Wild City

Earlier this year, the Twitter electronic music world chortled around a "Two Guy Theory", which is centred around the observation: "From Bicep to Overmono to Two Shell, the trend of two fellas coming up with elaborate excuses to hang out a lot has been picking up recently. Guys can't just be mates anymore, there has to be a catchy and fresh take on underground dance music involved." Towards the In...

Few sets invite one into a trance as quickly as Deep Brown's Wild City mix, which instantly whirrs you in with the arpeggios of Nathan Melja's 'Back And Forth'.  A long-standing DJ originally from Kolkata, Ankur Kedia aka Deep Brown gradually lets the arpeggios dissipate into textures focused on percussive numbers and bass melodies tailored for the dancefloor with the techno and house set. Within...

Few in the country have embraced the canon built upon the quick energetic hits of the breakbeat as closely as Smokey, whose hold on the sub-culture has seen her connect the underground deep cuts with popular tastes on stages of increasing magnitude. The Mumbai-based DJ brings a specific modern pop sentimentality-soaked colour of the genre to her Wild City mix.  With soft-centred lyrical tunes, Smo...

In the progressive, tech and deep house-dominated nightlife of Sri Lanka, Sunara Jay stands out by instead choosing to explore around the genres of glitch-hop, hip-hop, funk and nu-jazz. Consequently, the DJ and visual artist has been counted upon to represent the island's alternative underground culture with shows in Norway, UK, Germany, Pakistan and India.  With a practice of spanning over a dec...

Based out of Delhi, Antariksh Records has quietly but strongly left footprints in the global landscape of underground dance music over the years – releasing left-of-centre techno, break, acid house and electro tracks that have found their way onto dancefloors around the world while championing homegrown talents like Marbman, Fr4ctal, Planet Meta and Sepoys. The leftfield approach to dance music ge...

Mumbai-based Udai Sharma aka Maddeof manages to pick up the genre of lo-fi house and dust its mess off to contextualize it perfectly for the COVID-19 lockdowns, using the time when the dancefloors were shut to redefine his sound and utilising the style to offer some of the most effective releases of the period which offered familiar rhythms but with more laidback moods befitting to the new and con...

Electronic act KillZen construct their Wild City mix with only original and unreleased work to introduce their body of work in a free-flowing journey. The duo of Abhishek Chaturvedi and Anannya Gupta musically embody a musical duality in their work, even naming themselves after it. They signify the intense, raging, compulsive and club-friendly part of themselves as 'Kill', and on the other side of...

Starting as a radio show and a continual chain of song edits by DJ-producer Stalvart John, Dynamite Disco Club has since evolved into event curators championing artists which, as their name suggests, specialise in a motley of disco styles with heavy inclusion of house. The growing collective has an unfailing ability to create a musical oasis at festivals and club nights with curation that focuses...

Whether at a late-night slot at a club in South Delhi or a sunny pool-side party, Vijayant Singh as GIRLS NIGHT OUT always cues his selections with a natural sense of the occasion and the energy of his audience, always rendering sweating it out on the dance floor an effortless and compulsive experience. While the ongoing pandemic has kept the local dancefloors empty for most parts, the half-lawyer...

boxout.fm-regular Jaskaran Rana aka Sleepy Insomniac is known to take to the internet radio every month for his show ‘Lucid Dreams’, inviting the listeners into a psychedelic trip through guises of dance music. The New Delhi-based selector attempts the same on his Wild City mix, kicking things off with the abstract textures of Australian and Canadian electronica forces Roza Terenzi and D. Tiffany...

As we try to differentiate our mix curation with the inclusion of our first mix from a label instead of it being representative of a single individual, none felt as unique in that sub-category as Amarrass Records. Started by Ankur Malhotra and Ashutosh Sharma in 2009, the label, management, booking and vinyl pressing agency stood apart from most of the music industry, which was looking at the West...

Aalhad Joshi aka Marbman makes a case for taking dance music to the energy of its early roots when the genre wasn’t replete with as much explicit seriousness, but he does so with modern selections on his Wild City mix. Holding onto a penchant of fun-filled vocal refrains – as he does on his productions, the most recent of which ‘Class’ released on the Portuguese label No, She Doesn’t – the Mumbai-...

Among the many styles of DJs, some selectors rely on the quality of their selections to create the mood while others make the case of how mixing equates with performances by “traditional” instrumentalists – where entire sets come together cohesively akin to a single song, constructed with a zoomed-out vision by meticulously combining isolated, sometimes morphed, phrases and sections like individua...

