Episodes
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Though Vishal Unni's Wild City mix lands in the techno territory, it is hardly about slamming drums the genre usually signifies. Instead the hour and 12-minute journey focuses on the atmosphere that lies beyond it.
Surrounded by deep expanses of dubby sounds, the constant thump becomes meditative. The ebb and flow instead comes from whether Vishal rattles your body, like with the shaking low-ends of Plastikman's 'Akrobatix' or Sleep D's '041111', or takes you away from it deep into your mind with the heady peripheral eccentricitiy of cuts like Claudio PRC's 'Ebony Feathers' and Shoal's 'Gerakan'. All of this achieved through selections that will frequently get a techno-head pulling out Shazam or the tracklist as the Bengaluru-based producer and DJ no doubt uses his deep knowledge from managing the sound of India's seminal minimal techno label Qilla Records.
More info & tracklist: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21529-wild-city-258-vishal-unni -
Our latest Wild City mix from the dancefloors of ParaDisco, the party series founded by Mumbai's Nida Merchant, who was already one of the country's busiest DJs before she turned her focus to building the event series and other efforts like New Delhi Community Radio from the ground up.
Dedicated to the joyous nature of disco and house, the parties are not the run-of-the-mill affair of handpicked artists at regular venues, but see extra care in stylistic cohesion across not just curation but the look and feel of the events. Inviting collaboration (their Halloween party saw Delhi's Monkey Bar get decked up with the help of Nabi, for instance) and giving a chance to beginner DJs through open calls, ParaDisco promotes a sense of community, and the growing community has responded so far across cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and even London.
As it gears up for a Goa edition on December 27, our latest Wild City mix shares the sounds from ParaDisco's latest iteration in Mumbai as Nida leads the way into a b2b2b between her and Mumbai's own Choksi and Sohail Arora aka Rafiki.
The first hour is littered with familiar tunes recontextualised through edits and sampling to offer Bollywood soundtracks from films like 'Disco Dancer', songs by Etta James and George Michael, Four Tet's famed remix of Taylor Swift's 'Love Story' to reel the listener in. Once hooked, the mix undergoes a palpable shift an hour in as the acid basslines of Kink's 'Disco Spectrum' turn the mood a bit more intense and modern as the tag team of three keeps the mix oscillating between sombre, percussive and the occasional popular callback. The mix comes fully live, as record pull-ups give a sense of the height the party reached at ParaDisco's last outing.
For more info: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21496-wild-city-257-nida-x-choksi-x-rafiki-paradisco -
Missing episodes?
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After closing for the likes of Joy Orbison on nights like The Warehouse Project and going B2B with Baalti in 2025, Yash Mundhra aka EBITDA has made a place for himself in heavyweight lineups gracing Indian dancefloors. Providing a snapshot of his sound at this milestone, the Kolkata-rooted DJ offers a Wild City Mix that doesn't conform to a single groove pattern but draws upon a relentless leftfield selection.
The low-end intense mix keeps getting darker till it ends in the moody spaces of 'Deception' by Mars89 and '311' by SIRCH before emerging gradually to more joyous grounds. It moves through different rhythms and shades to cover that distance and back, but remains ultimately a heavy, hard-hitting journey.
More info & tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21478-wild-city-256-ebitda -
With the Wild City Mix, Femme Music's Sanoli Chowdhury organises the women-only selections to start with the electrifying energy of veterans like Heart and St. Vincent before mellowing the journey. Unreleased tracks from Indian musicians Ro Maiti and Tiana Tara, from Femme Music's upcoming debut release and compilation 'Nyima Vol. 1', lean more towards intimate and heartfelt alongside the acoustic plucks of New Zealand duo Tāl. Going through more introspection through another unreleased work from the compilation, 'Come Sit By My Bed' by Goa-based Tabitha Kagoo, the mix uses the heightened drama of 'Strange Game' by Australia's Jess Ribeiro to dial the energy back up and finish with the oomph of Sade and the romp of Bikini Kill.
More info and tracklist: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21433-wild-city-255-femme-music -
One of the steadily rising electro and house selectors of the country, New Delhi's Jaidev Kaushik aka Jay Drive found himself entrusted to warm the dancefloor up for the prominent modern-day techno act Helena Hauff at her New Delhi show – the mix from which he shares exclusively via Wild City.
With a nod to Hauf's prowess as a vinyl DJ and balancing dark textures with a sustained fun factor, Jay took to the Technics turntables with a strict adherence to the style of the artist he was warming up the floor for. Classic synthesised drum sounds lead the charge alongside equally tightened basslines to prioritise viscerality as the connecting thread, while any melodies or zany noises remain as peripheral details, keeping it light on the senses until elements of acid and tech begin to assert themselves more around the halfway mark with Joolmad's 'Cactus Lover'. Even with a consistent palette, the mix follows a tangible arc: one that builds the atmosphere in the first half and starts throwing colours within the established palette to leave us at a rolling peak.
