Juno Daily In The Mix & Interview – Baalti
A bucketload of beats
Baalti are Mihir Chauhan and Jaiveer Singh, a producer and DJ duo making “underground dance music with South Asian sounds and flavours”.
Their sound is big on percussive, tribal grooves and vivid sampladelia, as their recent five track EP ‘Better Together’ – either their third or second and half release to date depending on who you ask, showcased pretty spectacularly. Seb Wildblood certainly loved it enough to issue it on his All My Thoughts label.
Here they treat us to an hour of mix magic blending inspiration from their Indian identities, their love of UK-influenced club music and their San Francisco base, as well as joining us for a chat about their past, present and future.
TRACKLISTING:
- Yilan – Bayon [Grid]
- Pearson Sound – WAD [Hessle Audio]
- Dismantle – Bodied [Gutterfunk]
- Lag – Twitch [KRLF]
- Guchon – Puzzle Gum System [Merge Layers]
- Farsight – Unlimited [Club Moniker]
- Baalti – ??
- Baalti – ??
- Doctor Jeep – Push The Body [Tratratrax]
- Ekzander – Gyratism [Extra Spicy]
- DJ Double Oh! – Desvelo [All Centre]
- Pangaea – Why [Hessle Audio]
- Toumba – Janoob [Nervous Horizon]
- INVT – SUBELO Y BAJALO [INVT]
- Zo – The Hanged One [All Centre]
- Baalti – ??
- DJ ADHD & Baalti – ??
- Sobolik – Diamond [All Centre]
- Cameo Blush x Bappi Lahiri – Clearcutter x Yaar Bina Chain Kaha (Baalti Edit)
- GЯEG – Dembow Tronico (Simo Cell Rhythm & Clicks Remix) [lavibe]
- Utility & DJ Plead – Flooot (DJ Plead Rework) [SUMAC]
First of all, can you tell us where you are right now, and what kind of day you’re having… Been anywhere already or going anywhere interesting later?
M: We’re in our apartment in San Francisco right now, having a pretty relaxed day. We just got back spending a month apart – Jaiveer was in London and I was in New York. We’ve spent the day alternating between catching up and and going b2b in our living room. It’s been cool to surprise each other with new tracks we’ve discovered over the last month.
Up next I’m headed to Amsterdam to check out Dekmantel, and then we’re meeting up in London to play a show at Phonox on August 11th.
Tell us a bit about your early years – where you grew up and what your first memories of music are. What persuaded you to cross the lines from being a music fan into making music?
M: I grew up in Bombay and I think my first musical memories were the CDs my parents would play in the car. I listened to a lot of Norah Jones and Bob Marley at the time. The first CD I bought was ‘Blue’ by the boy band ‘Blue’. And I used to burn blank CDs from my best friend’s older brother’s iTunes at sleepovers. That’s when I got into bands like Linkin Park and Green Day and Metallica and I thought the drums were just so good. I think I was persuaded to make music the first time I saw a set of drums in real life.
J: I think a lot of my early music memories are from weddings and family gatherings, and from hanging out with my older cousins and stuff. I really liked the music I grew up with in the mid 2000s, and a lot of it’s made lasting impressions. tbh that’s probably where I heard songs from like the “Asian underground” and stuff for the first time, with a lot of really cool music coming out of the UK that fused bhangra and Punjabi rap with electronic music.
So, how do you two know each other and how did you end up in San Francisco?
M: We were freshman year floor mates in college in upstate New York, so we’ve known each other a pretty long time. We’ve been pretty tight since then. I moved to San Francisco right after college. Jaiveer’s lived in a few different places, and he “temporarily” moved here when we were mixing down our first EP but ended up staying.
J: Yeah I never intended on moving to SF! I originally came for just a month, and then kept coming till I’d basically moved here.
The name Baalti, what does it mean? We’re assuming it’s not the same thing as a ‘balti’, the dish which we’re particularly fond of here in the UK, especially those of us who grew up in the Midlands. We’re rather hungry now…
M: It means ‘bucket’ in Hindi. The dish ‘balti’ is named after what it’s served in, which is like a bucket. But it’s super funny that you mention that, because that’s actually where our name comes from. I have a shared note with some friends where we list out band names, and a friend had put down “baalti” one night after eating a really good baalti chicken meal. When we had to decide a name, we picked that name from the list but didn’t have any context about why it was on the list till way later.