As we reached the milestone of hosting our 200th mix, few artists felt as befitting as Discostan. The outfit started as a personal endeavour of Hyderabad-born and Los Angeles-based Arshia Haq, who was inspired by her own decentralised idea of a “homeland” as a modern-day immigrant in a globalised world, to carve a unique space on the dancefloor for a consolidated decolonised musical identity of So...

Few individuals can be ascribed the descriptor “musical polymath” as justifiably as Natasha Noorani. A singer-songwriter, playback singer, producer, voiceover artist and ethnomusicologist, the Lahore-born artist felt perfect for our 199th mix when we found ourselves enjoying her collaborative NTS Mix with Discostaan where she displayed her musicality as ‘Peshkash’, her project through which she is...

Over his 5 years in Bath, primarily as a student, Saumya Masrani, who chose his last name as his moniker, involved himself in his immediate British electronic music scene, becoming the resident DJ for local promoters Origin Sounds. Subsequently, the Mumbai-born UK-based talent found the opportunity to open for the likes of Scuba, Or:la and DJ Stingray as JUKEBOXX, and later followed the trail to h...

Punjab and Manipur-origin North Londoner Nayana IZ’s (pronounced “eyes”, after her first name which means in eyes in Hindi) trajectory as a solo artist has been nothing short of meteoric. Releasing her debut single ‘how we do’ just at the turn of the year, the rapper, model and multi-instrumentalist dropped a steady drip of singles running up to her EP ‘Smoke & Fly’ and has already found her verse...

There’s a lot of emotive ground and dynamic range one can cover behind the four-on-the-floor beat of techno. From the more spatial inward journeys of minimal techno born out of YMCAs and church halls of Detroit, to its more hedonistic raw takes morphed within the gigantic confines of warehouses and derelict industrial buildings in Europe – these are merely two distinct points in a multi-dimensiona...

There is no shortage of producers flipping Bollywood-samples, though a good few of them treat the practice as a gimmick or novelty. Anthony Daniel aka November Rose on the other hand does it out of pure and sincere love for the fun and unique flavour in classic Bollywood soundtracks. It is that fun-factor which the Atlanta-based DJ and producer captures on his Wild City mix.  Born in Pontiac, Mich...

Not a lot of mixes can leave a lump in your throat – less so, within a minute of them. Enter Derain’s mix for Wild City, which picks at fresh wounds of our collective consciousness with the opening echoes of Aamir Aziz’s poem ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega’. The quintessential verses gained their importance through the poignancy with which they encapsulate all the emotions and tragedies surrounding protes...

With his formative experience as a session bass player, Mumbai-based Nathan Thomas has shown a great understanding of the pocket of a beat even in his electronic productions as NATE08 – offering the leisurely draw of Dilla beats in his lo-fi hip-hop and RnB-rooted works. On his Wild City mix however, the young talent donns an entirely different oomph altogether, laying down the soundtrack for a be...

Anyone who has caught the enigmatic Babloo Babylon live has beared witness to the anonymous producer and DJ’s knack for interspersing film dialogues between climatic oomph of Bollywood edits in his DJ sets to bring the spirit of 70s and 80s’ noirs to the dancefloor. Behind the decks, Babloo is a storyteller with a unique voice, which compensates for his hidden identity. Recognising and utilising t...

After years of collaborative output with Vir RC as part of the burgeoning electronic duo Vridian, Siddhant Jain ventured out last year into his solo project ELM – naming the act after the gigantic elm trees that once served to offer respite to the travellers. Taking a cue from the tree’s property to provide comforting shade against light, the New Delhi-based producer and DJ related it to the prope...

Oslo-born, London-bred and inheriting a connection to Delhi, SUCHI has kept her finger on the pulse of global electronic music, perched as a seasoned radio host to notice the slightest of musical movements across continents – evident from the natural flair with which she incorporates in mix #190. Tracks like American producer Fleksor’s ‘Squaggle’ and Indian analog synth specialist Monophonik’s ‘Ar...

No one can accuse Radha Priya aka Noni-mouse of being obvious. She has a penchant for being quirky, inadvertently ridiculing the listener’s expectations like a musical dadaist through off-kilter music videos, volatile EPs and light-hearted sporadic SoundCloud uploads, which have constituted her steady but stark progression over the last year. Radha Priya just might be having fun but she has develo...