More info & tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21404-wild-city-254-jay-drive -
New Delhi's UKato distills his usual fare of breakbeats (which has got him to some of the genre's coveted labels like RAM Records) into the laidback groove of dubstep and the underlying pulse shared with techno before finding his way back using the deep low-end as the connecting thread. Starting from Mala, remixes of Aphex Twin and Pearson Sound edits, the mix goes deep into deep cuts in the second half besides throwing in originals, shaking your core with a dark depth while the beats work to keep things fun and lively.
More information & tracklisting: -
As a tag team digging through their combined vinyl collection, Unnayanaa and Hamza Rahimtula have been bringing the house down. Anyone who has danced captivated to one of their back-to-back sets this year, in any of the go-to local haunts that the pair is making its way through, knows that that metophorical statement isn't a hollow praise.
After connecting at AQI (the multi-day event hosted by Hamza's Windhorse Records and Warehouse Mix), the two of India's most long-standing and deepest purveyors of house music tapped into a synergy that should have been obvious.
As such, their formidable 3-hour Wild City mix, which captures the pair's recent visit to Bangalore's Indiranagar Social, is a full mapping of house music's DNA. Genre staples like Ron Trent, Kerri Chandler and Louie Vega connect easily with the disco lineage of Dinosaur L and Sister Power while the African and Latin-rooted rhythms of the likes Africanism and Jafrosax provides a percussive throughline to the genre's legacy and influences across continents.
Delivered with a puristic sense of craft using only vinyl selections coming together over a rotary mixing, Hamza and Unnayanaa still bring a showmanship to the mix which times its exchange of rhythmic breaks and singalong beltings, almost using the records to communicate with the audience in a very literal manner. Then almost like an epilogue or a tantalizing post-credit section, the upbeat sets gradually shifts via grittier beats into a leftfield comedown in its final 15 minutes.
For tracklisting and more information: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21287-wild-city-252-unnayanaa-b2b-hamza-rahimtula -
The influence of Bombay sometimes comes through gently included but obviously present samples likely from film soundtracks, and other times through the subtle rhythmic inclusion of the bustling city streets into the percussive assembly. It creates a Bombay-meets-Brooklyn sound that Rajah Betta dubs as "Bombay Club".
The Bombay-born and NYC-honed DJ, producer and radio host Sagar aka Rajah Betta is currently offering this fusion of geographic influences with an upcoming EP and an India tour that has made its way to Goa, Mumbai and Pune so far. Marking this movement with a Wild City mix, Rajah Betta's selections highlight his tendency to move through his influences.
Distorted guitars of alt-rock slip into gritty basslines of club music before the focus shifts to more percussive numbers like Laksa's 'Tech Steppas' featured next to a standout deep cut '145bpm Percussive Brain Cleanse' by Joeti. By the time we reach Batu's 'Inner Space', the mix has fully and discreetly shifted for a dark, high-tempo second half – making its final stop in the gradually transforming but quick journey through contrasting styles.
More information & tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21230-wild-city-251-rajah-betta -
All around the world in dance music, the South Asian diaspora is carving a space for the culture they have carried from their roots to their adopted new homes. One of the leading forces among them: Stick No Bills. The Dubai-rooted collective started as a party spearheaded by Jeftin James aka DJ Jeff and GT, and immediately became a home for people who wanted to celebrate their desi sound and aesthetics proudly.
"Growing up in Dubai, there were South Asian parties, and there were “cool” nights — but rarely anything that did both well," the collective tells us as they made their way to Mumbai for BUDX NBA House to perform as well as discuss the push for South Asian representation on global stages. "If you wanted to hear your sound, you had to compromise on production or setting. If you wanted the aesthetics and energy of a good party, you had to leave parts of yourself at the door."
Consequently, the collective tapped into that hunger in themselves and people like them to create parties that didn't make them choose between experience and identity, accruing a community that included film and fashion into the fold just as seamlessly as the musicians of Stick No Bills combine global hip-hop and even pop sounds from their nostalgia of South Asian culture. The edits, flips and sets by Stick No Bills merge amapiano with Tamil samples, Jersey club beats with Punjabi vocals and classic film melodies with pumping grooves.
"Dubai is a paradox. It’s hyper-global but locally fragmented. You can hear 20 languages in a mall, but still feel like your culture doesn’t have a platform. That in-between-ness shaped everything about us — because we are the in-between," the collective explains us. "We don’t mix genres for novelty — we do it because that’s how we grew up hearing the world."