J: Mihir thought it was a joke and that we’d change it eventually. I never wanted to change it.
Tell us about your history of releases to date….
J: We wrote our first EP in 2020, deep in lockdown, and then put it out the year after in 2021. We wrote the EP pretty quickly and a lot of the songs on there are some of the first we wrote together. It really felt like an intensely creative period of my life, where I was discovering all these old records and all these sampling techniques, and then making tracks every day.
After the first EP came out in 2021, we were in this weird in-between zone, where we’d written dozens of songs, but never ended up releasing any of them. A lot of it sounded like it could’ve been “Part 2” of the first EP, but we weren’t really interested in repeating ourselves. It was like, why release another “Ustad” or “Kolkata ‘78”, what’s the point of that, we’ve already done that.
At some point we started playing more club gigs, and we needed more original material to fill time on our live sets. So we took a bunch of the half-finished ideas and loops we had and brought them into our live set, and basically improvised with them on stage – and that’s how we wrote all the tracks that made it to “Better Together”. Something about arranging the pieces together live in front of an audience really worked for us and unlocked creative blocks we’d had.
So now we had a second EP done and scheduled for release in 2023, and all the songs on it were really different from the first EP. But we still had these older demos that we felt needed to see the light of day, and we also knew that it wouldn’t make sense to release them after ‘Better Together’, because our sound would have changed so much by then. So we decided to pick a couple of our favorites, finish them up, and put them out as singles. And that’s how we got “Nans/ Marigold” last year. We usually call that release “EP 1.5” lol
Finally, looping back around, we put out “Better Together” last month ! This last release really felt like a celebration for us, since those songs have been gestating for so long ! And they’re also our favorites so far 🙂
And you’ve basically spent the last year on the road – where have you been and any highlights you care to mention?
J: I wouldn’t say we were on the road the whole time but we definitely got around a bit, especially considering it was our first year of playing shows properly! We did LA like 3 times, New York a couple of times, London, Mexico City, Delhi, Bangalore a few times, Bombay, Goa, and a bunch of shows in San Francisco/ the bay area ofc.
Maybe Echoes of the Earth festival in Bangalore was a highlight? We played a day time set on this really sick stage shaped like a massive scorpion, in the middle of some really beautiful woods. I remember when we started the crowd was quite thin, but then every time I looked up it felt like the crowd had doubled! It felt like the energy just kept building and building, and towards the end the crowd had become just massive to the point where we couldn’t even tell where it ended. It was definitely the biggest and maybe most energetic crowd we’ve played for.
The new five track EP is a clubbier affair we gather… ‘Better Together’ is a nice positive
M: The tracks are definitely clubbier – a lot of the sounds were inspired by club nights we’d been to in the Bay Area while we were writing them. And yeah it’s a really sweet name too. We usually have a tough time settling on names, but when Jaiveer came to me grinning one morning and suggested ‘Better Together’ it was an instant hit. It couldn’t have been anything else. At first it was referring to us being better musicians and humans when we work together. But we also wrote the EP over a year of playing shows, living together with our best friends, being in amazing new relationships, and connecting more meaningfully with music communities in the Bay Area. So the name and the tunes also aim to capture all those positive memories and experiences.
Any other future plans we should know about?
M: We’ve got a show coming up on August 11 at Phonox in London as a part of the Daytimers residency. We’re also teamed up with some of our favorite producers to make a bunch of Better Together remixes and can’t wait to share once it’s ready.
And finally, what were you aiming for with your mix?
M: It’s been cool to come back to each other after a month apart in different cities and scenes. I’ve been super inspired seeing some sick crews in action like Slink, False Peak, Groovy Groovy and Kindergarden to name a few. Jaiveer’s gotten up to similar antics in London, and this mix is us coming in with fresh tracks on our USBs and playing them for each other for the first time. Very “DAMN. Ok now check this one out” type energy. We’re usually going to the same parties or getting exposed to the same sources of inspiration at the same time, so this felt really different and fresh for us. That plus the excitement of playing b2b again after a while. It was nice to take a break but I definitely missed this.
Ben Willmott
Click here to buy your vinyl copy of Baalti’s ‘Better Together’ EP