Laid over an earthshaking bass or trancelike skittering drums, Indian classical music is now as au courant as scratching, and musics from Albania, Kenya, India and Morocco all thump together on the same records. The best examples of this internationalist underground present an exuberantly, reverently optimistic sonic dream of the world as a musical bazaar, overflowing with exotic melodies, grooves and multifarious lyrical pathos.

Just in the last couple of months, we have been treated to Badmarsh and Shri's Dancing Drums, San Francisco DJ Cheb i Sabbah's Shri Durga and Banco de Gaia's The Magical Sounds of Banco de Gaia. Six Degrees, a San Francisco label devoted largely to promoting such world-beat hybrids, has recently released Traveler 99: A Planetful of Grooves [read review], an electronic album that includes French, Indian, South African, Celtic and Brazilian music, as well as a track from Wally Brill, who incorporates 78-rpm recordings of Jewish liturgical singers from the '20s, '30s and '40s into his dubby compositions.

At its best, this music can offer jaded Western ears something genuinely new, something that's exotic without being exotica and something that gives electronic music an emotional depth often lacking in club sounds. Sabbah's Shri Durga is especially reverent. As much an Indian classical record as an electronic one, it is full of prayerful ragas and lugubrious sitars snaking over big plosive percussion. The chanting and tablas never feel like gimmicks slapped over a 4/4 house beat to lend some Eastern flava--instead, the Indian music is central, with the hip-hop bass, samples and fades creating a subtle background for the vocal drama.

Much of the reason the Eastern and Western elements on Shri Durga sound so integrated is because Sabbah actually spent time in India working with renowned singers and sitar and tabla players. "Everyone's appropriating everything these days," he says, "but there's something sacred about music, and I've never felt that sampling a little sitar would be enough, especially if you can actually work with the person playing the sitar."

Sabbah's comments point to some of the most contentious issues for people making this kind of music, issues of musical purity and respect for traditions versus the cut-and-paste, crazy-quilt style both of electronic music and of the end-of-the-century world in general. The irony of this music is that it can represent both a pomo cosmopolitan smorgasbord where everything from every culture and era is up for grabs and a longing to escape from exactly that kind of international homogenization.

"A lot of Western music has forgotten its folk roots. There's a loss of that organic element," says Shri of Badmarsh and Shri. "There's a new, deeply organic sound coming from India, and people are trying it out."

Much like Talvin Singh's OK, Badmarsh and Shri's Dancing Drums is a stunning combination of Indian music and drum 'n' bass, the tablas and flutes swirling lightly in a sparkling atmosphere of quicksilver percussion and funk melodies. It's much more of a club record than Shri Durga, much freer in deconstructing the Indian elements and wildly mixing the sounds together. Dancing Drums is both playful and haunting; if someone made a version of Blade Runner that fetishized India instead of Japan, Dancing Drums would be the music echoing in the film's dark streets.
A native of Bombay, Shri had studied Indian classical music since he was 4. As a teenager, though, he rejected it in favor of heavy metal and jazz. "I was in my searching mode, and Indian classical music didn't seem to offer anything to me," he says. "It was too rigid, and at that time you don't want rules. I discovered hard rock and went through what I call my 100-instrument phase--I played everything from trombone and sax to guitar--at the end of which I settled down to playing bass and flute, and I got a jazz trio together in Bombay."

Soon after, he went to London, where he first heard drum 'n' bass on a pirate radio station. He related to it as a tabla player, he says. Oddly, it was this quintessentially English music that led him back to his Indian roots. He released a solo album, Drum the Bass, before teaming up with the London-born Indian b-boy Badmarsh.

"I'm not trying to put Indian classical music over Western music," he says. "I hear them as the same thing. It's like, at home I never speak a word of English--I speak Kannada and Tamil--but when I'm speaking to you, I'm not translating from my mother tongue to English, and when I speak at home, I'm not translating from English. That's how I see Western music, as just another form of expression. I'm doing Western music with an Indian accent or Indian music with a Western accent."