunday Playground,  is led by elaborate blends and su...

When T.L. Mazumdar aka EveryNowHere started the podcast series Tapasya Loading in 2020, one of his key goals was to pool together the worldview of artists that he had found inspiring without the confines of styles, geography or experience levels. As the multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and educator celebrates and zooming past 100 episodes with a Wild City Mix, naturally his selection foll...

With field recordings of birds and frogs stitched between transient meanderings of synths and soundscapes from her own work and that of her contemporaries from the experimental music space of India like Hemant SK, Bengal Chemicals and REVANT, Surbhi Mittal aka Pale Blue Dotter's Wild City mix is like no other. But then again the New Delhi sound artist isn't interested in being an artist like any o...

Bangalore's Vaibhav S Narayan aka SourFunk's Wild City mix is for the point where the dancers for the night embark on their journey on the dancefloor for the rest of the party. Functioning at the confluence of house and disco – something to be expected from a member of Stalvart John's Dynamite Disco Club – the mix is inviting, presenting edits and remixes from prominent house heads like Kerri Chan...

Born in Kashmir and operating between Goa and New Delhi, Zainab Wani aka Zequenx is in the midst of a transformation from the perspective of her listeners. The DJ and producer has added ambient live sets to her usual fare of four-to-the-floor dancefloor journeys. It's an addition to her musical being that is now reflected in her mixes – like the one she has made for Wild City.  A nearly 2-hour-lon...

Anyone regular to the upbeat lighthearted dancefloors in New Delhi over the past couple of years has likely witnessed a set by Aditya Mehta aka DJ Pants as the multidisciplinary artist/live sound engineer become a frequent fixture to the capital city's nightlife.  Recently, Aditya branched out as a producer, coinciding with the London and Bristol-based party-throwers PARADIA branching out into a l...

Warehouse Mix, the collective of DJs and other creatives, is one of the very few new faces in India's dance music space that is keeping the word "community" meaningful, building it with a sincere DIY ethos and love for house music. They've received some help from one of the genre's pillaring veterans in the country, Hamza Rahimtula and his Windhorse Records who has also paired with them to create...

The first 3 minutes of Aashna Anand aka Nariki's Wild City mix itself are a good statement on simplicity. After a straightforward introduction of the rhythms and textures that one can expect, the music soon dials back pretty soon – like the stop before the first drop on a roller coaster ride that sets the energy for the rest of the journey. It's moments like this or the tasteful midpoint break of...

Bangalore's Ishan Gaur aka I7HVN says he wants to play his Wild City mix "in an intimate, dark room". That is rather an apt aim for the abstract works he stitches together on the nearly hour-long mix as a soft pulse underpins a parade of elements that seem to appear out of nowhere, devoid of predictability for most parts. It's a mix that carries the qualities found in the whole of I7HVN's artistic...