Baalti Is Making Noise for All the Right Reasons

You can’t trace the beginning of Baalti—the bass experimenters duo made up of Jaiveer Singh and Mihir Chauhan—back to a single big bang moment. But somewhere between watching a group of Americans co-opt yoga into a “trance dance” meditation session, trading sample flips of old vinyl records at a head-spinning pace, and going down research rabbit holes on hidden music subcultures, the two college mates stumbled upon their signature sound together. 

The pair has cultivated a bass-laden, groove-driven, rhythmically rich musical sensibility that reimagines familiar found sounds from the South Asian subcontinent into abstract new forms. Their debut EP, Baalti, pays homage to Bengali disco, Hindustani classical, and Gujarati folk music, turning classics by Ustad Zakir Hussain and Rupa Biswas into lo-fi house renditions like “Ustad” and “Kolkata ’78.” Meanwhile, their sophomore EP, Better Together, leans further into these South Asian flavors with an infectious energy meant to be unleashed on the dance floor. With their latest offering, Mela, they cannonball into the cavernous chaos of West Bengal’s underground sound system clashes, splicing beats that feel as feral and unrelenting as the towering speaker stacks battling for sonic supremacy. And their recently dropped remix of “Tere Bina” attempts to bring legendary composer A.R. Rahman’s lyrical depth into Baalti’s experimental universe.

The moment it all clicked: “We were discovering a lot of records that inspired us, and we wanted to recontextualize them in a way we hadn’t heard before,” explains Mihir, recalling how a casual contest to see who could sample a Rupa Biswas record better led them to their layered sound. Around the same time, Jaiveer had been working on a personal project and had developed ten solo tracks when his laptop unexpectedly crashed. “I was in the space where I was like, okay, do I pursue that solo project or should I just try out this thing I was doing with Mihir?” Jaiveer says. Ultimately, he chose to pour all his energy into building out the Baalti identity. “I guess it was a good turn of fate that my laptop’s hard disk crashed,” he says with a laugh. 

Ok, but why that name?: “It’s kind of a joke that ran for too long, but it has taken on a newer meaning ever since,” admits Jaiveer. He points out that while they initially chose the name “Baalti”—meaning “bucket” in Hindi—to keep things fun and playful, they were wildly amused when they found that people who didn’t speak Hindi tried to assign it a deeper meaning. “I think it stands in for how people view non-Western culture in this way that it must be spiritual or deep,” he adds. “But sometimes, it’s like people are just chilling. So it’s almost like a call to not looking at people different from you in this one dimension.”

Brewing creative concoctions: While Jaiveer admits he needs to “nerd out” for hours to find a sample that slaps, Mihir tends to take a more instinctive approach. “If I stumble across something, and can join the dots in my head, I immediately make up the note on my phone, or, like, record a little voice memo, and then I have this bank of ideas ready to rip.” Recently, the pair has also been experimenting with a time-bound challenge to sharpen their method, especially when working with new collaborators. “We set a 30-minute timer and try to outdo each other to make the craziest idea,” explains Jaiveer. “Then, we battle it out, and the track that wins is the one we work on further.”

A showdown of sound: While making their Mela EP, the duo was deeply inspired by the underrepresented culture of West Bengal sound system battles, taking on an ethnomusicologist’s approach to understand what drives it. “It felt slightly different in that they’re just kind of exploring how far you can take the rage of this machine,” says Mihir. Jaiveer also points out that one of the most fascinating things they heard about these parties during their research was when their friend DJ Kabir said that it wasn’t music to dance to—it was music that gives you a heart attack. “It’s literally like auditory warfare,” he says. “It’s taking the idea of what a dance party can be to an extreme level. If this were released in the UK, people would call them the most forward-thinking producers. But just because it’s released on a cassette in a place far away, it’s not highlighted as much.”

The auditory alchemists: Having spent their formative years in India and most of their adult life in the US, the Baalti boys are careful not to exoticise their own culture, which pushes them deeper towards undiscovered Indian sounds. “We like looking beyond the first obvious layers,” says Jaiveer. “We’ll try to get into, like, Rajasthani folk music or Carnatic music. We also want to work on [something with] Santali music (the traditional music belonging to the indigenous ethnic group of Santal) because that’s one community where women are involved in the music, and that’s so refreshing.” For Mihir, a Mumbai-born Gujarati, tapping into his roots is also on the agenda. “I recently found my parents’ wedding tape, and there was like this cool wedding garba band,” he says. “I want to explore more dandiya and garba-led stuff.”