The collectives' Wild City mix reflects this as the visceral bass of Skrillex, Fred Again and Flowdan's 'Rumble' combines with the 1999 Bollywood number 'Ramta Jogi' or 2014's 'Patakha Gudi' soon flows out of the flutes running over Future's 'Mask Off'. The mix taps into pop moments as fleeting samples to create its own moments of recognition, choosing energy over cleanliness as it keeps the subs rumbling through hip-hop, dubstep and breaks.
For more information & tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21193-wild-city-250-stick-no-bills -
In its first quarter itself, Paloma's Wild City mix connects the low-end rattling bass of Joy Orbison's 'Flight.fm' to the tribal house of Nick Léon's 'Xtasis' before proceeding to the melodic runs of Charanjit Singh. This itself clues you in on the quick genre-hopping that the DJ, surfer, model and TV host does on the mix, which reels dancers in with the popular, more accessible numbers before going on to deeper cuts of acid house, melodic techno and adjacent styles.
Taken from her performance on New Year's at Sri Lanka's Closenberg Hotel, the regular spot for Tropical Wax, the party-throwing and lifestyle collective co-founded by Paloma, the mix progressively echoes the shifting of night into the morning, turning the mood gradually to the introspective as the psychedelic textures of Floating Points' 'Fast Forward' usher in the final quarter of the mix.
For more information: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21160-wild-city-249-paloma -
New Delhi DJ Sheral doesn't wait for a build-up on our latest Wild City mix, entering above 140 BPM from the get-go and keeping it relentless for the first quarter of the mix. When eventually we arrive at the special sustained blend of the vocal hook from Vin Sol's 'Wts' against the percussion breaks of Burland's 'Untitled 140', the first quarter emerges as a high-octane warm-up leading up to a dynamic ride of glitchy, quirky textures that follows, passing an upbeat and low end-heavy array of styles that majorly feature only deep cuts (though dubstep lynchpin Kode9 makes an appearance for the high point of the mix).
For more information & tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21137-wild-city-248-sheral -
Roan Sable's Wild City mix is the kind that makes listeners reach for Shazam time and time again. Peppered with deep cuts that the Pune-rooted DJ elevates to the efficiency of classics, the mix traverses through house music, reaching for the genre's upbeat vocal hooks and syncopated basslines. The journey, which Roan played out in Hyderabad for Sunday Playground, is led by elaborate blends and surprise drops in equal measures to keep things from becoming stagnant. In the process, we pass through highlight moments like Leon's 'Beautiful Girl' coming together with Locklead's 'Morning Krew', elevating the underrated tracks beyond their merit as standalone records, giving a glimpse of his mark as an experienced selector.
For more information: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21095-wild-city-247-roan-sable -
When T.L. Mazumdar aka EveryNowHere started the podcast series Tapasya Loading in 2020, one of his key goals was to pool together the worldview of artists that he had found inspiring without the confines of styles, geography or experience levels. As the multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and educator celebrates and zooming past 100 episodes with a Wild City Mix, naturally his selection follows the same ethos.
The mix is ripe with artists who have appeared as guests on the podcast, connecting topics from music education and the diaspora artist experience to mental health and the creative process for a holistic view of what it's like to be a creative practitioner. Consequently, the selection can go from sparse electro-R&B ('BLUE' by LO) to Punjabi yearnful laments over tabla rhythms ('Tera Jugg' by Kiran Ahluwalia) in less than 10 minutes. While every once in a while there are works showcasing virtuosity within a defined genre ('7 Cows Jumping Over The Moon' by Kai Eckhardt Band), the mix mostly seems to be tied together with the quality of pushing beyond any stylistic boxes and seamlessly jumping between them.
More information & tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21058-wild-city-246-everynowhere -
With field recordings of birds and frogs stitched between transient meanderings of synths and soundscapes from her own work and that of her contemporaries from the experimental music space of India like Hemant SK, Bengal Chemicals and REVANT, Surbhi Mittal aka Pale Blue Dotter's Wild City mix is like no other. But then again the New Delhi sound artist isn't interested in being an artist like any other, often questioning the default notions around listening and creation and consequently finding space for her work in art galleries, theatrical productions and the sombre corners of music festivals as well.
Yet the mix isn't a snippet-to-snippet glimpse of leftfield music but could work as an album with a clear cohesion and intention – showcasing the magic of raw moments of inspiration that propel creation and juxtaposing them with profound reflections on self, the world and the relation between the two.
