Folk Jams with Electronic

A lilting flute melody floats uneasily over see-sawing synths and a bass attack so heavy that it rattles the delicate, coloured-glass windows.

- BHANUJ | KAPPAL

Percussive dhol rhythms find themselves wrapped in velvety reverb, as if trapped by the handpainted clouds covering the walls and ceilings. Inspired by the monsoon, Badal Mahal is a fine-dining restaurant that sits atop a 17th-century Rajasthani fort, where patrons can cosplay as old-school Indian nobility. But for a few days last December, its cloud-motif ambience incubated a very different kind of sonic thunderstorm, as UK producer Vivek Sharda and a group of Rajasthani musicians perfected their apocalyptic, awe-inspiring fusion of desert folk and post-industrial electronics.

Sharda—who performs as V.I.V.E.K—came up in the 2000s London dub-step scene, and specialises in brooding dub and bass music. The musicians sitting across from him—including Bhanwari Devi, Krishna Kumar, Kambhra Khan, Kutle Khan, Alser Khan, Mahmud Khan and Yusuf Khan—are hand-picked torchbearers of centuries-old Rajasthani folk traditions. Their unlikely collaboration has been orchestrated by the curators of Magnetic Fields—the boutique electronica music festival that takes place at Alsisar Mahal—for Fieldlines, their "inter-traditional and inter-generational" music residency programme.

Fieldlines has been one of the festival's major highlights since it started in 2019, consistently delivering one of the weekend's most fascinating and innovative sets. In 2022, for example, the residency featured a collaboration between Chennai electronic music producer Vinayak and the Forgotten Songs Collective, which consists of eight members of the Biate tribe from Assam's Dima Hasao, supposedly the last remaining musicians in their community. It was, I'm told, the first time that this music had been performed outside the Biate homeland. That's exactly the sort of amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience that music festivals are uniquely positioned to facilitate.

Sadly, it's an opportunity that few Indian festivals take advantage of.