Video: Qasim Virjee and Indian electronica music
Qasim Virjee's IndianElectronica.com is more than a topic-based website. It's an online community, record label, radio station and annual music festival showcasing cutting-edge electronic music inspired by South Asia.
Producer of the video interview with Virjee, Anuj Rastogi, says, "In two short years the Indian Electronica Festival has grown from two world cities to five world cities spanning three continents. I produced this mini-feature to help inform those who are new to the music and want to know more. I also wanted to give people an up-close and personal glimpse into the world of Qasim Virjee, a man who is quickly becoming an important cultural catalyst for intelligent South-Asian influenced music and media on the world stage."
Indian Electronica was initially popularized in the mid 1990s with the UK's Asian Underground movement. "The music is expressive of an increasingly complex global identity," explains Virjee, who founded the dot com in 2003. "Indian Electronica music fuses 'East' and 'West' using technology and tradition to produce some of the World's most innovatively emotive and exciting sounds. Indian Electronica is not a genre; instead, it is a loose term referring to electronic music/IDM which exhibits the characteristics of South Asian musical tradition."
While British desis at the BBC Asian Network do a solid job of documenting the fusion music culture that evolved around them, Virjee's website, across the ocean in Toronto, covers the other big regional concentration of second generation Indians making electronic music for an increasingly global culture.
Follow the recommendations featured on Indian Electronica, courtesy BBC Asian Network DJs Pathaan and Bobby Friction. Featuring their respective 'Best Of 2009,' "outernational sounds". Click on each of their names for individual track listings.