For more information and tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/21031-wild-city-245-pale-blue-dotter -
Bangalore's Vaibhav S Narayan aka SourFunk's Wild City mix is for the point where the dancers for the night embark on their journey on the dancefloor for the rest of the party. Functioning at the confluence of house and disco – something to be expected from a member of Stalvart John's Dynamite Disco Club – the mix is inviting, presenting edits and remixes from prominent house heads like Kerri Chandler, Honey Dijon and Mousse T. peppered with recognisable melodies like 'Ain't Nobody' to grasp onto for even casual listeners of the genre before SourFunk takes you deeper. By the time you are into the spoken word passages of ABANA's 'Sativa Jazz', you know the immersion has completely taken over to make you part of the love letter to house that this mix ultimately becomes.
For more information and tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/20958-wild-city-244-sourfunk -
Born in Kashmir and operating between Goa and New Delhi, Zainab Wani aka Zequenx is in the midst of a transformation from the perspective of her listeners. The DJ and producer has added ambient live sets to her usual fare of four-to-the-floor dancefloor journeys. It's an addition to her musical being that is now reflected in her mixes – like the one she has made for Wild City.
A nearly 2-hour-long affair, the sonic journey starts from ambient sound bath-like curation before the clouds of pad start giving way to percussive elements that settle to the rhythms of techno. With influences of laidback trance feeding into it, the mix presents a highly immersive state ripe for introspection while the body clings to the guttural chant of the kick drum's thump.
For more information: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/20928-wild-city-243-zequenx -
Anyone regular to the upbeat lighthearted dancefloors in New Delhi over the past couple of years has likely witnessed a set by Aditya Mehta aka DJ Pants as the multidisciplinary artist/live sound engineer become a frequent fixture to the capital city's nightlife.
Recently, Aditya branched out as a producer, coinciding with the London and Bristol-based party-throwers PARADIA branching out into a label with a local-to-global V/A compilation that featured Aditya's debut single 'Extra Style'. Aditya marks the release for us with an exclusive Wild City mix.
In contrast to the more bass-heavy house of the single, the mix assembles tribal performances from around the world, infusing some Balearic influence to create a blend of new-age electronica. With tracks like 'Oki' by Sound of Mo and 'Mind Thieves' by Osamu Kitajima, the mix maintains a bright mood while the steady energy and lofty vocal parts create an introspective atmosphere over the energy of downtempo breakbeats and deep basslines.
More info: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/20911-wild-city-242-dj-pants -
Warehouse Mix, the collective of DJs and other creatives, is one of the very few new faces in India's dance music space that is keeping the word "community" meaningful, building it with a sincere DIY ethos and love for house music. They've received some help from one of the genre's pillaring veterans in the country, Hamza Rahimtula and his Windhorse Records who has also paired with them to create the recurring event AQI.
To give a taste of the event, Warehouse Mix's Tartaruga and Hamza have share their vinyl mix from their last AQI event exclusively via Wild City.
With an old-school mixing style, the selections play out in extended sections, getting enhanced and layered by two masters of the fundamentals of DJing. Usually a fun ride with the constant oomph of house's four-to-the-floor beats, selections like Louie Vega's 'Come Away' featuring Kerri Chandler takes an immersed listener to psychedelic places of respite.
More information: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/20888-wild-city-241-tartaruga-b2b-hamza-rahimtula -
The first 3 minutes of Aashna Anand aka Nariki's Wild City mix itself are a good statement on simplicity. After a straightforward introduction of the rhythms and textures that one can expect, the music soon dials back pretty soon – like the stop before the first drop on a roller coaster ride that sets the energy for the rest of the journey. It's moments like this or the tasteful midpoint break of 'Athenia' by Derek Carr that keep pumping energy into the mix which is a short and subtle affair.
Operating at the point where house starts to look a lot like techno, Nariki's mix is completely led by its selection and its flow, which she lets play out. It allows her to be highly intentful in her choices, picking mostly deeper cuts with an evaluation and insight honed by her background in music journalism.
For more information and tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/20869-wild-city-240-nariki -
Bangalore's Ishan Gaur aka I7HVN says he wants to play his Wild City mix "in an intimate, dark room". That is rather an apt aim for the abstract works he stitches together on the nearly hour-long mix as a soft pulse underpins a parade of elements that seem to appear out of nowhere, devoid of predictability for most parts. It's a mix that carries the qualities found in the whole of I7HVN's artistic voice – with his latest release, the 6-track EP 'Innate Needs', featuring similar unpredictability though with more hard-hitting grooves underscoring them.
Not quite ambient, though it practices a similar restraint, as it rewards giving attention to its surprising minute details, the mix comes off as a seamless extended composition even as it moves from deep-cut artists from foreign shores to Indian contemporaries of I7HVN like Yidam, Innerworld and Mythopoet alongside the producer's own work.
For more information and tracklisting: https://www.thewildcity.com/mixes/20827-wild-city-239-i7hvn - Show more
