I suppose I was just in a very musical environment, where my parents were having a lot of family functions, musical gatherings, mehfills... And in India, when someone's born there's music, when someone dies there's music. You know, at every kind of celebration there's music.

— Talvin Singh

TALVIN SINGH

Talvin Singh is simultaneously one of the most gifted young tabla payers on the Indian classical music circuit and one of the pioneers of the British Asian electronic music. Singh's legendary Anokha club night, which ran at the Blue Note in London in 1996-97, brought him together with the multiple talents of DJs State of Bengal, Equal-I, Mukul, Ousmani Soundz, Lelonek, Cleveland Watkiss, and others, under a single hot, crowded roof, and along with the compilation, Anokha: Soundz of the Asian Underground, was one of the main catalysts for the entry of British Asian music into the mainstream industry in the latter half of the 1990s.

Drawn to the tabla at the age of five, Singh went on, at the age of fourteen, to begin studying with one of the masters of the Punjabi Gharana (school), Ustad Lachhman Singh Seen. At the same time, as he grew up in London, Talvin began mixing the sound of the tabla with hip-hop and jazz, and eventually drum 'n bass, collaborating with a range of musicians from Courtney Pine to Bjork to Sun Ra, and developing his own powerful sound using the tablatronic, a set of tablas adapted for live use with a rack of electronic equipment - samplers, sequencers, effects, etc. After releasing two full-length electronic-based albums, Singh has recently returned to Indian classical music, touring and recording with the flautist Rakesh Chaurasia, among others.

Link: http://www.talvinsingh.com | http://www.anokha.co.uk