For all those of you out there proud to be sikh, or know a sikh, or think the khanda symbol of skihism is wicked...

...You can now get your Sikh on by busting out a cool t-shirt, coffee mug (would look pretty cool in your cubicle, innit?), hat etc via Cafe Press!

It seems this whole enterprise is the work of Ashmith - a dude on myspace.

For those of you who receive our newsletter, you probably read this yesterday - for everyone else, here's the news... if you dig it and want to get emails from us, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter.

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How are things people? Myself, I've been busy tooling up Indian Electronica to support our growing community – with myspace-like profiles and so on; more details below but suffice it to say that if your a producer/dj/music-lover you've got even more reason to sign up today for free! 

Its an exciting time for brown people making funky beats – if you've got your ears on the BBC Asian Network you'll note that since the staff switch-up before this summer, they've been increasingly programming indo-flavored drum'n'bass, house and other electronic music forms. As well, the Asian Network itself has raised its international profile through tighter association with Radio 1; some of you may have heard about Bobby Friction and Nihal's show simulcasting on both networks now for 2 hours on Tuesdays from midnight.

Though major industry movements may be happening in the UK, we're really trying to push this music globally and are gearing up for the Indian Electronica Festival's second year!!! This Spring we'll be hitting up New York City and as of now, we've got Pathaan and Paul D Miller, aka DJ Spooky, on the Advisory Committee and will be announcing additions soon! :)

Our plan is to also take the show to Bombay towards the end of the year – those of you interested in volunteering or performing can apply online.

In peace,

If you've visited the site over the past couple of days you will have noticed the transition we've made towards being a fully-fledged online community. What this means is that you can now connect with other music heads around the planet to collaborate on new tunes or check out new beats that people have created!

Right there on the front page you can now see the most recently signed up members who've uploaded photos and jump to their profiles! Also, throughout the site we feature random profiles – so once you've signed up people can access you from anywhere on the site.

• Let people know who you are by filling in a bio with links to your website, myspace etc AND your own gallery of photos!
• See who's viewed you and jump straight to their profile
• Drop comments on other member's profiles
• Post messages in the forum that automatically get listed on your profile
• Keep track of your buddies on the site by adding them as your friends!
• Search for new friends into whatever you are - filter by DJ, Producer, Music Lover and more!

Here's another head-scratcher for all you indo beats fanatics- do you know what the track is in this Cingular blackberry ad?

(Thanks to Travis or asking this via Indian Electronica Radio) 

Some of you may know that Sony's acidplanet.com had a competition recently for the best remix of Karsh Kale's Manifest - its the first track off of Broken English, his newest album.

I took a look at remixing it in early summer and well, trashed the versions I had cooked up because it was bloody tough - all the samples were tiny snippets and short of effecting the vocals to stretched out madness and layering them with dhol (which is in the original), I kind of ran out of ideas.

nSpaas won the competition with a mix that was well received, I haven't heard it yet because I've forgotten my password to acidplanet and well, that's no excuse... but anyway - you can check out all the versions submitted online and if they aren't enough for you, venerable San Fran label Six Degrees has just released an EP of the track which you can grab for 3 bucks!

While you're at 6d you might as well also pick up their newest compilation offering - its called 'Eden' and promises 11 'global chill' tracks for you to get your lovin onto.

q./ 

For those of you who didn't catch this on Sepia Mutiny, Boy Mongoose, a new cartoon/musi-group are dropping rec this holiday season with their debut album 'Christmas in Asia Minor' - I haven't heard the full album but they've covered 12 Days of Christmas and done a hilarious vid for it.. Check this:

Could they be the brown Gorillaz? :) 

Some of you may remember that we used to have some music videos here on the site.  Though I love seeing visual intererpretations of music, it was a bit taxing on our system to host them, but we've come up with a solution!

Announcing... [drumroll]... the Video Vault! Thanks to youtube, we're able to dish up a bunch of videos here on Indian Electronica again!  Expect more to be added soon and if you find anything cool people might want to check out, send us an email and we can throw it in the vault!

Right now in the vault, you can check out some great music videos plus live footage from parties and concerts - like this little clip from our festival in London this past summer:

Just incase anyone's looking for it, our record club signup system is being worked on a bit and should be offline for a week or so.

If you're interested in signing up - which will get you regular shipments of great CDs and promotional material in the post, drop us a line.

q./ 

This is just a quick note to say that we've got some great things planned for the Indian Electronica Festival in 2007!

Picking up on the huge success of our London, UK, installment this year we'll be returning to London in late summer after hosting festivals in both Toronto and New York City!

This year's international Advisory Committee will be smaller and will include Co-ordinators in each city we'll be at - watch this space for announcements of who will be helping the festivals.

As of now, the Advisory Committee comprises of festival director Qasim Virjee, plus Advisors  Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and Pathaan.

More to come soon. 

Some of you out there may know by know that I'm a web site producer, well, in doing my virtual rounds today I discovered an interesting video ad produced by the folks at Apple - check it out.

Basically, the ad features a couple of folks from 37 signals (uber-simple web-based software company) going on about how they love Apple and how its simpicity inspires what they do.

Interesting to note for us here is the soundtrack - check it out and let me know if you can recognise that track... funky little indo medley with some tabla and wafty male vocal in the background.

