Namaste friends,

Looking back over the past year through the lens of indianelectronica.com, I have witnessed amazing developments in the music industry at large as well as the ever-changing role of South Asian musical tradition and living culture.

It has been an action-packed year wherein, for the first time in history, over 25 individual performers from Bombay, Toronto, San Francisco, Vienna and of course Brick Lane, shared the stage to express themselves through cutting edge electronic music for 7 hours at our Indian Electronica Festival in London, England. This was the first time that our site membership of over 250 people plus newsletter subscribers (its in the thousands now) were able to get together and celebrate the music we're all confused to define yet thrilled to experience, with the support of the BBC Asian Network, we were able to record these amazing performances and broadcasted them internationally every night for 'Indian Electronica Week' on Bobby Friction, Pathaan and Nerm's night-time radio shows.

What started out as an experiment over 3 years ago to see if there are other people around the world who enjoy the thrill of tabla chasing hard breakbeats, or calm harmony of english and hindi vocals being sung in unison, has rapidly developed into something real. Indianelectronica.com is steadily becoming a platform for musical collaboration and exchange. Just in the past year we've had about 200 people join the site as members and now offer some cool features you might be familiar with from friendster o myspace. In 2007 we will be adding the ability for our community members to share audio and video uploads through their personal profiles plus we'll be officially launching our live, 24hr/day free radio stream!

2007 will be a year another year of unprecedented musical accomplishment and it is my hope that together we can work on getting the music we love to more ears around our little planet, and strive to promote and support a global culture of artistic pluralism.

In peace,

Ladies and Gentlemen around the world,

It is with great pride and pleasure that I can write to you today announcing that [ie'06], the first-ever annual Indian Electronica Festival, is happening internationally this summer - with our first event reaching Toronto, on July 20th!!!

Ardent fans of indianelectronica.com might notice that we've gone and shifted things around again this past weekend -yup, once again the forums have been reincarnated and even further simplified.... and, only registered members of the site can drop comments to the end of articles.

Its all part of a larger scheme to make our site more kick ass - and trust me, once you signup, you'll be a big fan of the new system cause, get this, members can now fill our profiles - so, DJs, producers, singer/songwriters and so on - head into the members area and register on indianelectronica.com today!

Soon to come - a multimedia gallery for the whole community - imagine logging in and posting your latest track for people to check out - exciting innit?

:)

q./