Whoever posts the correct name and artist/composer of the track in a comment below gets a compilation courtesy of us and Six Degrees.

q./ 

Our friends at Six Degrees Records in San Francisco (we co-present Dishoom once a month w/them), are putting all their 'South Asian' titles on discount at the moment.

You can get $2 off of artists such as Karsh Kale,  the MidiVal Punditz, Cheb i Sabbah (yes, we know he's Algerian), (selwa), and more!

You can see the full list of discounted titles at their online store and well, um, buy them! :)

Okay, I'm not going to say much here put instead just put a couple of snaps I grabbed from the cover and disc of a flick I bought on Toronto's Gerrard Street/Little India strip - the movie's called Golmaal and man, this chap really looks like Talvin Singh!?!?  Weird.

Click on a pic for a larger view. 

Wow!  I just got word about this from our friend Silvie over @ massive vibrations in bali that there's going to be a one-of-a-kind event going down tomorrow in Indonesia and thought to let everyone reading this know.

For all those in North America, read the press release/news bit below and let me know what you think tomorrow @ dishoom... or simply leave comments ;)

http://www.subswara.com

click for the full image

That's a lot - considering they're pretty much monthly, I suppose its been a while since i moved from NYC.. freaky.

As usual, I highly recommend hitting this gig up guys and gals - two super special guests this month including another San Fran resident - Cheb i Sabbah, and  Lorin Ashton, aka Bassnectar! This line-up promises an eclectic mix of beats from around the world to match a great diverse crowd - check it yaar.

click to popup the flyer!

...to Dishoom! :)

The hiatus is over!  We're back in Toronto from a successful stint in the UK and ready to bust some fresh world-electronica cuts for you on September 29th 2006!

This will be a special event once again merging live performance with visuals and interactive DJing - this time we welcome our new Toronto-based resident selecta Medicineman, known about town for spinning top class beats live and on his CIUT radio show!

We will be recording the night for rebroadcast on Indian Electronica Radio - so come by and give a shout out on the MIC to be heard on the next IE podcast with Abdul Smooth ;)

In addition to amazing performances, this is one of the last gigs to be held at Cobalt as this Toronto staple for lounging is due to close its doors soon - so come by and enjoy the space before it closes :(  

If you swing by Indianelectronica.com often you'll know that I think one of the most interesting brown cats making beats in the UK at the moment is a chap going by the name Yam Boy.

He's a joker with social conciousness that is a teacher by day and wordsmith by night, who also DJs in weird places like Brixton's Ritzy Cinema - yes, just down the street from where those rastas always offer 'Skunk Weed... Skunk Weed..' next to the bus stops...

Case in point that email signatures are almost redundant these days, I just noticed recently that Yamji has a blog!  He's just head to India on a music project with d'archetypes co-member Shane Solanki (sp?) and I hope he drops word on all the madness they get up to.

Check it out: http://yamboy1.blogspot.com/

Alas, the 2006 series of festivals is over but wait, no need to get teary-eyed yet, we've just uploaded some photos (including this one of Coco from VU VJing) to our media gallery from the 2006 Indian Electronica Festival London!

As well, VideoWallah's prepared a short video from footage shot that night at the 333 nightclub - more to come, but this is a nice teaser ;)  - you can grab it on the last page of the fest's gallery album.

If you were there and took photos, please get in touch with us so we can add them for everyone to check out! 

The first couple of sets (Sonik Gurus and Yam Boy) from the Indian Electronica Festival in London that happened this past Saturday are online and you can get them from the BBC Asian Network's lsten again feature...

All through this week the Asian Network will be broadcasting live recordings they made on Friction, Electro East and Pathaan's musical rickshaw!

We'll have photos online tomorrow from the gig, which was amazing!!! by the way - plus a full review so all y'all who couldn't make it can read about all the great performances and feel bad... wait a minute?  Why feel bad when you can look forward to our new roster of events happning through 2007 across the world (look out London, Toronto, NYC and more...) ? Ha! 

Has anyone elsenoticed the increasing useage of indian vocals in trance/prograssive house music over the past couple of years?

Particularily of note: one of my fave online radio streams, http://www.xtcradio.com/ , has featured tunes/remixes by Cheb i Sabbah and others via shows produced by Michael Darius and Tony Estrada!?  

Hopefully this is a trend - I couldn't believe my ears when I noticed Estrada busting some of the cuts we feature on our podcasts etc, but then I quickly realised that my surprise was totally stupid - I've only been expecting to hear indian electronica within the musical scenes that produce it and wel, that's just not what this site is here to promote! :)

Keep up the good stuff XTC, if any of you have been hearing the music we talk about/play here in other unexpected places, drop a line in/comment on this posting yaar!

q./ 

We just got word from BBC Asian Network that they'll be broadcasting audio from our festival in London this Saturday on the radio (available on-demand via their website as well), through the week commencing Monday the 28th!

Check this:

Alright, given the fact that we're planning a couple of more festivals around the world for 2007 in addition to the next Toronto and UK ones, I thought it best to cancel the in-person Discussion Panels and Workshop planned for the 2006 UK festival in London this weekend and replace it...

... Instead, on Sunday August 27th Indian Electronica will be hosting an informal industry get-together so you can come meet all the people involved in this excellent festival!  Expect a cool venue in Central/East London - we'll be meeting at 7PM.

Please SMS/text me at +44 0789 688 0423 ASAP with your name etc so I can send you information about where we're meeting!

Thanks,

q./ aka. Abdul Smooth